In 2009, Carrie Underwood sang about assaulting her boyfriend's truck with a Louisville slugger in an effort to prevent him from cheating on her, or whoever he dated after her, again. In both Carrie's world and the real world, "once a cheater, always a cheater" is accepted as an unquestionable fact.
But then, in 2017, that cliché about repeating infidelity was finally put to an academic test when the Archives of Sexual Behavior published the very first legitimate study on serial cheating.
"That study was the first that gave us any scientific insight into whether there's any truth to the idea of 'once a cheater, always a cheater,'" says Dr. Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of
Tell Me What You Want. The study, which Lehmiller wrote about in 2017, surveyed 484 adults who admitted to cheating in previous relationships and found at least a little bit of truth behind the phrase.
READ ON