This Is the Age When You’re Most Likely to Cheat
Cheating: Whenever it happens in a relationship, it causes a great deal of chaos. And there are points in our lives when we worry more often about being cheated on — or sometimes worry about being the cheater ourselves.
Apparently this isn’t just our imaginations, and there is an age when we’re most likely to cheat.
According to research conducted by the infidelity website IllicitEncounters.com, the age is — drumroll, please — 39.
CBS news reports that at this age, people are twice as likely to cheat on their partners as at another age.
And there’s obviously something weird going on with the number 9, too, because 29 and 49 are also considered to be “risky” years.
Adam L. Alter and Hal E. Hershfield from New York University and UCLA, respectively, found across six studies that at the end of a decade, people become more preoccupied with aging and worries about life’s meaningfulness.
The researchers said that such thoughts lead to behaviors that “suggest a search for, or a crisis of meaning.”
In other words, a personal crisis might drive someone to seek out an affair.
Alter and Hershfield also looked at how people on dating sites lie about their ages, and asked users to imagine they were trying to fool a potential date into believing they were as young as possible while remaining within the bounds of plausibility.
Their data suggested that the most frequent responses were ages ending in 5.
Sad news for everyone whose age currently ends in a 9, because apparently that’s the age that no one wants to be.
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