<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-62261896/stock-photo-surprised-sex-couple-lying-in-bed-with-lipstick-kiss.html?src=6B930ENaVPOyriT9PmaPxg-1-24">altafulla</a>/Shutterstock
Society tells us that men are supposed to go out into the world and earn the wages while women are supposed to stay at home and raise kids. Society, as many great thinkers have said, is stupid. It’s all very 1950s and Revolutionary Road and most people not from the fever swamp would acknowledge that these gender roles are detrimental to the world and terrible and dumb. Still, the pernicious effects remain in our psyche! Now, you can either believe that even the most enlightened people are still sick on some deep down interior level, or you can be the sort of person who doesn’t believe things, but either way it’s true.
How true is it? This true:
This new study, showcased in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, found that men who are 100% economically dependent on their spouses were most at risk for cheating, three times more at risk than women married to male breadwinners.
While, on average, women who are completely financially dependent on their husbands face about a 5% chance that they will stray, there is about a 15% chance that a man married to a female breadwinner will cheat, the study concluded.
“I think it has to do with our cultural notions of what it means to be a man and what … the social expectations are for masculinity,” the study author, Christin Munsch, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, told CNN.
Being economically dependent on their wives may threaten their manhood, Munsch said, and having an affair is a way to re-establish their masculinity, even if it’s all done subconsciously.
God is a lazy screenwriter.
UPDATE:
@bendreyfuss Are the men who depend entirely on their woman financially the ones you’re calling “the most enlightened people”?
— Mark (@markadams44) June 1, 2015
No.