Where to start … when I’m trying to think of something to write about, my first port of call is usually the dumpster fire that is US politics. Last week, it was allegations of people eating pets. Can’t use that one again.
Or maybe I can. It’s curious that presidential candidate Donald Trump has been courting voters sympathetic to Robert F Kennedy Jr, when it’s that younger RFK who has admitted to trying to take a dead bear home to “dress” and eat.
More recently, RFK Jr has been caught up in another scandal. A reporter tasked with covering the presidential campaign is alleged to have engaged in a remote (as in not physically consummated) romantic peccadillo with none other than the gravel-voiced ursa-vore. Is that the right word for someone who (wants to) eat bears?
I don’t know the details. Actually, I don’t think I want to know the details. It’s not even clear what exactly “it” was. But it makes me wonder about the differences between emotional rather than physically intimate relationships.
Research shows we know the distinction when we see it. Nine out of 10 women and 8 out of 10 men consider that you can be emotionally unfaithful without being sexually unfaithful. It doesn’t quite work the other way around, however. Fewer women, but still 7 in 10, say they think you can have sexual infidelity without emotional attachment. Only half of men think the same thing. Off the top of my head, I might have predicted the reverse.
Overall, people tend to feel more confident about identifying sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, however. Basically, sex involves less ambiguity.
“Many people are deeply occupied by the topic of romantic love, which is reflected in, among others, the endless number of movies, books, songs and similar on the subject,” write Sol Røed and colleagues at the University of Bergen in Norway.
Seven out of 10 women think you can have sexual infidelity without emotional attachment. Only half of men do.
I’m surprised they don’t also add “research articles about relationships” to that list. I don’t know how many studies there are now, but by 2011, 54 scientific articles had looked at responses to sexual and emotional infidelity. That’s a lot of researchers wondering about something that feels a little niche.
Let’s say I gave you a 10-point scale and asked you to think about how distressing it would be to find out your partner was sexually unfaithful, and same again for emotionally unfaithful. What would you say? Agglomerating those 54 studies shows both men and women tend to rate sexual infidelity as more distressing than emotional infidelity.
But what if I forced you to choose one of the two as more distressing? Intriguingly, the number crunching shows that people pick emotional infidelity.
This sounds paradoxical. One way to reconcile it is to consider that emotional infidelity may be a bigger concern for people, but the extent of pain associated with sexual infidelity may be stronger at the sharp end.
This research is a little old, but it’s not unrelated to something that’s pretty new: emophilia. No, this isn’t a penchant for smearing your mascara and listening to Panic at the Disco, but rather “emotional promiscuity”. People who display emophilia fall in love easily and often.
In April, Røed and colleagues published a study that used a set of questions to measure how often or easily people fall in love. Sure enough, in the sample of more than 2600 Scandinavians, those who say they easily fall in love also report having had more romantic relationships than other folk.
People who score higher on emophilia are also more likely to self-report being more extrovert but also more “neurotic” – they tend to experience more, and more rapid, emotional highs and lows. They also report more narcissism and interpersonal manipulativeness.
Makes me glad that I’m married. I can’t compete with blokes who want to cook up a bear steak on a date.
