What I’m about to tell you is going to sound like a giant pile of bulllllshiiiiit, but bear with me here: Getting cheated on may actually be good for you in the long run.
What sounds like a banal platitude spewed by a sympathetic friend happens to be a research finding backed by science. The findings of the study, titled “Intrasexual Mate Competition and Breakups: Who Really Wins?” have been circulating the Internet and giving heartbroken cynics hope their reveal in 2016.
Researchers from Binghamton University and University College London surveyed 5,705 people from 96 countries and asked them to rate their breakups on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most painful.
What they found correlated with previous hypotheses: Women initially took breakups harder than men, but managed their grief in healthier ways. They complained to their friends. They gave themselves time and permission to feel sad. Men, on the other hand, bottled their feelings up, a tendency that ultimately caught up with them in the long run.
Your bullsh*t detector will drastically improve.
Participants were also asked about their experiences with infidelity. Interestingly enough, women who had been cheated on typically experienced personal growth post-breakup. Not only did they have a better understanding of why their particular relationships failed, they also reported more clarity when it came to avoiding similar pitfalls and toxic behaviors in future partners.
Six months post-breakup, women who were cheated on had higher self-confidence, emotional intelligence, mating intelligence, and were better able to detect “low mate value” in potential prospects. All of this is to say that women were way less likely to fall for a f*ckboy again. (Men who were cheated on developed “stronger personalities,” though the study did not elaborate much on what exactly this means.)
A little pain now will grant you more power and wisdom in the future.
It sounds corny and the opposite of comforting in the moment, but facing adversity is good for the character. Research in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from the University at Buffalo-the State University of New York and the University of California, Irvine found that out of a group of 2,398 participants, those who dealt with more adversities fared better in all ways than those who did not.
The strengthening of your “psychological immune system” is a distinct positive benefit of a truly sh*tty situation.
A petty consolation:
It turns out that the biggest loser in the cheating triage is actually the other woman — followed closely by the dude who cheated (this particular study seems to have dealt with cis, hetero couples.)
“Evolutionarily, sexual promiscuity is often a short-term strategy, for while at that moment a woman may have ‘won the battle’ by accessing additional resources, building future intersexual alliances, or successfully poaching a mate, she could be ‘losing the war’ by engaging in reputation-damaging behavior that will reduce her ability to acquire a long-term mate of high quality in the future,” wrote the researchers.
Furthermore, researchers believe that since men are more competitive, they are bound to feel the loss of a good match more profoundly, and for longer after the breakup.
So rest easy knowing that while you may be suffering now, those two losers will be suffering way worse in the future.
