Survey shows more Japanese married men, single Japanese women cheating on their romantic partners

Single men in their 30s least likely to be fooling around, but it’s a very different story for the older guys.

Sometimes, romance in Japan looks very different than it does in other countries, such as when a man holds a wedding ceremony to declares his undying love for his favorite anime-style virtual idol. But in some aspects, romance in Japan is like it is in any other country, and not always in a good way.

For example, sometimes people in Japan cheat, giving in to the temptation to start a new romantic relationship without bothering to close out their old one. To try to see how common this is, Rize Clinic, a chain of hair-removal salons (which is starting a couples discount program) conducted a survey, asking men and women, both married and single, between the ages of 20 and 49 about their experiences with infidelity.

531 responses were collected, with 19.6 percent admitting to having cheated. The faithful/unfaithful ratio was pretty even between the sexes, with 19.2 percent of men saying they’d cheated in the past and only slightly more women, 20 percent, revealing the same.

However, there was a huge difference in when the cheaters did their cheating. Among married respondents, 38.5 percent of men had had an extramarital affair, more than twice as many as the 18.1-percent figure for married women. The women, however, were more likely to cheat as long as they didn’t have a ring on their finger, as 21.7 percent had been playing around behind their boyfriend’s back, compared to 12.9 percent of the single men who’d cheated on their girlfriends.

Temptation also struck at different ages for men and women, with the amount by age group that had cheated being:

While married men’s infidelity rates stayed steady, those for married women spiked in the 30-39 range before settling back down slightly. Unmarried women, on the other hand, became progressively more likely to have cheated in older age groups, whereas the unmarried men had the most dramatic jump of all, with the most faithful of all, single men in their 30s, being followed a group of cheaters almost six times larger for men in their 40s.

It’s worth keeping in mind that each individual respondent only represents one point on the age scale. Because of that, the data doesn’t necessarily mean that unmarried men stay on the straight and narrow path until they hit their 40s, then suddenly decide “Hey, if I’m still single, I may as well try to get as much tail as I can!” It could simply be that younger generations are more committed to their romantic partners, or possibly that they’re dating less in general, since if you’ve never had a girlfriend, you can’t have ever cheated on one either. And along those same lines, maybe the reason for the largest percentage of unmarried cheaters being in their 40s is that some of them got caught cheating during their 20s and 30s, which derailed their marriage prospects so badly that they’re still single in their 40s.

Source: PR Times
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso, SoraNews24

Credit: