A new study suggests that men who rely on their breadwinner wives are more likely to be unfaithful. The infidelity of financially dependent husbands, particularly millennials, is said to further increase as the wives earn more.
The research titled "Her Support, His Support: Money, Masculinity, and Marital Infidelity" explains that while the traditional working husband and homebased wife setup exudes stable familial connections, equality among partners is the key to an intact relationship.
The study published by the American Sociological Association was conducted by reviewing the data results of 2,750 married American men and women in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 2001-2011. It was found that husbands who completely rely on their wives for finances are 15 percent more likely to commit infidelity, and entirely dependent wives only have a 5 percent chance of cheating.
The research also analyzed the data from husbands and wives who have equal incomes and revealed that these couples are 4 percent less likely to cheat. Husbands rarely commit infidelity if they contribute 70 percent of the total family assets, but when their salaries increase further and they bring in 100 percent of the financial family gains, the likelihood of them cheating increases gradually by 4 percent.
"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," Christin Munsch, study author and assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, told CNN. "This suggests that there is something about inequity in relationships that people don't like, and something about not being the breadwinner that men especially don't like."
Munsch told Fortune that she pursued this study after her friends broke up several years ago.
Breadwinner wives, who bring in 100 percent of the family income scored an average of 1.5 percent chance of cheating per year, making them the group who are least likely to exhibit unfaithfulness. These women feel guilty for deviating from conventional social norms that recognize husbands as the main source of family income. They feel that they are taking a huge toll on their husbands' masculinity and thus perform ways to prevent it, such as doing the household chores amid having a full-time job.
"He already might feel threatened that I'm the breadwinner, I'm certainly not going to make him clean the toilet, too," Munsch said, giving an example of the possible thoughts going through the minds of these wives.
In the end, Munsch iterates that wives should not be alarmed if they earn more than their husbands. "They still only have a 15 percent chance of engaging in infidelity even when completely dependent on their wives," she explains. "I don't want people to think 'Oh my God, my husband is going to cheat on me because he's dependent!' We're probably talking about a specific type of man who buys into a very traditional gender ideology."
Photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simões | Flickr
