Neglect, sexual variety, Lack of Love & More: Real Reasons People Give to Justify Cheating

Drunkenness, neglect and a quest for sexual variety could make people cheat on their partners, a new study has shown.

The study, entitled "Motivations for Extradyadic

Infidelity Revisited", says one’s personality is related to the motivations for cheating on a partner. The findings found that often people cheat because they begin to feel a "lack of love" with their partner.
Some who cheat say the fell out of love with or don't feel loved by their partner and of the 495 adults that were surveyed, 77% felt like a lack of love was present in the relationship.

Around 74% just had a simple desire for the sexual partners who they cheated with, 70% felt neglected by their partner while 70% were also drunk or not thinking when the cheating occurred.
Over half cheated on their partners in order to raise their self-esteem, 43% cheated out of anger and over a third of those surveyed felt "unattached" and just wanted to have s*x. Authors of the study, Dylan Selterman, Justin R. Garcia, and Irene Tsapelas wrote, "Consistent with predictions, attachment insecurity was associated with motivations of anger, lack of love, neglect, low commitment, and esteem, while unrestricted sociosexual orientation was associated with sexual variety."
A 2005 research by Barta and Keine, had previously listed dissatisfaction, neglect, anger, low commitment, self esteem, and sexual desire as motivations for infidelity.

But using an internet-based questionnaire on 495 people, who were mostly young adults, researchers listed some other motivations for infidelity.
“In addition to evidence for previously studied motivations, our data demonstrate additional factors, including lack of love (“I had ‘fallen out of love with’ my primary partner”), low commitment (“I was not very committed to my primary partner”), esteem (“I wanted to enhance my popularity”), gaining sexual variety (“I wanted a greater variety of sexual partners”), and situational factors (“I was drunk and not thinking clearly”).

“Consistent with predictions, attachment insecurity was associated with motivations of anger, lack of love, neglect, low commitment, and esteem, while unrestricted sociosexual orientation was associated with sexual variety. Implicit beliefs (e.g., growth, destiny, romanticism) were deferentially associated with sexual desire, low commitment, lack of love, and neglect.”

The study was published in The Journal of S*x.