We don’t have couple-level data so the men and women in the study are not in the same relationships
In other words, if the cheated-on take longer to start new relationships than cheaters do, as intuitively seems likely, the study will be more likely to capture a dissolved relationship through an interview with the cheated-on party than with the cheating party
As I mulled Frisco’s response, two limitations of the Add Health data struck me as particularly important. First, as she implied, there can be delays between 1) cheating, 2) getting caught, and 3) getting dumped-so cheaters interviewed before the final step may have reported doomed relationships as “intact,” whereas the study’s cheated-on respondents by definition had reached at least Step 2.
