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Monday, February 05, 2001
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

STATISTICS VARY

Numbers for the frequency of marital infidelity are scarcer than wedding rings on fingers in a meat-market singles bar.

That contrasts with the high visibility of certain individual cases of infidelity. Celebrity examples include Prince Charles of England, former President Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Many of the statistics tossed around in popular magazines or books are simply guesses, family counselors say.

The main reason for the lack of information is that infidelity can't be directly observed in studies. When individuals respond to surveys, there is no way to verify if they are telling the truth about what is probably a sore subject.

Divorce rates can be measured, but do not coincide with infidelity rates because divorces can occur for reasons other than infidelity. Also, infidelity does not always result in divorce.

Neither the U.S. Cens us Bureau nor the National Center for Health Statistics track infidelity, though each tracks some aspects of marriage and divorce.

Here are what various sources have claimed about infidelity rates in the United States:

c About 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an affair at some point in some marriage, according to Peggy Vaughan, author of "The Monogamy Myth: A Personal Handbook for Recovering from Affairs."

c About 24 percent of men and 14 percent of women have had sex outside their marriages, according to a Dec. 21, 1998 report in USA Today on a national study by the University of California, San Francisco.

c Affairs affect one of every 2.7 couples, according to counselor Janis Abrahms Spring, author of "After the Affair," as reported by the Washington Post on March 30, 1999.

-- JOAN WHITELY