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Math Proves More Men CAN Cheat

It doesn’t prove that they DO

Shefali O'Hara
2 min readDec 10, 2022
Photo by Mia Harvey on Unsplash

I wrote an article on cheating a while back and one reader informed me that if I am talking about heterosexual cis-gender men and women, they must be cheating in equal numbers since they make up roughly equal proportions of the population.

On the surface that makes sense. However, in order for it to be true, we have to assume that when people cheat, they do so with similar numbers of people. That is not necessarily true.

Let’s assume that there is a small town with 10 men and 10 women.

Each of the 10 men is in a “committed” relationship with 1 of the women.

However, one of the women is a prostitute. Whether or not her husband knows is irrelevant for this discussion.

Let’s say further that each of the men cheat but only 3 of the women do, one of them being the prostitute. Let’s further stipulate that each of the men who cheat only does so once a month.

This gives us a situation in which:

  • All 10 of the men cheat once a month.
  • 2 of the women cheat once a month.
  • 1 of the women cheats 8 times a month.

This gives us a situation in which, while there are an equal number of cheating “encounters”…

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Shefali O'Hara
Shefali O'Hara

Written by Shefali O'Hara

Cancer survivor, Christian, writer, engineer. BSEE from MIT, MSEE, and MA in history. Love nature, animals, books, art, and interesting discussions.

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