You’ve probably heard this before: men care more about sexual cheating; women care more about emotional cheating. But is that really true? Kind of.
A 2025 study of 4,465 people in Norway found that the culturally held belief gets much more interesting once sexual orientation enters the picture. Heterosexual men were far more likely than heterosexual women to be upset by sexual infidelity, and men who were more strongly attracted to women showed the strongest sexual-jealousy response.
The researchers also looked at four traits tied to masculinity and femininity. In men, a more masculine pattern across those traits tended to go along with stronger attraction to women, which in turn was linked to more distress over sexual cheating.
1. The Eight-Year-Old You
One thing researchers asked about was childhood play. Think trucks, roughhousing, dolls, games in solitude, and whatever else you were into before age 12.
Men who remembered having more traditionally masculine interests as kids were also more likely to report stronger attraction to women later in life. And among men, stronger attraction to women usually had a bigger reaction to sexual cheating.
2. Head vs. Heart
The second trait looked at whether someone leaned more toward systemizing or empathizing. Systemizing means being more drawn to figuring out how things work; empathizing means paying more attention to how people feel.
This was the weakest of the four measures. Men who leaned more toward systemizing still scored more masculine overall, but the connection wasn’t especially strong. The researchers even noted that this measure fit the broader pattern less well than the others.
3. The Jobs You Actually Want
Researchers also asked what kinds of jobs people preferred. Men drawn to more traditionally male-dominated fields, like engineering or construction, usually scored more masculine on the broader measure.
This trait mattered more than the systemizing-empathizing measure in the men studied, so occupational preference wasn’t just filler in the questionnaire. It was one of the stronger pieces in the pattern.
4. How You See Yourself
The fourth trait was gender identity, specifically how masculine or feminine someone felt compared with other people of the same age and sex.
For men, feeling more masculine was part of the same cluster that tracked with stronger attraction to women and, indirectly, more sexual jealousy. Once attraction was taken into account, though, these traits didn’t add much extra explanation for jealousy by themselves.
Lead author Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair told reporters that “the degree of masculinity and femininity varies greatly from one person to the next and over time, regardless of biological sex.”
The study also found that the difference between straight men and women became narrower with age. And nearly half of straight men said emotional infidelity would bother them more than sexual cheating.
So the old “men care about sex, women care about feelings” line misses a lot of what’s actually going on. In this study, the strongest sexual-jealousy pattern showed up in men who were more strongly attracted to women and who also scored more masculine across several of these traits. Take from that what you will.
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