Women are smarter love-cheats

A new survey has found that women are more adept at keeping their extra marital affairs a secret than men.

Women have always been more secretive than men about affairs, according to Julia Cole, one of Britain's leading relationship therapists.

Women regard infidelity as an emotional betrayal and therefore more potentially damaging to their principal relationship than men, who are more likely to consider affairs "just sex". Women, therefore, go to greater lengths to keep their affairs secret.

She was unclear, however, why this appeared not to apply to men. The survey of 2,014 adults found that for the nation as a whole, 16 per cent of women and 21 per cent of men have been unfaithful at some time. Most, though, acknowledge that infidelity is always destructive to a relationship.

Boredom with their partner is the most common reason given for cheating. This suggests that many Britons have difficulty adjusting to a long-term partnership once the spark has gone out of their relationship, said Ms Cole, author of After the Affair.

"People often mistakenly believe that affairs are all about sex. But more often than not people have affairs because they want to feel that they are special to somebody and to themselves, and their partner has stopped seeing them as special," she said.

The Populus survey is based on a random sample of 1,052 women and 962 men aged 18 and over across Britain, who each completed a confidential questionnaire in the presence of a researcher. The results were weighted to be representative of all adults and to the marital profile of the country.