PH
Choosing an affair partner isn't necessarily the same process as choosing a casual sexual partner.
Research using nationally representative data found that women reporting extramarital *** tended to know their affair partners better than men did.
Women were less likely to report an affair with a stranger.
This suggests that women's affairs in the dataset were more commonly embedded in an existing social connection.
That person could already be someone she regularly talked to, worked with, socialized with, or otherwise knew.
It doesn't mean emotional attachment was necessarily present.
But for women in this research, cheating was less likely to involve somebody completely unknown.
© Journal of Family Issues (2019)