There was a post yesterday, I believe, claiming this, and reading the replies made me want to ask this question of the women on here.

Basically, the line from a lot of RP guys here is the following: sexual infidelity represents more of a betrayal of a relationship when the woman does it than when the man does it. I put it like that because a lot of women were trying to bring in abstract harm that is done in terms of it ruining other marriages or how bad it is ''for society''. What's being discussed is merely the damage inflicted on the betrayed spouse. So the line goes that since women get pregnant, infidelity on the woman's side is actually an existential threat to the husband. If you are in a committed, monogamous relationship with a wife who is cheating, you are in danger of receiving a Darwin Award.

That being the case, many believe that men are psychologically wired to find cheating by their partner more painful. Whether you want to chalk that up to evolution trying to motivate you to avoid/leave a situation which has the potential to eliminate you from the gene pool as surely as a tiger, or a hurricane, I think there are good reasons from looking at the behaviour of each sex to suppose that this is true. Women certainly seem more willing to overlook or tolerate sexual cheating than men are. Women also seem to take more seriously things like 'emotional cheating', which men barely give any though to. This, again, makes sense if you consider that the real threat to a woman's genetic investment in the family is her man divesting in the relationship and leaving for another woman. So it seems that both sexes are more hurt by the thing which directly threatens their reproductive imperative.

Anyway, I'm not really here to defend the proposition that this is true, my question is this:

If it were true, would you care?

As I see it, the situation is analogous to male physical strength. Men do more damage when they get physically violent with women than vice versa, as such, it is treated and considered differently. If it were proven to you beyond a doubt that men suffer more psychological harm from being cheated on, would you accept that as a valid justification for the convention of female cheating being seen as a bigger deal than male cheating? If not, do you accept the standard line on physical violence that I outlined above, and if so, can you present a non-ad-hoc reason why the same logic does not apply in both cases?