Being Cheated On Is Really, Really Bad For Your Health, Says New Study
It doesn’t just hurt your feelings, it can do actual physical damage…
Hello, dear friends. We’re about to delve into a very sensitive and dark topic, so you best prepare yourselves. We’re going to talk about cheating. Specifically, what happens to your health when you get cheated on.
Obviously, being cheated on really, really sucks. It’s an emotional pain that compares to no other, and there’s a special place in the “Emotions Nobody Should Ever Experience” guidebook reserved for the horror of catching your significant other with another person.
But guess what? If you thought the emotional toll of being cheated on was a doozy, just wait until you hear what a new study found out. Apparently, being cheated on is so, so bad for your physical health, that it makes the emotional trauma look like child’s play.
The study, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, discovered that being cheated on doesn’t directly give you cancer or anything, but it seriously fucks with your decision-making skills when it comes to your health.
For the study, researchers surveyed 232 college students who had been cheated on in the past three months, and they all had an average relationship length of 1.76 years. That’s not a very long relationship, but it’s long enough.
The researchers found that there is a strong connection between mental health and engaging in health-compromising behaviors, which includes things like getting blackout drunk, or eating an entire pan of brownies in one sitting.
And considering anyone with a heart becomes depressed, anxious, and distressed after being cheated on, there’s a high likelihood for engaging in said health-compromising behaviors after being betrayed by a lover.
“As we expected, people who experienced more emotional and psychological distress after being cheated on engaged in more risky behaviors,” lead researcher, M. Rosie Shrout, told PsyPost.
“They were more likely to eat less or not eat at all, use alcohol or marijuana more often, have sex under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or over-exercise. Being cheated on seems to not only have mental health consequences, but also increases risky behaviors.”
Basically, when you get cheated on and you the hurt hits you like a freight train, you’re more likely to drink yourself into oblivion, starve yourself or eat until your pants don’t fit, shoot up mystery street drugs, and/or have risky sex with questionable people.
None of that stuff is good for you.
But the question now is why? Why do people flip their self-destruction switch when they get hurt? Is it some kind of paradoxical self-preservation method?
At the moment, we honestly don’t know. Science hasn’t researched that just yet, but we’ll find out soon enough.
Anyway, being cheated on seriously sucks, so I’m sending love and hugs to everyone out there who has had their heart ripped out and shit on.