How To Tell If Someone Is Likely To Cheat On You, Based On Their Fingers
What a person's finger can tell you about their ability to be faithful.
Emiliano Vittorios | Unsplash Stop snooping through his phone. Sign out of his Facebook account. End your search for suspicious hair ties in his car or the smell of perfume on his collar.
Infidelity can be traumatic and is one of the more challenging problems faced in a relationship. While many people are blindsided if and when they find out about a spouse or partner cheating, others may suspect infidelity because of actions that are out of the norm.
Research found the easiest way to determine if someone is likely to cheat on you: Look at their ring finger.
In a study from Oxford University, called "Stay or stray? Evidence for alternative mating strategy phenotypes in both men and women", researchers assessed 1,314 hands, including 572 men and 742 women.
After looking at the length of the index finger compared to the ring finger, they discovered that both men and women who have a right ring finger that's much longer than their index finger on the same hand are more likely to be unfaithful. Scratching your head (or looking at your own hand)?
Yuri A / Shutterstock
The concept behind the study is that the length of your ring finger reveals the amount of testosterone you were exposed to in the womb, which is linked with promiscuity.
The study also found that men and women are inclined to either stay or stray. It's the first study to show different mating approaches are used by both men and women, though the study did find that males were slightly more likely to be promiscuous.
So, what do you do if your partner's ring finger is much longer than their index finger? Aside from screaming, "Who is she?!" at the top of your lungs, remember that finger lengths are determined before birth and that there are plenty of other factors that influence whether your partner will hook up with the neighbor or not.
"There's almost no one that exists who's purely promiscuous or purely monogamous," Researcher Ralph Wlodarski told Bloomberg News.
"Everything we are is a combination of both our genetics and our environment. There’s massive room for variation, and that variation will depend on your upbringing, on your early relationship experience, on your development, and on aspects of free will and aspects of making decisions based on your experiences."
Another study, published in a Royal Society Journal, revealed that researchers measured the finger lengths of 274 female volunteers. They also took DNA samples and had them complete psychological tests that focused on the quality of their relationships. "Women with higher (more feminine) left-hand digit ratios are more impulsive and rate their romantic relationships less favorably."
If all else fails, add 'even finger lengths' to your list of non-negotiables — science says people with even digits are likely to be in it for the long haul.
Researchers at Essex University looked at sets of identical twins where one of the siblings was heterosexual. They found that the homosexual twin tended to have a more significant difference between the length of their index and ring finger, with the difference most pronounced among women.
Michelle Toglia is the Executive Editor at Elite Daily, overseeing the site's entertainment, news, style, dating, and experiences coverage.