The Jenny was aghast and perplexed by Larry's barrage of questions about the frequency, timing, whereabouts, type, quality, and orgasmic nature of the sex Anna had with the interloper. Like Anna, The Jenny asked, "Why is the sex so important?" Thankfully, the husband in me prohibited the professor in me from responding, "Uh, helloooooo? Have you not read Buss et al., 1992?" I was somehow smart enough to say, "That's a terrific question honey, and one worthy of study."

And that's how my collaborators and I came to study sex differences in the nature of jealousy-fueled interrogations of suspected cheaters. Given the calamitous costs of cuckoldry for ancestral men, we predicted that relative to women, men would be more likely to grill their unfaithful mates about the sexual nature of their affairs. Although ancestral women did not run the risk of cuckoldry ('twas always mama's baby, but papa's maybe), their partners' emotional infidelities put women in jeopardy of losing their partners' time, attention, investment, and protection. As such, we further predicted that women more so than men would inquire about the emotional nature of a suspected cheater's affair.

Our first study had psychology undergraduates—the low-hanging fruit of the participant tree—consider the following forced-choice dilemma: "Upon discovering that a serious romantic partner has been unfaithful to you, you would likely have many questions for him [her]. However, some questions are more important to ask than others. Which of the following questions are you more likely to ask your unfaithful partner?" Much as you did earlier, our participants then selected either "Did you have sex with her [him]?" or "Do you love her [him]?" As depicted below, upon discovering that their mate had been unfaithful, men more so than women (84 percent vs. 54 percent) indicated that they would inquire about the sexual nature of the extra-pair relationship, while women more so than men (46 percent vs. 16 percent) reported that they would inquire about its emotional nature (Kuhle, Smedley, & Schmitt, 2009).

Although insightful, this study was limited in that the participants were mere undergrads who merely imagined their likely reactions to an imagined mate's infidelity. Ideally, I should have hired an attractive confederate (and for the ideal, I'll go with Natalie Portman), instructed Natalie to become involved with married adult men, and then recorded and analyzed the scorned wives' interrogations of their unfaithful (and lucky but naughty) husbands. Unfortunately, what a professor wants to do and what the IRB actually allows a professor to do are rarely the same thing. Fortunately, IRB's have no jurisdiction over reality-television producers.

1. The victim contacts the Cheater's Detective Agency (CDA) with a suspicion that a mate has been cheating.
2. The CDA clandestinely videotapes the cheater's actions over several weeks.
3. The CDA presents video evidence to the victim of the cheater's involvement with the interloper and offers the victim the opportunity to immediately confront the cheater and interloper, who are presently together.
4. The CDA accompanies and records the victim's jealousy-fueled confrontation with and interrogation of the cheater and interloper.
5. And finally, like a Tucker Max story, awkward hilarity ensues.

While I was obliviously ruminating about my job-talk on imagined reactions to imagined infidelities, The Jenny was watching actual reactions to actual infidelities. She said, "Hon, isn't this kind of what your job-talk is on?" And so began my Cheaters study of cheating. The Jenny is part lover, part mother, part research inspirer.

Although running a quasi-experiment (one in which I measured married participants' jealousy-fueled interrogations of their mates after I hired Natalie Portman and Johnny Depp to infiltrate their relationships) would be a big no-no, content-analyzing footage of the natural quasi-experiment that is Cheaters is completely kosher, if unorthodox. And that is how I came to own 11 university-purchased DVDs of Cheaters. 

After training my six undergraduate RAs to distinguish between a victim exhibiting sexual or emotional jealousy, they watched and coded the nature of 75 jealousy-induced interrogations. A quintessential example of a jealousy-fueled sexual interrogation is exhibited in the below Cheaters clip in which 28-year-old Kristopher catches his 23-year-old girlfriend and an interloper in flagrante delicto.  

A jealousy-fueled emotional interrogation is seen below when 23-year-old Maria confronts her 24-year-old husband about his cheating.