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We recently went through every page on this site and pulled out each statistic that made a claim about infidelity, divorce or our own results. Some had a source. Several did not. The ones that did not are gone.
Doing that exercise taught us a fair bit about how bad statistics travel, so here is the test we now apply. It takes about two minutes per number and it works on any topic, not just this one.
1. Can you find the study, or only other websites?
Click through the citation. If the link goes to another blog, and that blog links to a third blog, and none of them ever reaches a named study with a sample size and a method, the number has no origin. It is a rumour with a decimal point.
A real citation lands on something you can inspect: a survey, a dataset, a peer reviewed paper, a government release.
2. Does the wording match what was measured?
This is the one almost everybody gets wrong, us included until recently.
The Institute for Family Studies analysis of US General Social Survey data found that 20% of married men and 13% of married women reported having sex with someone other than their spouse while married. That sentence gets retold online as “20% of men cheat”, “20% of people admit to cheating on their current partner”, and a dozen other versions. Each one quietly changes the population, the behaviour, or the time frame, and each one is therefore a different claim than the study supports.
If a site quotes a study but paraphrases it loosely, assume the paraphrase is wrong until you check.
3. Could this have been measured at all?
Some numbers fail on logic before you even look for a source. “Seventy per cent of married women do not know about their partner’s infidelity” is one. The people in that group are, by definition, the ones who would answer no to a survey asking if they knew. There is no way to count them.
“People who suspect a partner of cheating are right 85% of the time” is another. To produce that you would need a large sample of suspicious partners plus a reliable, unbiased way of establishing the truth in every single case. It has not been done.
4. Is the country right?
Most infidelity figures in circulation on Australian sites are American. That is not automatically a problem, as long as it is stated. It becomes a problem when the label falls off and a US survey reappears as a fact about Australian marriages.
There is no Australian equivalent, which is the part that surprises people. The most cited Australian source, Relationships Australia’s infidelity research, surveyed around 1,800 visitors to its website about what they think causes infidelity. Most pointed to emotional disconnection. It is a perception survey, and it does not measure how many Australians have actually been unfaithful.
Small tells help. Distances in miles, dollar figures that look American, references to states that do not exist here. We found a results table on a sister site of ours that measured travel in miles, which told us plenty about where it came from.
5. Is it a rate, or two counts divided?
Divorce is where this one bites. The ABS reported 118,804 marriages and 49,158 divorces in Australia in 2025. Divide one by the other and you get about 41%, and you will see that arithmetic presented as the divorce rate on plenty of sites.
It is meaningless. Those are two different groups of people in the same year. The couples divorcing in 2025 mostly married a decade or two earlier, when the number of marriages was different. A real lifetime divorce rate requires a cohort projection, which is what the Australian Institute of Family Studies produced, though the widely quoted 40% figure dates back to a 1993 article and is old to be quoting as current.
What is on this site now
Two sourced statements about infidelity, both linked, with the US one labelled as US. No divorce percentage at all. Where we describe our own track record we give our success rate as around 95% and say plainly that it is based on our own client outcomes over 20 years, which includes matters that ended with a partner being cleared.
Where we previously had a statistic and no source, the claim is now framed as what it always was: our own experience, after two decades of this work.
That is a shorter list of numbers than we used to have. It is a more honest one.
Written by Rob Jones, Senior Investigator. Rob works on cheating partner, surveillance and locate cases across Parramatta and western Sydney. Licensed under GORA Investigations Pty Ltd, NSW Master Licence 412080174.