Torontonians have a love affair with being single, an attitude that has even spilled over into those who are -- at least officially -- in relationships.
According to a new poll, considerably more than half of Torontonians said they could be "truly happy" if they were single. This group includes a vast majority (79 per cent) of those who are in fact flying solo and a perhaps surprising majority (52 per cent) of those who are ostensibly tied down.
A senior official with Leger Marketing, the polling company that conducted the study for Toronto Life magazine, said that single people have been conditioned to tell themselves that they're perfectly content being single.
And an executive at a dating firm that specializes in already-married people said that television has played a role by showing the quirky, happy and funny side of single life.
Among people who are in relationships, though, it takes just one look at their propensity to cheat to believe their claims of loving the free and single life.
Cheaters were found to be plentiful in the Leger survey -- nearly one-quarter of respondents either admitted straying or refused to answer whether they ever had.
Of the 500 people polled, one in 10 admitted having cheated on a person described as their "monogamous partner" and 4 per cent said they had cheated on a spouse. There could be overlap between these two groups as well as with a third group (9 per cent) that said they'd been in a relationship with someone who had been married at the time to someone else.
There's some solace in the poll for suburbanites, though.
The results showed that only 6 per cent from the 905 region had engaged in a relationship with a married person, compared with 12 per cent in Toronto.
The telephone interviews on which the results are based were conducted from June 21 to June 27. The company says the poll has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
According to Craig Worden, associate vice-president of public affairs at Leger, the numbers are in line with other surveys done across North America. But he acknowledged how hard it is to get people to admit their infidelity. "The figure is hard to nail down because people are dishonest about it," Mr. Worden said yesterday.
Another expert on marital transgression said that the number is almost certainly much higher and can be affected by the way the question is phrased.
"A lot of people don't consider certain things to be cheating," said Darren Morgenstern, operations director at Ashley Madison, an on-line dating service geared toward people already in relationships.
"A lot of people don't consider phone-sex or cyber-sex cheating. Some don't think oral sex is cheating. Our statistics suggest that 70 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women, at some time in a relationship, will stray."
While the actual number is open to debate, numerous studies have showed that infidelity is common. Some florists will even admit, privately, that they have clients who send bouquets, complete with romantic notes, to multiple people.
Although moral campaigners are known to fulminate against the supposed decay of society, Mr. Morgenstern argues that some percentage of people have always cheated on their partners and will always continue to do so.
What has changed is that more people are opting for common-law marriages and live-in partners, which may run a higher risk of infidelity.
The Leger study found that the odds of straying were considerably higher among those in relationships than among those who were married. But Mr. Worden isn't sure this portends more infidelity to come, as society moves further away from the traditional norms of married life.
"Quite often, people who are in a common-law relationship see it as a marriage," he noted. "I'm wondering if a lot of those are people who cheated on a boyfriend or a girlfriend."
Even if the bulk of these cheaters are people who strayed from nothing more consequential than a short-term relationship, the results of the Leger poll will be sobering to anyone who thinks they know their partner.
Oliver Moore