Admitting you were unfaithful in past relationships is a gamble¹. "Once a cheater, always a cheater" is a phrase that can damage your reputation for a long time, if you're unlucky. 

 

承认你在之前的情侣关系中不忠是一次赌博。如果你不走运的话，“一日出轨，终身出轨” 这句短语则会长期损害你的声誉。

 

According to some scientific research, there could actually be some fact behind the idiom. 

 

A new study, published in the journal Archives of Sexual² Behaviour, followed 484 participants in mixed gender³ romantic relationships. The researchers asked the participants to report their own "extra-dyadic sexual involvement" -- having sexual relations with someone other than their partner -- and also whether they had suspected their partners of infidelity in each romantic relationship they had been in. 

 

The results showed that people who had messed around in their first relationship were three times more likely to cheat in their next relationship compared to those who had stayed faithful.

 

Those who knew that their previous partners had cheated on them were twice as likely to have their next partners do the dirty on them too. Suspicion also appeared to be hard to shake, as people who suspected their first relationship partners of cheating were four times more likely to report suspicion in later relationships. 

 

One reason for this could be the fact that when we lie, our brain actually gets used to it. This was the finding of a study published in Nature Neuroscience, which showed that telling small lies desensitises our brains to the associated negative emotions, which may encourage us to tell bigger lies in the future. 

 

In other words, those little white lies we tell all the time might build up into bigger, more serious untruths.

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