Finding out that the person you love is not only lying to you, but fucking another, is excruciating. The betrayal, the STD risks, and just the general misery can really do a person’s head in. Some suspicious types try to nip this behavior in the bud by spying, snooping, or policing. Obviously, these tactics rarely work, and if you’re to the point where you’re investing in CSI-type technologies, it’s probably too late anyway. However a new study says there is one thing you can do to keep your partner from straying—pray for them.Frank Fincher, the author of an upcoming article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, called “Faith and unfaithfulness: Can praying for your partner reduce infidelity?” studied some religious types and discovered that people who prayed for their partner’s fidelity were less likely to be cheated upon. My first thought was that naturally, if you’re paying more attention to your man (or woman) and thinking positive thoughts about them, you’re more likely to have a happier relationship. Fincher insists this secular thinking is wrong-headed. “The mechanism implicitly studied in this work is divine intervention,” he writes. Furthermore, “those randomly assigned to pray for the partner each day for four weeks showed less infidelity than those who engaged daily in (1) positive thoughts about partner, (2) undirected prayer or (3) a neutral activity (keeping a log of activities).”Praying to resist sexual temptation yourself didn’t help either. (Just ask Jimmy Swaggart, various members of the Catholic

clergy, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker or countless others religious hypocrites.) Nor did imploring the Lord to transform a bad partner into a good one. The results occurred only when one offered a simple prayer along the lines of, “please continue to protect and guide my partner …. bring those good things to my partner and make me a blessing in my partner’s life.” So does that mean we non-believers have a life full of lies and betrayal ahead of us? Not necessarily. Fincher says, “This research does not suggest that prayer is the only vehicle for increasing fidelity in relationships, nor does it support any inferences about atheism or atheists. The findings are relevant only to the 4.54 – 5.92 billion people who profess some form of religious faith.”