Sources

What the meter is built on.

Infidelity Meter is our own model. Its structure draws on ideas that recur across the clinical literature on affair recovery. Here is what we took from where, and what is ours.

Updated 8 October 2026. Independent professional review: not yet done (see how we work).

Works that shaped the structure

  1. Shirley P. Glass with Jean Coppock Staeheli, Not "Just Friends": Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity. Free Press, 2003. Used for: treating secret emotional intimacy as a betrayal in its own right, and the idea of "walls and windows" (who is let in, who is shut out). It shapes the emotional affair and micro-cheating types and the areas of closeness and exclusivity.
  2. Janis Abrahms Spring with Michael Spring, After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful. HarperCollins, 1996; updated second edition 2012. Used for: the different tasks of the hurt partner and the partner who cheated, and trust as something earned through specific, repeated behaviour. It shapes the two roles and the conditions of openness and lasting change.
  3. Donald H. Baucom, Douglas K. Snyder and Kristina Coop Gordon, Helping Couples Get Past the Affair: A Clinician's Guide. Guilford Press, 2009. Used for: recovery in stages, from absorbing the shock, to understanding what happened and why, to moving on, whether or not the couple stays together. It shapes the recovery outlook and the eight-week plan in the PRO result.
  4. John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman's three-phase approach to affair recovery in Gottman Method couples therapy: atone, attune, attach. For background on trust and betrayal: John M. Gottman with Nan Silver, What Makes Love Last? How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal. Simon & Schuster, 2012. Used for: the conditions of responsibility without blame (atone), empathy for the hurt (attune), and both partners wanting to rebuild (attach).
  5. Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press, 2007. Used for: why control and fear change everything. It is the reason the safety step comes first, and why it overrides every other score.

These authors are not connected with Infidelity Meter and have not reviewed or endorsed it. Our summaries of their ideas are ours, and will be checked in the independent review.

What is our own

  • The twelve areas of a relationship and each item's footprint across them.
  • The weights, thresholds and caps in the formulas.
  • The types of infidelity and the order in which they are chosen (types).
  • All texts of the LITE and PRO results.

These are reasoned choices, not results fitted to outcome data, and the meter is not a validated scale. If you need a validated instrument for research or clinical work, use one, not this.

If you know work that should change something here, write to hello@infidelitymeter.com.