Accountants make best husbands…to cheat on!
With 24 hours to go to Valentine’s Day, accountants might want to make a few checks that everything is rosy in their marriage before splashing out on a big bouquet, as research from the UK’s largest married dating site reveals that they are the category of husbands most likely to have wives who cheat on them by looking online for additional male company.
From today, married couples and civil partners can register online for the new marriage allowance, a tax break offering potential savings of up to £212 a year, which comes into effect in April.
IllicitEncounters.com aims to bring together people looking for a little romance outside their current relationship, ranging from the occasional bit of flirtatious chat, a regular coffee date, or a full-blown affair.
When it polled 1,500 of its female members asking what their husbands did for a career, the highest percentage of them (13%) said they were accountants.
Accountants who want to make sure they are their wife’s one true desire could take a close look at the top six reasons these women gave for starting affairs.
A third cited reasons which are common to any job, such as ‘the excitement has gone in our marriage’, and 15% claimed that ‘we’ve lost our connection’ as well as loss of sex drive in the marriage.
The sometimes difficulty work-life balance in the accountancy sector might be a factor for some while others said they strayed because ‘we spend too much time apart’ and ‘I don’t feel special to him any more’, both possible outcomes from long days at the office and a lot of business travel.
Somewhat ironically, the women who had married to accountants and gone on to look for romance outside the home cited the fact their husband was ‘ethical and plays by the rules’ as one of the top 10 reasons he was a good life partner.
Psychologist Lucy Redford said it was unsurprising that women chose accountants as husbands to start with, pointing out that ‘stability, both financial and personal is the number one thing people seek in marriages.’
‘The typical accountant is seen as stable, reliable and responsible. Consciously or sub-consciously, all women seek these characteristics in a mate. The number one reason people stray from marriages is because excitement is replaced by routine, and what was once seen as a spark becomes a chore. Every relationship requires work, but it still needs to be worth working for,’ Redford said.
Other factors on the top 10 list of the benefits of an accountant spouse included reliability; earning a good wage; being intelligent; taking the fear out of money matters; being a stress-reliever; and being a good decision-maker.
This may be why the research also showed that very few of the women who had signed up to cheat on their husbands planned to make the break permanent.
Claire Page, spokesperson for IllicitEncounters.com said: ‘On the good side, if you’re an accountant and your wife is straying, she won’t let the affair break her marriage, because only three among the 195 cheating women said they would consider leaving their accountant husbands!’
In fact the website, which has 970,000 members in the UK, claimed that it was unlikely the accountant husband would even find out about his wife’s other interests, as it claims to operate with complete discretion and says that in the 13 years it has been bringing together married people who want to start affairs it has yet to hear of anyone who was caught out as a result of using IllicitEncounters.com.
Looking on the bright side, Page said: ‘Finding out your partner had an affair isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Oftentimes it brings to the surfaces the unspoken tensions and problems couples have and when people cheat and are caught, it usually brings about better communication and clears the air.’
And for accountants who are single on Valentine’s Day and are still thinking of popping the question after digesting the survey findings, Baker Tilly is reminding them that one way to woo their partner is to point out that new tax rules could save some couples up to £212 a year.
Jackie Hall, tax partner at Baker Tilly said canny romantics might want to mention the new tax relief for married couples and civil partners, which comes into effect on 6 April 2015, and is designed to benefit lower earning couples where one spouse has insufficient income to use their personal allowance.
‘While we doubt that this new tax benefit will be a deciding factor in whether to get hitched this Valentine’s Day, it could nevertheless be a welcome bonus for some as they begin their lives together as a couple,’ Hall said.
Where couples meet the conditions, the spouse with the unused allowance will be able to transfer up to £1,060 of that unused allowance to their spouse.
However, those couples where the other spouse has income in excess of the higher rate threshold (£42,385 for 2015/16) will not be eligible, and the tax break does not apply in situations where one spouse has no income but the other has just above the higher rate threshold.