What I don’t get is relationships where both partners are both cheating as much as possible, AND simultaneously insanely angry if their partner cheats. I always wonder why the hell they don’t just agree to have an open relationship, it could save them both a lot of effort and stress and fighting. This seems to be the majority of relationship drama, everyone cheating their asses off and hiding it while prying through their partners lives trying to find evidence of cheating, and if they do boy are they pissed. I see their shit on facebook all the time.
Seriously why not just agree to be in an open relationship if both partners want to boink other people?
They probably justify it that *they *only did it because their partner does it (regardless of who did it first) or doesn’t help around the house or doesn’t have time for them or whatever.
It’s a good question, and I think it largely boils down to partners wanting to control each other.
In many cases, I don’t think infidelity is about sex so much as it is about control. People cheat to prove their partner doesn’t control them, and they also cheat to feel more powerful than their partner.
If hubby sleeps with his foxy female friend, he feels like a stud and feels more powerful / worldly / macho than his wife. Finding out she banged the poolboy is going to deflate that.
If you’re sensing a common thread that none of these sound like healthy relationship dynamics, you win a cigar.
They’re fetishists. Their real pleasure in the relationship is all that Recreational Outrage.
I know of a brother and sister, both in their late 50’s, who squabble non-stop about every nit-picking little thing and are incessantly at each others’ throats. When I first witnessed this, I found it alarming. But then I realized that this was simply their shared hobby. Recreational squabbling. Once I realized this, the next time I witnessed the same, I found it entertaining.
I think it’s because both infidelity and wanting a faithful spouse come from the same source, a lot of the time. If your big desire is to be wanted, it makes sense. If you want everyone to put you at the top of their list as the most desirable, then you don’t want someone putting someone ahead of you, even if you put someone ahead of them.
For an analogy, think of a person who has pets, say two dogs. That person might have a favorite between the two dogs, but the dogs both belong to the person. If one of the dogs started to act like some other person was the best person, and the dog’s favorite, the owner might feel jealousy that they are not the special one at the top of the dog’s list.
Or, I may just be making shit up. I dunno.
Yes, this is all it is. The male needs to spread his genes as widely as possible. The female needs to secure a stable provider for her offspring while at the same time securing the best genetic sire. At the same time, both need to secure a stable economic unit for continuing prosperity while also seeking options if things go south. It’s all competing genetic and material impulses. The urge to couple and seek fidelity is just as strong as the urge to seek variety.
You know what else would help DNA spread? If we allowed people to run around all day with no clothing. Public sex on the sidewalks. Murdering your sexual competition. Rape. Yet somehow we’ve transcended such anti-social behavior by and large, even though they would be reproductive advantages. So no, I don’t think it’s “explained,” it’s just moved the question a bit. Why do we still cheat and create drama over it but we don’t have stranger sex at Starbucks?
The short answer is: It sucks, but it’s not important enough to do anything about.
Murder and rape have been adjudged harmful to others and to society at large for reasons other than those directly related to sexual relationships. Over time they have become more and more unacceptable in a broad sense, and they remain criminalized in most societies.
Public nudity and public sex are not banned because they are themselves considered harmful to others or to society at large in a serious sense but only because they offend the sensibilities of the majority of the public. There are places where public nudity and public sex may be permitted without affecting anyone’s sense of social justice.
Infidelity, on the other hand, has not only always been prevalent in human society, it has also been much more common than any of the above. Some societies have gone through phases of trying to control this kind of sexual behavior, but we are clearly on a trend of removing infidelity in general from the supervision of the legal system. Whatever harms it causes are personal and emotional and largely temporary. Nearly everyone either engages in or is the victim of infidelity at some point in his or her life. It has little import to society at large or to notions of social justice. It’s simply considered people’s own private business.
Infidelity is also a common factor in the forming of and breaking of couples, which has also become far more accepted in human society at large. Largely speaking, we no longer believe we as a society have an interest in forcing people to maintain permanent unions and that goes hand-in-hand in not having an interest in policing infidelity.
When we look at the lives of individuals who have been considered major contributors to society, through public policy, or creative arts, or science, a huge percentage of them are revealed to have engaged in infidelity. Indeed, a huge portion of the corpus of human creativity in drama, literature, music, and visual arts is based on issues of infidelity.
It’s simply one of the minor roadbumps of life, like the pains of adolescence, or acne, or disciplining children, etc. There’s no overarching social justification for taking any kind of social action that tells individuals how to live their sexual lives in this manner.
I think perhaps you misunderstood the tone of my post and my personal stance on infidelity. I’m all *for *“infidelity,” if it’s open and honest and consensual. It’s the drama I’m against, and the drama that I see that is destructive - to individuals, to their families and neighbors and society at large. At *least *as destructive as seeing a nipple at WalMart.
My point is that simply saying “Because people want to spread their DNA” ignores the fact that we’ve stopped a whole lot of behavior that spreads DNA, but this one persists. We’re *not *slaves to our genetic imperative, and to reduce it to that absolves a whole lot of people’s responsibility for their own actions.
If you ever get a coherent answer, let me know. I’ve never understood it. I can understand the idea of non-cheating faithful exclusivity, and a little bit the idea of feeling betrayed (in the limited sense of “it was the dishonesty, not the infidelity”) and I can take on faith the notion of jealousy (“I want you all to myself”) although I don’t seem to be wired that way. But yeah, WTF people, if you realize you’re not actually reliably inclined towards sexual exclusivity and/or that your partners don’t appear to be, wouldn’t you end up with a more loving and more durable commitment to each other if you just agreed “I want you and if the price of having you is accepting the possibility that you might have sex with someone else at some point I can deal with that” and promised each other NOT to whack each other over the head with frying pans and yell and break up and all that if and when it happens?
Personally I think lots of folks got sold on the idea that love MEANS needing exclusivity, and they internalized that so deeply that they would not feel loved unless their partner was NOT tolerant of any other sexual partners.