:eek:
You would report that your child ate a grape in a supermarket in order to make ammends, but it’s OK to cheat on a boyfriend/girlfriend and not tell? 
Not trying to start anything, I just find it interesting where people draw their lines.
So all that sleeping around portrayed on Grey’s Anatomy amongst physicians is legit. I thought it was just a plot point for the show.
Selective ethics
Because I believe the store owns the grapes until the ownership is transferred to the customer in exchange for money, or offered as a sample. I don’t believe in ownership of people. Those kinds of notions originate in patriarchal tribal and religious codes of behaviour that I reject.
I find this argument persuasive:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/27/ryan.promiscuity.normal/
I’m sure the cheater can be happy.
You forgot the 5 Our Fathers and the 5 * Hail Marys*
Thanks for sharing your experience. I enjoyed reading the advice, but am glad to see that you’ve handled the situation. It was brave of you to share.
As can the other party if we just remember “ignorance is bliss”.
It has nothing to do with “ownership”, it has to do with trust. If another person and I have an exclusive relationship, then we have both promised (explicity or implicitly) to only be with one another. In that promise a trust relationship is formed. Each party trusts the other to keep that promise. If one party breaks their promise, they have materially changed the agreement and the other has a right to know, period.
See, I don’t care what is considered “normal” behaviour. Human beings are different than any other animal in that we have the ability to choose to behave differently from our natural inclinations. Once that choice is made, communicated and accepted, then all parties involved have a right to know when one has violated the agreement.
The store has a grape that they will trade for money. You are not supposed to take the grape without giving the store money, or coming to another agreement. It violates the agreement you implicitly entered when you went into the store. In return for exclusivity as a couple, they give each other their trust. If one takes the exclusivity but abuses the trust it violates the agreement. Either agree to some other arrangement in advance, or honor the agreement in place.
YMMV
The child put the grape in its mouth and ate it. The store was going to sell that grape, so there is a monetary loss.
I’m not saying what happened in their bedroom was the same thing, but unless you can show that she stopped him while he was on his way to a sperm bank, financial loss is hard to prove.
Even if she felt guilty over a perceived financial loss, I’m sure sperm banks take anonymous funds. And even if they Do only take sperm, I’m sure she could head out to a bar, get a guy interested, drag him by the crank to the sperm bank,
finish him off in a cup, and tell the night nurse, “Look. We’re even. And to Hell with your damn Vig…!”
A relationship is sort of an agreement, not ownership. Some people choose to keep theirs open, while others commit to just their partner, etc.
Betraying your partners trust is the real problem, and that’s likely to happen if someone unilaterally acts and tries to justify breaking the above agreement (most times defined as cheating).
Riiiight, because people just choose that type of agreement from among a wide variety of possible choices. They don’t feel intense social pressure, based on those traditional social mores I was talking about, to enter into an arrangement that goes against very powerful instincts and drives that evolved over millions of years.
And can you give examples of other agreements people commonly make with each other that cover even behaviour they may engage in in private, discreetly, perhaps even hundreds or thousands of miles away from the other person?
We see an apparent epidemic of public figures–mostly men–stepping out on their wives. And those are just the ones who get caught. Year after year, an endless parade of them. Each time it happens, the chattering class clucks and frets and wonders what explains it. Some kind of special neurosis that overtakes powerful men? Pfffft. Or is it just that they have the opportunity?
I submit that if we were able to conduct a controlled experiment, sampling heterosexual married men at random (I know women and gay men “cheat” too but I only know what it is like to be a hetero man), offering them the chance to have sex with highly attractive women, using protection, in a very discreet and private situation, that very few would turn down the opportunity (and those that did would agonise over it and second-guess themselves until the end of time). And I just don’t think that’s true of other agreements people solemnly enter into, not to the same degree.
Nor do I think most married men would ever be willing to “betray” their wives in ways I’d actually consider true betrayal–like anonymously smearing their reputations, undermining their mother-child relationships or their status at the office. In fact, were such a betrayal the price of getting secret nookie with the hotties, then I do think most married men would turn it down. Because then it’s really not true that “ignorance is bliss”. Yet we make a pretense in our culture that a one night stand the wife will never find out about is every bit as deep a betrayal as these other acts, if not deeper.
If you really believed that, you’d never allow anyone to tell you anything…
Okay, so maybe you do believe it.
You really missed your calling as an ape. From the CNN article you quoted:
That article didn’t cover any new ground, and what it left out is that we have brains evolved enough to NOT behave like chimps an bonobos, for the good of our family and by extension, society. You can quote (make excuses for) how you have a biological imperative to screw around, but you’re supposed to be smarter than an ape. Plus, you’re screwing with a partner who’s most likely smarter than an ape, and has expectations of your behavior.
Cheating may be “natural”, but it’s not acceptable. Screw around all you want, but stay unattached or you’re going to hurt people.
:rolleyes::dubious:
It’s natural I throw my own feces at people too. That doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable.
I am an ape, and so are you.
Wasn’t saying it did–it’s the oldest ground of human nature. But a lot of people have their heads in the sand and are shocked–SHOCKED–at assertions like these.
Stay unattached? I am married, with four kids.
I had an affair. Though it lifted my burden to tell my husband, it gave him one to carry that he did not deserve. The hardest thing to do is to look at the man you love and not share your life with him. Even if that life includes being in love with another man. You want the comfort and the understanding of your husband/bf. You want advice. If you are anything like me you have been overwhelmed with emotions you don’t understand. This was not supposed to happen. Not to you…
If I had to make the choice to tell or not to tell again… I would not. I would leave my dear sweet husband in blissfull oblivion. I would carry my shame and my pain alone.
You may very well be. But the rest of us, not so much:
Paraphrased from recent thread:
Nature, sir, is what we are meant to rise above.
In other words what, you’re challenging the shibboleth of fidelity from inside the system?