I’m not saying cheating is good - I don’t condone adultery. But I don’t condone a lot of behaviours that seem just as bad (or worse) to me, but that don’t get brought up as frequently or passionately, the way infidelity seems to. A recent example is the thread in CS about unbearable movie topics. I was surprised by how many people mentioned being unable to tolerate stories that involve infidelity in a sympathetic light.
Again, I’m in no way saying that cheating is okay. Just wondering why for some it seems to be a sin that eclipses all others.
I generally think it’s bad to automatically categorize a particular kind of failing as a “Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go” unforgiveable sin. In relationships in which both partners assert that they value and expect monogamy, I think cheating can often be a symptom of the couple’s problems rather than a singular problem in itself.
Part of it is that we’ve been socially conditioned to consider it the great evil, and part of it is that, of all the wrongs your lover can do to you (other than direct deliberate emotional/psychological abuse), this one really plays to emotional insecurities and feelings of inadequacy. There’s also a strong humiliation factor and a feeling of foolishness for having trusted someone who has proven untrustworthy.
All in all, though, the vast majority of people in out society claim to value monogamy and understand it to be among the most precious vows between lovers. And, fact is, I’ve always considered it not at all difficult to not cheat. I’ve ended relationships that have fizzled out because I wanted to be free to seek out something better, and I’ve ended relationships upon finding someone else I preferred to be with (but ended the bad relationship first). Always seemed pretty easy to me. So, when someone who claims to love you can’t keep an easy promise I can kind of understand that some serious anger/hurt/resentment is going to follow.
But, in generally, I still see it as often being a symptom of other problems.
Possibly because they’ve experienced the damage it can cause, either first hand or second hand (parents, close friends, etc). So they don’t find stories about it especially enjoyable. It’s not so much an “ultimate evil” – they wouldn’t rank it over murdering a busload of orphans – but it’s a topic that they have enough personal experience with (unlike murdering orphans) that it’s an unpleasant topic for them.
Actually, it seems to me that when the wrong is done to a third party that there are some seriously heinous wrongs that will still show people standing by their husband/wife/SO.
Personal betrayal. After a very public, and often expensive, swearing of eternal fidelity. Wherein both parties invest so completely in each other as to bear their children, and commingle their finances and futures.
These are some of the reasons why divorce is so bitter and why some people never recover from the damage such betrayals produce. We all know people who were forever changed by the failure of their marriage due to infidelity.
But I would challenge your premise. Infidelity is heinous and ends a lot of relationships. A grievous sin, no doubt. But I would think that, for most people, compared to say childhood sexual assault, or mass murder, or terrorism or any number of other things, it is really a ‘lesser’ sin.
I think this tends to be an American attitude, too. In some parts of Asia and Europe, attitudes towards infidelity are more uncaring or “so what?”, IIRC.
I wouldn’t call it “the ultimate evil” but it is an example of someone who is such a child that they have to get what they want regardless of the damage it causes another person, and that person is also one they have proclaimed to love and cherish above all others. If that person has children, it also harms their children.
It’s just a sign of a despicably weak character. Even worse is if they try to excuse it with “one thing led to another…” as though it wasn’t their choice. Pathetic.
A couple agrees to have an exclusive, monogamous relationship. Or perhaps a monogamish one or maybe an open one, but with certain rules about conduct. They both agree and trust each other to abide by said agreement.
Then one partner unilaterally decides to break the rules, doesn’t tell the other partner about it, and essentially puts the other partner into an open marriage that they don’t know they’re in.
To do this sort of thing generally requires the cheating partner to maintain a web of lies, deceptions, ‘gas lighting’, and general deceitful, dishonest behavior.
If/when the betrayed partner discovers this, they realize they are not in the marriage they thought they were in, their spouse is not the person they thought they were, and that they cannot now automatically trust anything their marital partner says. The foundation for their world suddenly crumbles underneath them.
Many such betrayed partners feel quite unhappy about this. And quite a few feel that the biggest problem was the dishonesty and all that implies, not the sexual behavior with others (though most aren’t really thrilled about that either.)
I think the reason infidelity is so prominent is because, in the context of relationships, it IS the ultimate sin. I mean, relationships are built around trust and commitment to the other person, and infidelity is a deliberate repudiation of that trust and commitment.
Now in the grand scheme of sins that a person can commit, it’s not necessarily as high as the busload of orphans, but within a relationship, it’s pretty much the big one.
Keep in mind though, that infidelity the way I’m describing it doesn’t have to be sexual; that’s just the way it’s commonly interpreted in the US. I’d argue that emotional infidelity is much, much worse than plain get-your-rocks-off sexual infidelity.
I’ve seen it used as the get out of jail free card.
I knew a couple where she put up with so much shit: verbal abuse and drunkenness, and she accepted it as just what a good Irish Catholic wife endures. With that sort of thing, there’s a gray area as to how much is too much. Plus, to some extent she was yelling back and getting schnockerd on occasion herself. But the minute she found those blowjob polaroids that was that.
Fucking other women and/or hitting you provides a clear line of death.
I think the former is what people fear; the latter is what “proves” it to them. Even though it may not be the case. The cheater may have just been drunk and a gorgeous woman wanted to have sex with them. But the cheated party feels like they’ve been entirely rejected, physically, personality, intellectually, even if the cheater still feels the same way about them they did before. Good luck proving it, cheater.
Yeah, I was kind of thinking that direction, but hadn’t really articulated the thought entirely by the time you posted that.
I also think there’s a bit of a gender bias that goes on- women tend to wrap sex and love together much more than men tend to, so infidelity on the part of a man automatically trips the emotional and physical infidelity switches, while for a lot of men, it doesn’t seem to be as much about the woman having had sex with someone else, it’s more of a loss of face thing about having been cuckolded.
I have a 50% “beats the fuck out of me” reaction, being a polyamorous person who doesn’t give or accept promises of sexual exclusivity.
But the other 50%, the part that I can relate to, is honesty and trust versus deception and betrayal. Regardless of whether I think it’s a stupid-ass promise to make in the first place, if you make a promise you should keep it; if you can’t keep it you should come clean with your partner about that; and if you keep some horrible secret that you know would be upsetting to your partner if your partner knew, you aren’t going to have the kind of trust and intimacy and sharing that you otherwise could have had. You’ve poisoned the well.
If you believe the evolutionary psychology theories that say that we’ve evolved to instinctively behave in ways that favor propagation of our genes, being cuckolded is instinctively considered a Very Bad Thing because it results in a man spending precious resources to nurture some other man’s genetic offspring. (After all, the word “cuckold” comes from the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, tricking the other birds into caring and feeding for their babies.)
Women, on the other hand, fear infidelity because (again, according to evolutionary psychology theories) they fear their man’s protection, support, and economic resources being diverted to some other woman and that other woman’s offspring.