So, a while ago it came out that my uncle（who’s from outside the family and married in) cheated on my aunt (mom’s sister).
They’re still married. Honestly not sure what they’ll do since he is the one with the job and our family doesn’t have enough to support her and her children.
But I just don’t get it. I get falling out of love or even finding other people besides your spouse attractive, but cheating is just such a layered lasagna of shit.
1.You want to eat your cake and have it too. (There’s an entire community of people who cheat on their spouses called “cake eaters.”). I don’t understand what you get out of that though unless you’re just really lustful (and even I wouldn’t do that and I’m a lustful removed). If you want to break up/divorce that’s fine but you can’t just have emotional/physical relationships without changing anything. Which leads to point 2
2.How little fucking respect do you have for your wife and family? Because the thing is that youre denying your partner any autonomy in the relationship. You dont even respect them enough to even talk about it, or you don’t respect them enough to think they deserve to know about it or will ever find out.
I mean look, there been some stories I’ve heard where I understand, if the relationship is already dead. It still sucks but I can understand if it’s inevitable anyway. But otherwise i just can’t conceptualize how selfish and shit you have to be to do it.
And I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t so common. I mean it doesn’t happen in every relationship but it’s so common basically everyone is paranoid their partner is cheating on them. So I just really don’t get it
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Yes but also there is a complex dialectical relationship between sex and love
You will find that most people simply do not consider the consequences of their actions, or think things through at all, before doing things.
On top of that neurotypical people tend to be ok with doing morally bad things if they think nobody will know. Where as people with ADHD or ASD etc tend to follow their own moral code regardless of who is watching.
Combine these two things, and inhibition reducing narcotics like alcohol being involved at times and its no wonder these things are common.
where in the hell did you come up with the generalization that people with adhd are moral in their behaviours than people without an adhd diagnosis?
Im inclined to agree, so many behaviors are attributed to autism when id say its more just people with good moral compasses and who have empathy enough to consider how actions affect others.
Of course, people with autism may be inclined that way, i’ve also met complete reactionary fash who are autistic, its a bit tokenizing.
Morality is learned. Fascists do not see themselves as the villains. In their eyes what they are doing is justified, and moral. Even Hitler would have seen himself as the good guy. Saying someone has a strong morality is not saying they strongly allign with your moral compass. It’s saying they more strictly follow their own moral compass. This is why fascists spend so much time dehumanizing the people they commit violence against. They don’t see it as morally wrong to kill those people because they have convinced themselves, or someone else has convinced them, that those people are inhuman. That its actually a good thing all the violence thats happening.
You can read studies on the differences in neurodivergent morality. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/41/8/1699 I’m not tokenizing i am nuerodivergent myself. This is a, while maybe not fully understood, pretty widely observed behavior difference.
Thanks, reasonable response - sorry if it came off as attacking you, just used to people going the way I felt about it in my post.
In my ideal society, polyamory would be normalized enough that people who wanted to date multiple people would simply do it openly. The whole cheating business is based on a failure of the current social construction of the family to systemically accommodate and normalize polyamorous relationships.
What would have happened to the couple in the OP though if the husband had asked and the wife said no?
Depends on what the uncle did after that, just like in the current situation. In my ideal society it would be considered essential for people to verify that they align on polyamory before seriously committing to a relationship.
The thing that always bothered me about the cheating stuff was that there is an implicit property relation attached to someone’s genetalia that people just seem to go along with.
Two consenting people have sex, outrage I have exclusive rights over that.
I guess someone could see it that way, especially under capitalism, but I don’t think that’s generally where the hurt comes from. If somebody explicitly says I don’t want monogamy, that’s different from going in with the belief that it’s exclusive and then going behind someone’s back. Whether monogamy makes sense or not is kind of beside the point about trust and the breaking of trust. If I agreed with you that I’m going to play tennis with you and only you, however absurd that might be, I’m still going back on my word if I go play with someone else without telling you. And sex and romance together are generally going to be a much more personal thing than playing tennis together, with a lot more intense feelings tied up in it.
To simplify: Breaking trust generally doesn’t go over well.
We also need to talk about how coercing your partner into being monogamous is… a bad thing?
If someone is actually coercing, that’d be abusive. But if we’re just talking about people doing it because it’s common, I’d think coercion is a bit misleading of a word (makes it sound like it’s one person doing it to another) and it’d be more suitable to say it’s peer pressure, social expectations, and socializing (media, etc.) shaping what people do. I am personally not convinced there’s anything inherently wrong with monogamy that would imply open relationships are somehow healthier, but the structure of it when it is tied up in economics undoubtedly has problems, as do the unrealistic expectations brought on by endless romanticizing in media. It seems to me that under the capitalist framework, some of the urge to go for open relationships would just suffer from problems of being seen as disposable and transactional, a convenience that gets called upon when desired and nothing more. Not that monogamy can’t suffer from this too, but point being, I don’t think the alternative is fixing the underlying issues on any generalized level.
Ultimately, if you don’t want to do monogamy, you should make that clear from the offset and if someone is trying to pressure you to do otherwise, then get out of that relationship as fast as you can. That’s a person who is not respecting your side of things.
I agree; on the flip side, it’s extremely dishonest to present as monogamous (even if one really wishes to be) knowing you aren’t, or have reservations or know that when temptation meets hormonal cycles, resistance is likely to fail. These things can be discussed honestly, giving a prospective partner the honest opportunity to consent or decline. It’s not the end of the world if the prospective partner declines, since other options are clearly available.
💯 There’s a lot to be said for being able to discuss things openly and honestly. And it doesn’t have to mean it’s any less romantic. Knowing with clarity where each other stands means you can build a stronger connection when you do align.
Knowing with clarity where each other stands means you can build a stronger connection when you do align.
This is a powerful statement. A lot of issues could be avoided if individuals would take time to sit with themselves long enough to know with clarity where they stand with themselves. So many people think that’s just the way it is, or they are, without knowing themselves intimately enough to say whether they are just engaging in behaviors because it’s expected, or if their behavior actually aligns with their self-concept or perceived values.
That’s a great point. And I think part of that comes down to experience, or a lack of it. Like in the sense that sometimes getting a taste of what you don’t want will tell you more about what you do want. But also, as you get at, being honest with yourself about what’s you wanting something and what’s the position that is expected of you.
It reminds me of something that’s come up in therapy for me before. Basically this idea of like, say I don’t feel like doing some kind of cleaning. I could approach this in way where I come up with reasons for why I don’t need to clean right now and why it’s justified that I don’t need to, and get into what is sort of a moralistic, ego-saving argument with myself against inner critics about what constitutes “good behavior.” Or I could be honest with myself about the fact that I simply don’t feel like doing it and that many people don’t feel like it with a lot of things, and it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person in need of defending myself; and that in spite of not feeling like it, I can choose to do it anyway, if it’s something I believe in doing. And a lot of what could be made very tangled becomes instead pretty straightforward. Doesn’t necessarily make the action easier, which might still be painful to do depending on what it is, but it cuts through layers of confusing self-narrative.
It is coercion, plain and simple. They start demonizing you because you’re not mono? That is coercion, no need to mince words. I don’t think there is anything wrong with monogamy, it’s just that both partners have to consent to it. It’s just that people who are polyam have been forced into the closet by circumstances and may not feel ready coming out yet.
If a closeted gay person has been pressured into a straight relationship, we feel sympathy, but then if a closeted polyam person has been pressured into a mono relationship, all of a sudden, they’re le big bad?
Make it make sense.
I guess I’m not familiar with a circumstance in which people are being demonized because they want to have an open relationship. I’m not doubting it occurs, but it’s not been an issue I’m familiar with. I’m used to seeing on a dating app, occurrences of people openly saying they’d rather do non-monogamous with a built-in option to choose that in the app. So it takes me by surprise a little.
Isn’t that a common problem in cases of a married couple doing an open relationship. Like, do we tell our friends and family? And if we don’t, what happens if they find out?
Or if you’re married, and considering proposing an open relationship to your spouse, there’s some chance that it’s taken very badly.
This probably depends on how old you are and where you live tho.
I think this view only slides if you do actually already have inherent misogynistic or misanthropic tendencies, and those tendencies mix with the natural jealousy feeling that cheating invokes. I think of asexual people who also don’t love being cheated on.
Emotional maturity does not have a linear relationship to age. And that does not mean young people think cheating is fine, but rather emotionally immature people do not digest their ability to affect (positively and negatively) other people. And older people typically have a partner and the outcome of that is someone gets hurt. Other people posted great reasons.
I’ve always found it kind of funny that it’s called “cheating” specifically. I feel like that word implies so much about how we view love/sex as a “game”.
In Portuguese we use the word “traição”, which means betrayal. So it’s a much stronger word. Despite that, a lot of men cheat (or betray) their wives in Brazil.
It’s a tough but really interesting subject that touches the relationship between the nuclear family and private property. I’ll try not to write a whole book so I’ll focus on what you need to explore to understand the whole infidelity paradigm.
Firstly, observe how much housing and property is tied to family status. Ultimately, marriage is not a love affair it’s an economic one.
Secondly, explore how the reunion of private property, love and sexuality is a historical construct that has and had many alternatives.
Finally, understand how social constructs corners us into absurd dilemmas. Cheating is dishonest, yes we should always say that we want an open relationship before lying to somebody who trusts us, unfortunately, that’s not how things present themselves in reality. Your uncle might be an ass, idk, or maybe he knows wanting an open relationship would mean divorce, aka, personal level economic crisis, and that nobody wants this, so cheating is the lesser evil. You might say well just give up on sex/love if you’re married, but I don’t think we should expect people to renounce that very prevalent aspect of the human life because of some private property shenanigans
Hope that helps seeing a different perspective, I personally got way more involved in questionning love/marriage and family after I experienced living together as a couple. Some stuff you gotta live it in your flesh to understand why people do the things they do
You might say well just give up on sex/love if you’re married, but I don’t think we should expect people to renounce that very prevalent aspect of the human life because of some private property shenanigans
Eh, on this part, I feel like these are two pretty different points:
(1) Giving up on sex: Sure, it’s a pain, but you can live without it. There are people who have trouble even finding a partner in the first place, which can last for decades. I’m not sure sometimes if this is made easier by having supplementary ways of getting off, like porn, or if porn actually makes it worse because you can get close mentally but don’t actually get the real thing. But either way, you aren’t dying of thirst in the desert for not getting the real thing. It can suck, yeah, but you can get through it without doing something dishonest/hurtful to another person.
(2) Giving up on love: This one I more understand (and I suspect is more the part that people who think they badly want to get laid are actually after). Loneliness can really eat at a person. Maybe it’s even more intensified if you’re in a loveless marriage, so close to intimacy and yet so far (I don’t know from experience, just trying to give credit to the possibility). But also, romance is not the only way to have emotional or physical intimacy (and I’m not even thinking of sex atm when I say “physical”). Friends can be extremely close sometimes and not have it be romantic. Though socializing probably gets in the way of this at times, shoving this idea into people’s heads that if they are close and sync up in the right gender or sexual preference combo, then they must be needing to make it romantic. As if this is the ultimate form of adult closeness and everything else is on a sliding scale, with romance as the endpoint.
This kind of socializing, I think, is toxic to people being able to be happy without romance. What they need as a basic human thing, is closeness. What they (tend to be) taught is that for an adult, romance is the ultimate way to do this. So then, they’re going to extrapolate from that, that they will never be satisfied until they have a good romance. But romance itself is not a static feeling thing, where you find somebody and feel exactly the same toward each other forever. Feelings can deepen or fade, and it seems to be a consistent thing that the initial “high” early on is not something that lasts and has to be replaced with something more slow-burn affection for things to be maintained.
But if somebody believes the high is what love is and keeps chasing that, they’re going to have a harder time “settling down” and building love, not just searching for it. This is not to say all failed relationships can be fixed by “trying harder” or something, just that if someone views it as a magic that has to stay in the air and loses sight of the action part of any kind of relationship, I’m sure that’d increase their temptations to cheat.
What they need as a basic human thing, is closeness. What they (tend to be) taught is that for an adult, romance is the ultimate way to do this.
I guess this also ties on the capitalist (and other “structures of power”) need for a “docile and growing workforce”.
