As we get back to post-inauguration blogging, I’m turning to an email I got from a woman last week. “Tara” wrote another in the series of missives from young (21) year-old women contemplating a relationship with an older (36) man. The trick on this one is Tara is interested in a married fellow, one who claims, as so many do, to be in a less than fulfilling marriage. Tara asked me a couple of other questions, but finished with this one:
…do you think that the decision to cheat lies within the hands of the involved person, or does it share a weight equally with the “other woman”? am i bound by ethics and decency to his wife, even if he is the one who makes that decision (as to whether a sexual or emotional affair happens.)
The simple answer is that cheating is cheating, and that anyone who knowingly enters into a relationship with someone who is pledged to another through marriage or another sort of monogamous arrangement gets a full and equal share of the blame. That’s perhaps the response of our age, though a history of adultery and its prohibitions reveals that that has not always been a universally held position. In different times and places, only the married cheater has been blamed, or only the woman. And some folks like to parse out differences between what is “adultery” and what is “infidelity”, even though most of us use the former to refer to the extra-marital subset of the latter. But while the history of Western law and religion makes clear that our sense of what kinds of extra-marital or pre-marital sex are wrong is a moving target, the modern received consensus is that having sex with someone who is pledged to another is bad.
For many of us, the real offense of infidelity (I use the term broadly, to encompass emotional as well as sexual affairs) lies in betrayal. The very word means to “break faith”. To be cheated on is painful enough, but to be lied to is, in a very real sense, worse. While most cheaters cover up their behavior through active lies or lies of omission, the real deceit lies in the betrayal of the original promise to be monogamous. Whether as part of a marriage ceremony or simply an informal agreement to “not see other people right now”, most (not all) relationships make their way towards some sort of mutual pledge of fidelity. To cheat is to break that pledge unilaterally. And once we’ve cheated, we’ve in a very real sense called into question every other aspect of the relationship; our pledges of fidelity aren’t just about what we promise not to do with our hearts and bodies, they are pledges about the effort we intend to put into this particular bond.
When I was going through the Twelve Steps with a strict sponsor many years ago, the subject of my many infidelities in my first marriage came up. I offered to Jack my “reasons” for cheating on my first wife. He snorted at all of them, and explained what I have come to see as the modern way of understanding the problem of infidelity. “Hugo, it doesn’t matter what your reasons were. You need to understand, when you cheat on your wife, you’re not just betraying her, or any God you happen to believe in. The greatest problem with cheating is that it turns you into a liar; on a soul level, every time you sleep with another woman behind your wife’s back, you know you’re breaking a promise you made. No one can break his own promise and be happy.” I was in a pedantic mood, and snapped back that that sounded less modern than Aristotlelian, to which Jack — who wouldn’t have known Aristotle from Adam –replied that it didn’t matter what it sounded like, it was simply true. And of course, Aristotle was right, and Jack was right. One of the great tragedies of infidelity lies not in what it does to others but what it teaches us about ourselves — that we are fundamentally untrustworthy. And it is hard to be happy while living with the dissonance between one’s language and one’s life. Continue reading →
