Following up on the recent posts about fidelity and marriage and the possibility of platonic friendship, I’d like to build on something a commenter wrote below yesterday’s piece. I’ve included several links to older posts as well. A former student of mine writes today:
until both men and women realize that being faithful is a choice one has to make everyday for the rest of their life and not just some mountain top romantic promise, the temptations will always win out.
I think there’s some good sense in that. Being monogamous comes “naturally” for some, and presents more of a challenge for others. I don’t suggest that lifelong monogamous commitments are best for everyone, and while — as I’ve said almost ad nauseam — I do think marriage is a particularly effective vehicle for personal growth, I don’t think it’s the only such vehicle. Certainly, one of the ways in which marriage presents this opportunity to grow is through the practice of active fidelity. And fidelity is, as the commenter says, a choice one makes every day.
I know very well how affairs happen, having been recklessly unfaithful in earlier marriages. As someone who “performs” for a living, I know all too well the particular temptations inherent in this and similar professions. My wife and I are exhausted much of the time; these days, we’re busy raising our precious baby girl, co-parenting as best we can, working on our respective careers, finding time to volunteer. This week, we’re also in the throes of moving, buying one house and selling another. It’s very easy for the obligations to pile on top of each other until it seems as if every waking hour is about doing the next task, responding to the next call to duty. And while my wife and I make time to validate and connect with each other, we don’t have the leisure we might once have had to do much mutual soothing and reassuring. There’s too damn much to do, not to mention a little creature in the house who really does need lots of soothing.
So if I’m not careful, I can start to feel a bit crestfallen. If I’m not careful, I might start to think “My wife doesn’t appreciate me the way she once did”. (She might say the same about me.) With my body suffering the effects of not working out as I once did (there is very little time for exercise), my ego might begin to look about for some source of validation, something or someone to tell me how good and wonderful and handsome I still am. And of course, I work as a college professor surrounded by young people; I blog and Facebook and interact with colleagues in my usual ENFP way. Lots and lots of people see the “surface Hugo”, and the surface Hugo can come across rather well. And without being conscious of asking for it, I get lots of validation from students and colleagues and readers and friends who don’t know me as well as my wife does.
My wife deals with my bed head and my morning breath and my habit of talking in my sleep. My wife deals with those exasperating moments I have when I’m so exhausted, I zone out and momentarily forget where I am. My wife gets to deal with the fact that — though I’m much better than I used to be — I still leave a small trail of coffee grounds everytime I make my morning brew. My wife gets all of me, as I get all of her. We see each other naked, not just in the flattering half-light of the bedroom but in the stark fluorescent glare of the bathroom mirror at dawn. There are no romantic illusions; neither has the other on a pedestal. And if I am not careful, that old bad habit of wanting to be on a pedestal in another’s eyes reasserts itself. If I’m not careful, I could start flirting or “intriguing” in order to get the validation to which I self-righteously feel entitled. And if I’m not careful, even now, after all these years, I could have an affair. For that matter, so too could my wife.
But here’s the flip side. My wife is my best friend, my truest human partner in this business of living. And despite what some believe, I know full well that familiarity need not breed contempt. I don’t need illusion or rigidly defined gender roles in order to feel like a husband and a man; I don’t need to be shut away from the reality of childbirth in order to find my wife still desperately attractive. I know too that getting someone who only sees the surface to fall in love with you is very, very easy. It’s minor league stuff. And perhaps it’s arrogance, but at this stage of my life, I want to hit major league pitching. (My wife throws it hard and fast and inside — a challenge I delight in. I throw wicked curves. We continue to delight — well, most of the time it’s delightful — in figuring out the other’s strategy.) When I’m dressed up and well-groomed, when I’m in the full frenzy of my teaching, I know I’m attractive to more than a few people. But so what? That’s easy. Can I be attractive on a soul level to a woman who sees me when all my tricks and tools are stripped away? That’s hard. That’s challenging. That’s big-time ball; that’s living as an adult. I like that challenge.
When my wife and I quarrel, I know the old temptation to seek out solace from a “woman who understands.” (I ended my first two marriages in exactly that fashion.) I get how men and women alike can feel so exasperated by a judgmental or uncaring spouse that the desire to be seen as wonderful and sexy again by someone new and starstruck becomes overwhelming. Been there, did that, got the expensive lawyers’ fees to show for it. Mark Sanford apparently fell for that old saw of the “woman who understands.” But he did so because at some point, he made a conscious choice to give up on this hard but immensely rewarding work of living in and through a monogamous relationship.
In the end, though, the real reason to be faithful has nothing to do with one’s partner. The real reason to be faithful is to honor a promise one made, not to God or to a spouse, but to one’s self. The promise one makes when one pledges fidelity is — among other things — to “not be a cheater”. (This is basic Aristotle, of course.) When one cheats, no matter how “justified” the cheating might seem, one betrays the self as well as the spouse. And somewhere, deep inside, one is surely conscious of becoming a new kind of person: an oath-breaker, a liar, a betrayer. This is why divorce is morally neutral or even good, while infidelity is fundamentally unethical; leaving your spouse before sleeping with someone else may end the marriage, but it allows you to preserve the immensely valuable sense of oneself as an honest person whose actions and words are congruent.
I basically agree with you about divorce vs. cheating but I’m not sure how it works out in your moral framework. When you get married, you promise not to cheat, but you also promise to stay married, right? How does the choice to divorce not make you an oath-breaker?
Because the issue is about the oath that’s broken: a mutually negotiated divorce is an agreed upon-end to a contract that didn’t work out. If one makes emphatic pledges not to divorce, then one has broken that pledge (not all weddings include that pledge). But negotiating an end to a contract, as painful as it might be, doesn’t carry the moral burden of betrayal. When one divorces, one acknowledges imperfection; when one cheats, one acknowledges one’s fundamental deceitfulness. I think there’s a heavy distinction there.
Dev, it’s the difference between ending your lease vs. staying in your apartment while refusing to pay rent.
This brings me back to a recurring theme over at Amanda’s Place about how marriage shouldn’t be hard work and that if it is, then it is somehow broken.
I tend to go with Shnarch’s idea that marriage is a cruciable but that is not the same as saying that it is an awful chore and a drag to be avoided or, once in, to flee.
In reading threads about the book Yes Means Yes! Visions Of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape it occurred to me that consent is not as straightforward as we are taught to think it is.
In that light, you are raping your “partner” by continuing to have sex with them, while nuturing their mistaken belief that the relationship is monogamous.
Their consent is premised on a lie that that can have serious consequences — both physical and psychological.
In short, any sex you get from your “partner” while pretending to be monogamous is a form of rape.
What about when only one partner wants the divorce Hugo?
When only one partner wants a divorce, it is painful, but it isn’t the same sort of betrayal, because it’s not based on deception. That’s a key aspect of the problem. I like Mythago’s bit about the lease.
Betrayal may be felt as the result of a broken vow as well…….which someone on the recieving end may well regard as deception…….in that they were promised something which was not delivered.
I know this is a bigger topic but I’ve never quite understood the idea of marriage as a lifelong vow………which can be broken if needed. One reason I’ve never done it I suppose.
Funt, a divorce (at least in the US) is a lawsuit. The person filing for divorce is claiming, in a court of law, that marriage as an entity can no longer continue to exist. In the Olde Dayes, this was accomplished by accusing the other person of having done something to destroy it.
What I wonder, between the openness of divorce versus the deception of cheating, where does the intermediate approach, say, attempting to openly and candidly renegotiate the terms of the marriage, including at least emotional fidelity, fall? These posts on marriage and fidelity are coming at a personally interesting time, as I’m in the middle of a divorce following an unsuccessful attempt to do just that. That was my way of attempting to “make work” a marriage that on its own merits lasted at least a year longer than it should have, and was the attempted alternative to either cheating or divorce. (I was the one who filed, and while there’s a good bit of disappointment and recrimination on a lot of issues on both sides, at least the nasty legal fight Hugo mentions is being avoided, not the least helped by being in a no-fault divorce state with no children and little property involved).
Oh, and I’ve been pretty busy this year, so haven’t been around this blog much for awhile. In case I haven’t said it already, congratulations, Hugo, to you and your wife on your little one. May you have the happiest of homes in your new digs once you’re all through the moving storm.
I think with the attempt to re-negotiate, we go back to deception. Was there a deception, and was it conscious/knowable at the time. So, as for breaking a vow to be married “until death do us part” – if the person never meant it, or knew that he/she had a very difference concept of when a marriage could/should reasonably end than the person he/she was marrying, that would be a betrayal. Because at the outset there was a deception.
But people who honestly intend to pledge themsevles forever and then come to a point where they cannot maintain that promise and be true to themselves, well, I think there’s some wiggle room. When they are honest with their partner at the outset, and honest when they get to the point of needing to re-negotiate or leave or be utterly miserable, then I don’t think you can really say there’s been a deception. Certainly not like how cheating involves deception. There may be a broken promise, but a promise honestly made and honestly broken is still better than/different from deception.
And I appreciate Randomizer’s comment, though addressing it might take this thread on a tangent. I think we have a real problem in this society with sexual consent obtained based on lies and deception being somehow seen as OK. We don’t apply that standard to other agreements when assessing them under the law (if you misrepresent a material fact to another party to a contract, the contract will likely be invalid; if you obtain consent to sign a check on false pretenses, that’s a crime, etc.) I think it comes from a place of thinking that it’s hard to draw the line between “mere puffery” and material misrepresentations in the area of personal relations. And also the tie that actions for alienation of affection/failure to follow through on a marriage proposal, etc. had to the objectification of women under the law, which lead to them being done away with.
I think we have a real problem in this society with sexual consent obtained based on lies and deception being somehow seen as OK.
Well put, Emily. We particularly seem to see sex as a vicious game, where men “win” if they get it and women “win” if they extract compensation for it, with the sex itself being almost a secondary goal.
Heh, and what of us weirdo married people who never agreed to do the monogamy thing? (poke- just giving you a hard time, Hugo…)
but…
Lying and deception are the real deal breakers IMHO.