Doesn't that mean gay, usually?
It means douchebag, usually.
I'd sleep with a married man before I'd sleep with some guy with a girlfriend, because there might be legitimate reasons why you can't get out of a marriage, but if you need to sleep around on your girlfriend, you're just too chickenshit to break up with her, and I can't respect that.
Well put.
At least he was honest about cheating -- not to his girlfriend, but to you. He wanted a backdoor girl, and was upfront about it.
Some hotel rooms are much nicer than some apartments, and they have that illicit vibe about them. Plus room service -- the two most romantic words in the English language.
Plus, ick: he wants someone to sleep with him, but won't tell you what his problem with his girlfriend is? Whatever.
He was lying to you. What he was really hiding was dingy sheets and a lot of fast-food wrappers.
what his problem with his girlfriend is
That there's only one of her is my guess.
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6 is probably true.
Anyway, hotels and room service truly are great, but chetty tools are too high a price to pay.
Would he be paying for the hotel rooms, at least?
You could replace it with something else to preserve the numbering.
The Asian ass fuck and little Asian lesbian pages no longer exist. Bummer.
Lemme guess: he's R. William Treverton III and she's Sharon White, daughter of finance VIP T. Fitzhugh White, and the families get along splendidly, but she doesn't really enjoy sex (with him).
I'm imagining Emerson patiently checking every one of those links.
The French ones are there, but the ones in English go to an "out of commission" Tripod page that is entirely in Spanish.
Yeah, I don't really get this. To the extent sleeping with a married guy is OK, I would think the same is true of someone with a girlfriend. The only difference maker I can think of is kids, and that can happen (I'm told) with a girlfriend.
Lemme guess: he's R. William Treverton III and she's Sharon White, daughter of finance VIP T. Fitzhugh White, and the families get along splendidly, but she doesn't really enjoy sex (with him).
This is exactly what I thought.
The reason he doesn't want to talk about his problem with his girlfriend is that would involved confiding in you and emotional attachments are cheating.
It's not really okay to sleep with a married guy either. And I didn't say I would. I just said I'd do it sooner than I'd sleep with someone with a girlfriend.
But the difference is what I said--some married people have real reasons they have to stay in their situation. That's rarely the case with these people with girlfriends. They're just greedy and lazy.
This is exactly what I thought.
I thought the "girlfriend" was a boyfriend.
I've been trying to sleep with a married woman for years. Do they have a Craigslist category for that?
26, see 1.
Are they mutually exclusive?
If I were opposed to sleeping with a married woman, I'd probably have to be prepared for an annulment.
27: I sometimes think I have a minor married woman fetish, myself. Weird, that.
Is it a married woman fetish, or simply an attraction to women of your own age, most of whom are now married?
No, slol, he means a fetish for married women who are minors. Which is sick.
I'd sleep with a married man
Hooray!
I've had more married women make passes at me than single women. Not sure what that means, really.
I'm figuring that the solution to this fetish is ultimately just to get married, then I can sleep with my wife, who will also be married (albeit to me).
What a dumbass. You are kind and sweet, but I wish you had clocked him one.*
--------------------
*Duh.
32: No, married woman who are older than me. Though many of the cool women I know are married. But that's more about relationship wishing than sex.
I've slept with a married guy (who was not Mr. B.). He had two kids (later he had a third), was a serial cheater, his wife was a chronic depressive and one of their kids had some special needs. He loved his wife and more importantly, he loved his kids, and didn't want to make trouble; he just wasn't happy at home and wanted an outlet. I figured he knew what he was doing. Maybe I'm a tool, but whatever.
39 seems right to me (other than the "maybe I'm a tool" part), but I'm not sure how it fits with 2 and 4. If what you're after is just a little sex and a little companionship, and if the guy is upfront about what his situation is, I'm not sure there's a whole lot of reason to get too worked up about what the deal is between him and his girlfriend. That's up to the two of them.
We all do things that are wrong for various reasons (see above where I admit to sexual activity with involved people), but if someone tells you he's lying to his girlfriend, you're helping him dick her over. It's not right. And it's not sufficient to just shrug and say, "that's between the two of them." Is there any other case when you can knowingly abet a wrong and not be morally implicated in it?
I guess I'm not convinced that infidelity is in all instances wrong. Relationships are complicated. Staying the hell away from the guy may be a very good decision, but I'm not sure there's enough in the post to conclude that the guy's a total asshole (partial asshole, maybe, for the look alone).
40: I think that if someone wants you to fuck them and they're married, that they have an obligation to explain the situation to you so that you can make a decision about your own comfort with the situation. If he's fucking around b/c his girlfriend is too fat, then I want nothing to do with him. If he's fucking around b/c his partner is ill and they have children and he wants the family to stay together but also wants an outlet, I think that's a position I can respect.
On the other hand, I also respect someone who has a privacy zone that means that they aren't going to discuss their problems with their partner with The Other Woman. I know that I won't have anything to do with guys who think the way into my pants is to complain about their exes (or their currents). But for me, I want to be able to make a decision about what relationships I enter into and whether I feel okay about the person, and one important way of doing that is finding out their motivations.
Infidelity is in some cases forgivable, but it is always wrong, barring socioeconomic or cultural constraints that certainly weren't the issue here. Breaking promises is wrong. Lying about things it's understood you'll be honest about is wrong. And, as I've argued before, putting your partner at undetermined disease risk is wrong.
I'd like to know what conceivable justification there would be for him to undertake a premeditated, continuous sexual relationship with another woman.
Okay, just for argument's sake: maybe his girlfriend is dying of cancer, and he doesn't want to break up with her, but he also wants sex and/or emotional companionship that he isn't getting from the dying chick.
I don't agree that infidelity is always wrong, fwiw.
Couldn't he just wait until she died?
I would not want my husband sleeping with other women when I was dying of cancer, and it would be wrong for him to do so and lie to me about it. I have gone extended periods of time in my adult life without sex and relied on my friends for companionship, even in particularly emotionally trying circumstances, and lived to tell the tale.
48: Sure. But I'm just saying, for the sake of argument, that's a reason that might justify his taking up a new relationship on the side.
Eh, I think I'm sort of with DaveL on this. I have a hard time imagining myself being other than monogomous, and I'd have a hard time with someone who was unfaithful to me. But that probably plays out in the sort of person I got involved with. Beyond that, at least in long term relationships, dickish is as dickish does.
Is it wrong that this post makes me even more jealous of Tia? (Not because of the experience she describes, but because it implies the existence of at least some more satisfying experiences.) I'm such a loser.
I agree with pretty much everything in 43-45. I don't agree with 46, although I am, IRL, monogamous as hell, both because that's the way my relationship works and because I'm fundamentally lazy and risk-averse. I think there are lots of reasons why people end up in situations where they have at least arguably incompatible obligations to multiple people, and while I think that's often a poor way of achieving happiness, I don't think it's necessarily immoral. Life is just complicated. Although, on reflection, Chet may be too young to have a decent life-is-complicated argument to make, in which case maybe he is just an asshole.
I wonder what the philosophers think about this.
I've had more married women make passes at me than single women. Not sure what that means, really.
Maybe you remind them of their sons.
I wonder what the philosophers think about this.
Reality is experience, experience is knowledge => Infedeility is OK as long as you don't tell/don't get caught.
Maybe you remind them of their sons.
They were all roughly my age.
re: 54
An expert knowledge of the philosophical analysis of the disease concept fully qualifies me to pontificate about other people's sex lives.
Seriously, what's with Chan Marshall's long, long hair?
I mean, compare: short, long. I don't get it.
Let's say instead of a girlfriend you have a girl who you met recently and who's hooked up with you 4 or 5 times in the last couple weeks, with whom you sometimes plan dinner and similar date type stuff, and who gives the impression of being into you. And instead of answering Craigslist ads for other women, you ask another woman who you've been sort of thinking of asking out for a long time to dinner. You've had no discussions of expectations with first mentioned woman, except that (this isn't an expectation) she's moving out of [shared city] in about two weeks. Nevertheless, you think she'd be unhappy if she knew that you were going to dinner with second mentioned woman. Please advise. Except that I'm pretty sure the answer is to just be explicit about what I just said in this comment, and I'm not sure I want to do that.
53: There are virtually no situations in which you have multiple obligations, barring serious economic or cultural pressures external to the relationship, that preclude you telling your partner that you intend to effect a change in the status of your relationship, and allowing your partner the freedom to act in response, or just ending the relationship. The only one I can think of is maybe that you have a child who's really deeply emotionally disturbed and could not withstand a divorce. It's easier and more comfortable to maintain your married life != serious incompatible obligations. Your obligation to your children does not involve staying in a relationship where you just have to cheat. If your relationship is so bad that it involves unthinkable sexual frustration to stay faithful to your partner, your children can survive the split.
I'm on record saying I think infidelity is given inflated importance relative to all the other mean things you can do to a partner, but that doesn't mean that it is not straightforwardly wrong to lie and to break a promise when you have lots of other options available to you: to speak to your partner honestly about changing the status of your relationship, or to break
up/get a divorce.
B's guy in 39 for instance? Gross. Seriously, FSM protect me from ever marrying someone who decides that his "obligation" to me and our children makes it impossible for him not to lie to me about serial affairs and give me the chance to have a marriage that was not completely dishonest and fraudulent.
Infidelity can, in some cases, be understandable and forgivable. But the fact that you can understand the impulses behind something doesn't make it right.
This is reminding me of that thing from The Big Chill, where some character avers that rationalizations are more important to people than sex, and another protests, and the first says, "Oh yeah? When's the last time you ever went a day without a rationalization?"
that it is not straightforwardly wrong to lie and to break a promise
and, I almost forgot, put your partner at a disease risk
Here's the actual dialogue:
Michael: I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.
Sam Weber: Ah, come on. Nothing's more important than sex.
Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization
[Insert Severely Drunken Commentary Disclaimer]
I have to say I'm continually amazed -- and sometimes admiring (see comment 39) -- at what people will share over the Net.
63: If your relationship is so bad that it involves unthinkable sexual frustration to stay faithful to your partner, your children can survive the split.
"Survive" is a potentially elastic word. I'm fortunately not a child of divorce, but (like most people, I expect) have known numerous people who are, and would venture to say that it's highly questionable that many of them would have preferred the divorce to dealing with (or even submerging) issues of marital infidelity.
There are virtually no situations in which you have multiple obligations, barring serious economic or cultural pressures external to the relationship, that preclude you telling your partner that you intend to effect a change in the status of your relationship, and allowing your partner the freedom to act in response, or just ending the relationship.
I can think of a couple. The extreme situation is a wife with ALzheimer's or dementia who needs a lot of care and isn't capable of an adult relationship. I can respect the husband doesn't want to abandon a woman in taht situation. There are less extreme situations where I have less respect but still find it understandable.
39 and 43: An open marriage is one thing, but if there's deception involved, I'm with Tia, it's wrong. Also, you don't know how good the guy is at the deception bit. If the kids find out, it could seriously undermine their relationship with their father. Of course, the man is responsible for his own actions, but you're enabling a situation that could potentially cause a lot of pain.
Those of us who think that all relationships are bad ones are not having our minds changed by this thread.
62 -- if the situation is as you describe I don't see how you have much of an obligation to disclose -- it sounds like the relationship is pretty transitory and not a real big deal.
63: I understand what you're saying, Tia, but as I've gotten older I've found that fewer and fewer situations are amenable to universal rules of right and wrong.
If your relationship is so bad that it involves unthinkable sexual frustration to stay faithful to your partner, your children can survive the split.
Of course they can survive it, but survival isn't the question.
This philosopher thinks everyone should just have sex with Emerson. Problem solved.
62: If you knew when you started seeing the first woman, that she was leaving town in about a month, and there's been no discussion of 'expectations', then it doesn't seem like that one's really going anywhere. Do you want to carry on a long distance (although I guess it might not be very far away that she's moving to) relationship with her?
My limited perception of US-style dating is that it's ok to date anyone and you don't have to worry about exclusivity until you both agree to see each other exclusively. I could be very wrong though!
Decide which one you like best and sort it out, would be my advice I suppose. Have you had your dinner with the second one yet?
That would be a lot of bad relationships there. This would be more evidence that I'm right, except that of course people would accuse me of tampering with the data and ruining everything and just plain being no fun just to win an argument.
Also, not with apostropher even for scientific reasons. Sorry, Apo.
It would just be sex Emerson, not relationships. I'm sure someone else would do apostropher for you if necessary ...
I'm such a loser.
I'm reconsidering the virtues of transhumanism.
sex Emerson
I thought the policy here was that we sex Mutombo.
I wonder what the philosophers think about this.
I think Tia's got it right. I'm sure we can dream up lots of crazy scenarios where it might be possible to break a fidelity promise (if a brain in a vat were to seduce another brain in a vat and they were in a runaway trolley...). But in all of the situations (barring the Alzheimer case) it seems that they're crazy justifications that the partner wouldn't buy. And if the partner wouldn't buy it, then maybe it's not really a justification.
The cancer case? Let's be clear. The guy is a dick.
Needing an extramartial affair to save his marriage? Maybe that one sounds good in the cheater's head after a few martinis ("Yeah, baby, I'm not cheating, I'm fucking for my marriage and for my kids") but come on. It's a rationalization, not a justification. Think it would have gone over well with the person's wife or husband? ('Sorry babe, you're just not up for sex with the chemo and all....')
His wife is an adult and he made a promise to her. Assuming she's not suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia, she has a right to be informed of a change in the deal. Either she'll be okay with it or not, but he can't respect her as a moral agent if he doesn't. And really, this is what it comes down to: it's infantilizing someone when you have a problem with the relationship, deciding you don't need their input because you 'need an outlet.'
The person the cheater is cheating with isn't as culpable, because that person isn't breaking a promise. I'm not sure if there's an obligation to help other people keep their promises, exactly. But they are culpable for the harm their actions could cause.
I think that if someone wants you to fuck them and they're married, that they have an obligation to explain the situation to you so that you can make a decision about your own comfort with the situation.
See, this is sort of what I mean. He has a right, out of basic human decency, to give you a chance to make up your own mind, but because he made a promise to his wife, now he gets to treat her like a child?
Needing an extramartial affair to save his marriage?
I made a typo but it's funnier this way.
78 GIER. Hard cases make bad law. Tia's rule rules.
78 gets it mostly right, it seems to me.
"I'm not sure if there's an obligation to help other people keep their promises, exactly."
Perhaps not an obligation to help people keep their promises but definitely an obligation not to actively facilitate their breaking.
62: I think you've got the answer (that is, if you feel committed enough to woman 1 that you wouldn't want to tell her you were going out to dinner with woman 2, that indicates that it's a big enough deal that she'd want to know), but given that she's leaving town in two weeks and the two of you haven't said anything about exclusivity, you're a jerk, but not a huge jerk, for not telling her.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. But I'm not sure if that can just be wrapped up in a general prohibition against harm. That is, it's bad to cheat with someone because of the harm it does to his spouse & kids; I'm not sure if it's extra-bad, beyond the harm, because it helped him break a promise.
62, you seem to feel guilty, and I'm not sure why. You've been on four or five dates and haven't explicitly said anything about exclusivity. But given that you are feeling guilty, it's probably because you feel committed implicitly and you think she does, too. Probably best to let her know what's going on; if there's confusion, the fact that she's moving in two weeks might not on its own end it cleanly.
Well, it also goes to a more general obligation -- leaving aside issues of harm -- not to participate in the violation of moral rules that you yourself believe in.
Assuming she's not suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia, she has a right to be informed of a change in the deal.
What if she's suicidal?
If it's so crucial that you stay married for the children, then presumably your cheated on wife/husband will see it that way too when you tell them you need an outlet. If the cheated on party doesn't see it that way, maybe it was never that crucial after all.
Btw, 78 gets it right, including the last paragraph.
63: I think those are some excellent rules for a John Hughes movie. In this life, not so much. I vote with Apostropher (#70).
83: No, I don't think it's extra-bad, to help someone break a promise. The other person is presumably a responsible adult and has free will. It would be extra-bad if you were trying to tempt them to break their promise, i think, but not if they had their mind set on it already, so if it weren't you it would be someone else.
82: a bit of a jerk, he may well be. It kind of sounded to me like he'd got a bit of confidence from woman 1, and that was why he'd finally decided at this inopportune moment, to ask out woman 2.
What if she's suicidal?
Staying in a relationship with someone just because they're suicidal isn't really a good idea. It's also not particularly helpful to them. Stay involved and support them while they get treatment, sure, but you shouldn't try to keep up appearances and hope everything will be alright. If they're at a point where breaking with them will push them over the edge, it isn't really the breaking up that's the cause--eventually something else would do it to them instead.
re: 91
No, I don't think it's extra-bad, to help someone break a promise. The other person is presumably a responsible adult and has free will.
Well, I take it that, if you believe promise breaking is bad and you participate in an instance of promise-breaking, then at the very least you are guilty of a level of moral hypocrisy.
The 'if it hadn't been me it would have been someone else' defence is, to say the least, not a good one. The whole point is that it is you, if you see what I mean.
62: I say lie. She's leaving town in a couple of weeks, she's unlikely to find out, and telling her would upset her. I think that upsetting people in order to retain one's own moral purity is kind of shitty.
Re. deception and cheating married men (or, for that matter, cheating married women): look, I'm not claiming that deception isn't wrong. Or that cheating isn't wrong. I am saying that these things are more complicated than just a simple wrong/right answer, and that one of the things that the simple answer is failing to take into account is people's feelings. Yes, there are lots of assholes who rationalize assholish behavior. But there are also decent people who are caught in genuinely painful situations who rationalize taking action that helps make the painful situation tolerable. Is it morally pure? Maybe not. Is it human, and therefore deserving of empathy? Yes.
94: I'm counting that as a vote for the Apostropher Platform for Free Love and Smoked Bacon, B.
the Apostropher Platform for Free Love and Smoked Bacon
Speaking of which, how can we not have heard from Chopper on this issue of vital significance to our nation's bodily fluids?
Speaking of which, how can we not have heard from Chopper on this issue of vital significance to our nation's bodily fluids?
He's too busy getting some?
the relationship is pretty transitory and not a real big deal.
Certainly how I see it, and I think how she does; I've made a point of not saying anything that would lead her to think otherwise.
Do you want to carry on a long distance (although I guess it might not be very far away that she's moving to) relationship with her?
No, but since we haven't communicated that well I can't be certain that she doesn't want to (I'm probably just inflating how good a catch I am).
I say lie. She's leaving town in a couple of weeks, she's unlikely to find out, and telling her would upset her.
But here's the thing. If answering truthfully* the question, "So what did you do last night?" would upset her, it probably means I did something wrong. Your advice is that telling the truth about it wouldn't make it better, but what if I'm misreading her and she wouldn't mind?
*True answer: I took a woman out to dinner hoping to make something more of it. The conversation with her was very good. I (perhaps bizarrely) offered not to pay the whole bill but rather to split 2/3, 1/3 which I thought would make it more date-ish than friend-ish, she said no to that but then yes to drinks after dinner. Decided that her brushing her hand against my knee a couple of times while we were at the bar was probably an accident. Went home by myself and left a comment on unfogged.
I think that upsetting people in order to retain one's own moral purity is kind of shitty
He could retain his moral purity and not upset her by not going out with woman 2. One wonders why he did not wait until woman 1 was out of town. He could even just postpone a date with woman 2, telling her honestly that he thinks he may have mistaken the understanding with woman 1, and doesn't feel comfortable going out with woman 2, but that he will be excited to see her when woman 1 leaves. If woman 2 doesn't appreciate that he's trying to be scrupulous with another person's feelings, woman 2 is not worth it.
I didn't say it couldn't be understandable, or pitiable, or uncomplicated. I think the person who embezzles money from the local mom & pop store because her daughter is depressed and she can't pay for the medical treatment is still wrong to steal, even if I don't find her as blameworthy as someone who did it to fund a lavish vacation.
But it's not an excuse that removes culpability, or that diminishes the harm. And it really sounds like a rationalization. Special needs child, depressed wife, serial cheating? I'm sure none of that has to do anything with the others.
And I really do think it's out of respect for the other person's free choice. 'What she don't know won't hurt her' isn't something you say about someone whose choices you respect.
What if she's suicidal?
Hard case, but I'm inclined to say that if the only reason you're with someone is the threat of suicide, the whole situation needs help, and it's not going to be improved by cheating.
it's bad to cheat with someone because of the harm it does to his spouse & kids
This assumes that cheating, in and of itself, causes harm to the spouse and kids. When the fact is that it isn't cheating, but the knowledge of cheating (or other possible consequences), that causes harm.
88 is just wrong, and (imho) selfish. People break up over cheating because they are jealous. That they find jealousy intolerable to live with has nothing to do with what is or isn't important for children. The rather flippant idea that divorce isn't so bad for kids (and certainly not as bad for them as living with a cheating partner is for an adult) is outrageous.
I'm not saying divorce is never justified, or that it affects all children in the same way. But I believe rather firmly that expecting children to deal with divorce in order to protect adults from having to deal wiht infidelity gets it exactly wrong.
Wow. Most of the comments on this post deal with the actual issues involved -- cheating, the desire for intimacy, etc. By contrast, my first reaction was, "Yep, sounds like a Craigslist kind of situation to me."
I think that means that previous posters are a lot more mature than I am. :)
PS -- I sometimes tuck my sunglasses into the neck of my shirt. Sigh -- I hate being a douchebag, but it's so darned convenient!
she said no to that but then yes to drinks after dinner. Decided that her brushing her hand against my knee a couple of times while we were at the bar was probably an accident.
We have a whole thread on this back in the archives somewhere. To sum up the conclusions, if you're on a date with a woman who is touching you enough that you are wondering whether she's trying to send you a signal, she probably is. This is not intended to say that you should assume consent to anything, but making further advances is a reasonable thing to do at that point.
100: And it really sounds like a rationalization.
Is there a technical distinction between "rationalization" and "justification"? (I ask out of a real lack of knowledge.)
I don't know from technical, but I'd understand the difference to be that a rationalization is an argument that is only meant to be good enough to make you feel better about what you're going to do anyway, while a justification is an argument that is meant to actually show that what you are going to do is right.
But here's the thing. If answering truthfully* the question, "So what did you do last night?" would upset her, it probably means I did something wrong. Your advice is that telling the truth about it wouldn't make it better, but what if I'm misreading her and she wouldn't mind?
It doesn't necessarily mean you did wrong; the measure of right and wrong isn't whether or not people are upset. People are often upset by others doing right.
That said, I think your feeling that you are doing something she wouldn't like is probably trustworthy. But this whole "what if I tell her the truth and she doesn't mind?" sounds to me like the reason you want to tell her the truth is to make yourself feel better, rather than out of concern for her feelings. You want absolution. What I'm saying is, you're in the situation of your own free will, no one is going to absolve you of it. OTOH, it's not murdering puppies, the first woman is leaving town in a couple of weeks, the likelihood of anyone getting hurt over this is pretty minimal, and (imho) it's not a big deal. It's one of those things that, later in life, you will admit to with a rather shamefaced acknowledgement that it wasn't your finest hour.
OTOH, Tia's advice about telling the second woman that you maybe jumped the gun a bit isn't bad--but then, of course, you're running the risk that the second woman feels very strongly about this kind of thing and will want nothing more to do with you. I suppose the morally pure answer to that is that if that is the case, then you should divulge The Truth and let her make that decision and take the consequences, and if she's that kind of person and you're not, then you shouldn't date her anyway. I suspect that the realistic answer is that given you don't feel really good about the situation, you're basically a pretty faithful sort who kind of blundered into an awkward situation, and my advice is for god's sake don't make it any more awkward. Just ride it out and it'll simplify itself all on its own very soon, and no one gets hurt. If it were me, I would think that sacrificing a small bit of self-respect in order to protect other people's feelings would be worth it.
I have to say that if a woman is brushing her hand up against your knee after you came up with some bizarre "I'll pay for two thirds of the check in order to make this feel more date-like" thing (?!?!) you've gotta be pretty damn attractive.
We have a whole thread on this back in the archives somewhere. To sum up the conclusions, if you're on a date with a woman who is touching you enough that you are wondering whether she's trying to send you a signal, she probably is. This is not intended to say that you should assume consent to anything, but making further advances is a reasonable thing to do at that point.
unless she's a klutzy woman (like me!)
One wonders why he did not wait until woman 1 was out of town.
Well, one can't make it through a week without a rationalization, so: I was on the margins of the friend/date borderline, which is emotionally safer for me. Rescheduling, especially rescheduling for the reason given above, makes perfectly clear that I'm looking at it as a date. Maybe that's a good thing, but it's not something I wanted to do.
Seeing as I changed my handle just to avoid associating some trivial stuff that could look bad with it, I'm newly impressed with Tia, ogged, bitchphd, and others.
This assumes that cheating, in and of itself, causes harm to the spouse and kids. When the fact is that it isn't cheating, but the knowledge of cheating (or other possible consequences), that causes harm.
If I have a relationship of so little emotional intimacy that my husband/boyfriend is keeping a huge part of his life a secret, that is a harm to me. If my husband/boyfriend is spending significant amounts of time and money on another person, rather than the family or the relationship (the money isn't an issue unless he's my husband), that is a further harm to me. If his "outlet" is allowing him not to do serious work on our marriage, that is yet another harm to me.
There are options for the children before you ever get to telling your partner you need an outlet. You can try not cheating.
For the record, I have lived through not one, but two parental divorces. I am entirely aware that they are not good for children. But having children does not mean that every aspect of your life is hostage to them, and if my husband were the guy in 39, I would leave him, barring some extreme circumstance with my child, like mental illness. What I would have demonstrated to my child is the importance of honesty and having high standards for how you were treated. My husband does not have the right to make the decision about what is best for the children for me or without me; they're my children too, and that's what he'd be doing by deciding his infidelity was better for them then my open eyed appraisal of the relationship.
I find myself agreeing with most of what B.Ph.D. has written in this thread. Does that make me a bad person?
1) Two people make a promise to be faithful.
2) One person breaks that promise.
3) Other person finds out about the promise-breaking.
4) Other person decides that keeping up the promise now that the first person isn't honoring isn't right, and now it's her fault the marriage broke up because she was expecting he'd live up to what he'd said he'd do?
Well, fuck, I hope that depressed woman doesn't find about her jackass husband because if she leaves him, now it's her fault the marriage broke up because she was jealous.
If you want a relationship where you can sleep around and have an expectation that no one will be jealous, then don't make a promise to be faithful. There is no problem with an open marriage here. There is a problem with deciding that a closed marriage is now open by fiat and expecting the other person just to deal.
But I believe rather firmly that expecting children to deal with divorce in order to protect adults from having to deal wiht infidelity gets it exactly wrong.
How does it protect adults from having to deal with infidelity? The divorce ain't a picnic for the adults, either. Plus, I don't think it sends a good message to the kids to say, hey, if someone promises you something, and they break it, you're just supposed to be a doormat because saying otherwise is sign that you're a deeply jealous person.
Eh, I'm kind of with B. on this, come to think about it. The jerkishness in the situation (minor, I've done far worse things) is in the jumping the gun, not so much in the secrecy about it. Given that you are jumping the gun, fessing up doesn't make you a better person, it just hurts woman 1's feelings.
(Or, possibly, reveals that she doesn't mind, in which case you aren't being a jerk, you're just being overly cautious about worrying that you might be. But it sounds as if you're fairly sure she would mind.)
On the third hand, if La Primera was going to be around forever, would you still prefer to date La Otra? Because if so, you should wind things down now with La Primera anyway, before it gets any more complicated.
and this:
I have to say that if a woman is brushing her hand up against your knee after you came up with some bizarre "I'll pay for two thirds of the check in order to make this feel more date-like" thing (?!?!) you've gotta be pretty damn attractive.
I passed this by because it was so weird that I didn't know what to say about it, but yeah. Pick up the check, or split the check, but some sort of carefully calibrated how much extra of the check you will pick up because it's kind of datelike? Just don't do it.
I figure that it had to have been less weird in person than it sounds, somehow, but still don't do stuff like that. Dutch is good, hosting is good, letting someone else buy you dinner without protesting is good. Finicky fine-grained maneuvering about money? Bad.
Went home by myself and left a comment on unfogged.
That surely is a euphamism.
Goodness, but the moral certitude here is flying hard and heavy. Human relationships are insanely complicated and infinitely varied, and almost never fit into the ethical matrix you draw out on graph paper in your twenties.
117: Once again, Apo is the hero!
Right, we're young, and that's why we can tell it's in fact wrong to fuck around on your spouse.
No one said they couldn't understand or forgive it. Just that we're not going to pretend it's not wrong.
Also, B's 101 gets it exactly right.
No, Idealist, it makes you right.
If I have a relationship of so little emotional intimacy that my husband/boyfriend is keeping a huge part of his life a secret, that is a harm to me.
This assumes that the cheating is a cause of the lack of intimacy; it may well be a symptom. Lack of intimacy in a marriage harms both partners; either they decide, together, to do something about it, or they don't, in which case they must then decide separately what to do about it. One possible decision in the second case is to find intimacy elsewhere and try very hard to keep it a secret. It's fine not to like that solution, but to assume that the person doing it is at fault for the original problem is a big stretch.
If my husband/boyfriend is spending significant amounts of time and money on another person, rather than the family or the relationship (the money isn't an issue unless he's my husband), that is a further harm to me.
Sure, but he may not be doing that. The guy I was fucking, to my knowledge, wasn't doing that. We had one cheap Thai meal, and we slept together in a hotel room that his employer was comping and in a condo that his employer was comping.
If his "outlet" is allowing him not to do serious work on our marriage, that is yet another harm to me.
Very true. OTOH, as above, it's also possible (and it was my impression in this case) that it was the lack of serious work on the marriage that led to the outlet. Also, the couple was in counselling (and he was getting counselling on his own).
My impression was that this was a genuinely decent man in a very unhappy marriage with a woman he cared for but who was emotionally unwell. To the point where one of the reasons he didn't want a divorce was that he was worried about her effect on the kid with problems, given that she would probably be the one who would be awarded custody. I'm aware that my explanation of this might make me sound hopelessly naive ("he's married and can't get a divorce!") but generally I'm a pretty good judge of character and sincerity, I think. If anything, this guy's biggest mistake was that he had a very demanding career, which he really enjoyed, but that required him and his family to relocate occasionally and made it harder for his wife to work and that took an awful lot of hours away from his family (which made it pretty easy for him to cheat on his lunch hour, say). I think the career was a bigger problem for the marriage than the cheating, and fwiw, I told him so.
117 -- Yes. Identifying something as wrong is fairly easy. Identifying it as the least wrong thing to do in a given situation -- very much more complicated and dependent on all the individual features of the situation.
It's the future, apo. We use Excel.
(also: that doesn't work? shit.)
I have to bow out of the thread for a little bit due to the fact my life is busyhellohfuckwhy but I realize I'm sounding pretty heated, and I didn't want any of my pretend internet friends to mistake that for storming off.
And I don't think that divorce is the only option after infidelity. Forgiveness and moving past it, sure. Counseling. But deciding that the marriage is now open by fiat seems to be a big enough change that the person would be more than justified in saying, hey, I didn't sign up for this, and I deserve better. There are worse things for kids than a divorce (and I find this strangely and suddenly conservative presumption that divorce is the worst thing ever baffling. Surely people who make the decision to divorce don't always do so out of jealousy.) and I think Tia's nailed most of the reasons.
I am seriously never going to marry anyone who thinks he gets to make decisions "for the children" that involve lying to me about what it is we're doing for the children. My judgment about the children's welfare is not inferior to his.
101: Sure, life is complicated, but in order to cheat without "harming" the person in the way you describe, you have to deceive. And it's pretty likely that you'll slip up at some point or your family will notice that you're being secretive.
And being secretive isn't great, because then people start to wonder whether you're lying about smoking or your health status or hiding money away somewhere to run off with your girlfriend. And then trust is eroded, even if nobody ever finds out that you were cheating. The family will worry about being surprised by other bad things and will just generally be off-kilter.
Also what MM said about actively helping someone break a promise.
I said, "(perhaps bizarrely)." But yes, I should have offered to pick up the whole thing.
116: No, but I was hoping as I wrote it that someone would make that joke.
125: I feel the same way. OTOH, if I developed a mental illness that made me unreliable and meant that I couldn't deal effectively with a child who had emotional problems of his own, I would hope that my partner would be able to take on the burden of caring for me and the children in ways that would, hopefully, preserve stability. And I hope I wouldn't resent him unduly for quietly getting a little bit of comfort on the side while dealing with a difficult and demanding situation.
FWIW, I would hope that he'd feel the same way.
As I understand, in France marriage is the duty part of life, and cheating is the fun part, and the husband and wife each have as much fun as they can, if only to spite the other. But here we seem to have a higher-order system where cheating is also in the zone of duty, where cheating on the person you're cheating with is also subject to the rules..... or something like that.
A far to regular with the two girlfriends, I'm totally dying to know who you are. I think we should have a moratorium on regular commenters going anon while admitting they are regular commenters. People with juicy salacious details that they don't want to associate with their regular pseudonyms should have the decency to pretend to be lurkers or something.
Because what we don't know won't hurt us, damnit!
130: Um, yeah. Particularly since I could probably figure it out, unless you did something to cover your IP address, and I'm not looking but it's killing me.
My agreement, that is. I'm not a far too regular.
OR AM I
I'm reasonably sure I know who it is without looking.
Just that we're not going to pretend it's not wrong.
I'm not saying it isn't wrong, just that there are many different degrees of wrong, that the degree of wrong will often vary based on the circumstances, and that stating "X is the proper course of action for all instances of Y" is going to collide with the terribly complicated nature of long-term relationships.
I think we should have a moratorium on regular commenters going anon while admitting they are regular commenters.
I strongly oppose this.
I'm with B on this. Especially insofar as cheating within a dysfunctional relationship can often alleviate bitterness or feelings of being trapped. If there are kids or some other external factor keeping the relationship together, this might be good.
That said, such manuver is, to say the least, risky and requires a bunch of discretion. So I could see just following a precautionary principle and ruling out tagging with cheaters. I just don't think there is some reason a apriori that it is a bad deal.
135 is right. And not only does it collide with reality, but it can actually do a lot more damage than a more forgiving set of moral standards.
maybe his girlfriend is dying of cancer, and he doesn't want to break up with her, but he also wants sex and/or emotional companionship that he isn't getting from the dying chick
Slightly off topic: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did this, but it was TB, not cancer, and he was married. When his wife died (having known all along but not let on) he married the other woman.
This thread makes me think I should just marry Graham.
As someone who you know shares your sense of right and wrong on these points?
Re 135, I agree with B and Apo. Again.
Idealist agreeing with bphd? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
It's of course true that infidelity + lying may be the symptom, not the cause of all bad things in a marriage. And sure, one can forgive and move on, etc. Nonetheless, it's just a weak, despicable thing to do to lie and cheat. It is so very hard for me not to view these men as slimy, self-pitying, f***s. Oh, poor me, my marriage is bad, I'm going to lie to my wife and break my promises to her. Why would anyone want to enable, excuse, or have anything to do with such a person?
Yeah. I really doubt he'd ever cheat on me for any reason, but if he did, he'd tell me and trust my judgment to respond to it appropriately. It makes me paranoid to think of all the people in the world who would take it upon themselves to protect me from the truth.
143: I think Ideal agreed as well. Hot ex-military sex!
(Really, I think this is one of those Twainian "Boy, now that I'm 20-something, my dad's a lot smarter" situations. And, just for the discord, more or less why I get suspicious in the face of Hirshman's stridency.)
In the interests of comity, I'm sure that most people who cheat are just selfish fucks. I'm only arguing here that it isn't impossible to cheat with what one might think of as a kind of honor about it.
especially when he told me that what he really wanted to do was run a dog rescue, and he told me all about this sick dog that changed his life.
Wow. Hook, line, and sinker.
Ladies, if you want us to be honest, you've got to stop buying stories like this.
Hirshman
Please, don't do that here.
Why would anyone want to enable, excuse, or have anything to do with such a person?
Probably in my case because I find people who are trying to do the right thing in difficult situations very attractive.
148: Actually, I was waiting for someone to make that comment.
148: I guess the problem is, what if he really does want to run a dog rescue? Should he just keep it to himself for fear of looking shrewd?
More proof that this shit is perverse.
And not only does it collide with reality, but it can actually do a lot more damage than a more forgiving set of moral standards.
Seems to me nobody here is denying that. People are just saying you need a frame of reference, and suggesting what that should be.
Look, society has a rule that it's wrong to kill your mother. I think that's a good rule. But I was personally responsible for my mother dying when she did, and I'm perfectly relaxed about the decision I made on that occasion. Other people here have probably had to make similar calls.
Does this translate back into saying that the existence of rules to control matricide is immature? I don't think so. Likewise the general position that Tia and Cala are putting doesn't make them ethical absolutists. Just clear about their starting point.
144: Idealist agreeing with bphd? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
Look to your left. That's Tia on your side. You might want to up the dosage. (Not meant as a shot at either of you; just noting that this thread has a lot of strange bedfellows.)
149: You're right. Sorry.
I'm inclined to think the dog rescue thing was true. He also said he wanted to rock climb. Why wouldn't you want to run a dog rescue instead of working in finance?
I'm sure that most people who cheat are just selfish fucks.
No. I know plenty of people who have cheated and they aren't selfish fucks, they just had periods of selfishness, weakness, bad judgment, what have you. This is commonly known as being human. Some of them decided to come clean with their partners about it, some did not. It isn't my place to judge whether their method of handling it after the fact was more or less appropriate for their relationships because I'm not in those relationships. And if you aren't in a relationship, it's flatly impossible to understand all the dynamics of it, no matter how well you know the people involved.
Honor really doesn't enter into my equation here, any more than humidity or housing density.
I'm inclined to think the dog rescue thing was true.
I've wanted to run a dog rescue ever since my two little red coonhounds were killed by a mountain lion.
Wanna fuck?
You're married, gswift. What kind of a girl do you think I am?
I think Ideal agreed as well. Hot ex-military sex!
I'm afraid you would find my performance disappointing, SCMT, which would make me ashamed, so I will just have to preserve the mystery.
a lot of strange bedfellows
You just can't get this group sex thing out of your head, can you?
You're married, gswift. What kind of a girl do you think I am?
But I buried them myself! It's really sad!. And uh, my wife is sick and stuff.
I can offer you sympathy and companionship in your time of need, but it must not go further.
I had written a long and convoluted comment saying that I'd be fine with LB checking, and then wrote on preview that I'd also be fine with Tia checking as long as she told me if she guessed properly. But at that point I would just be being mysterious for its own sake, so I accede to the wishes of the commenteriat.
Also because I've taken a fairly firm stance that people shouldn't lie, but rather say things that are non-responsive or in some other way not calculated to cause people to believe teh false in the past. But I never claimed to follow every moral claim I make. I'll almost certainly end up saying something true but misleading.
But I never claimed to follow every moral claim I make.
That is, I acknowledge my hypocrisy.
He didn't say it necessarily had to be a dog rescue. He said dog rescue, or dog breeder, or something with dogs, and he said he was working on getting enough real estate in the South to live off his earnings as a renter. It wasn't as sappy as I made it sound.
On preview, I was right that it was w/d.
what if he really does want to run a dog rescue
Oh, come on. No one wants to run a dog rescue.
I've wanted to run a dog rescue ever since my two little red coonhounds were killed by a mountain lion.
I love that book too. I'll sleep with you based on your taste in literature, not your shitty lies.
w/d?! Wow, surprise twist ending; I didn't even consider you.
I'm largely with Cala and Tia re: the above.
The whole 'what they don't know, won't hurt them' line just seems like the lamest type of specious self-justification.
[That's not to say that can't have better or worse reasons for cheating or that some of the cheaters don't deserve some sympathy for being in a bad situation. Nor is it to say that I've personally always been whiter than white.]
It isn't my place to judge whether their method of handling it after the fact was more or less appropriate for their relationships because I'm not in those relationships.
After the fact, no. I'm not quite in Tia's camp that momentary weaknesses must be confessed, because I don't think all cases of infidelity are ones that bring up worries about disease, and I do think that a lot of the confessing is meant to make the cheater feel better about himself. Talk to a priest or a counselor and leave your wife out your guilty conscience.
But before the fact? If you cheat, it's a moment of weakness, at best. That may make you forgivable, but it doesn't make you right, no matter how you cook the rationalization. (B, I'll trust you know the guy better, but to me it's sounding like "I just don't want this girl to call the house.")
Whoa! I'm among the shocked as well.
Admission: I looked up the IP yesterday.
Do I not get props for knowing? First my amazing American Idol prediction powers, and now this?
Yeah, I think it was the before-the-fact thing that I meant when I said most cheaters are probably just jerks. The planning (a la Tia's story--I'm perfectly comfortable thinking this guy is not someone I'd give a pass to).
I never call these guys' houses. What for?
Not shocked, but impressed that you 'fessed up. And newly impressed by your stud credentials!
Tia loves to be patted on the head.
171: Credit where credit is due. Looking back at the sentence structure, w/d should have at least occurred to me. I feel shame.
Don't some women who cheat with married men fantasize that they'll leave their wives for them? And wouldn't a story of why he really, really can't leave his wife preclude that problem?
I think far too regular (recommendation: less fiber and prunes) is at worst being mildly jerky. Maybe he should tell woman 1 that he won't be into an LDR and that he thinks they should stop hooking up now, but in this kind of situation I don't see too much need to be overscrupulous about prematurely starting a new relationship. And, don't tell woman 1, that seems like it'd be hurting her feelings for no reason, it seems. If she eventually finds out that you started dating someone right around then, I doubt she'll feel too betrayed.
(On preview: ditto to 177; "And wouldn't a story of why he really, really can't leave his wife preclude that problem?": No; and can't we at least strip the URLs from the spam?)
The critical distinction being that you're not married or committed to woman 1. I do not endorse behaving thus with one's spouse.
Not particularly important, but a datapoint: we've conducted practically this entire discussion with the men cheating on their wives, but from my own observations (which admittedly don't begin to approach a sample size that would lend significance), the opposite scenario has been more common.
they just had periods of selfishness, weakness, bad judgment, what have you. This is commonly known as being human.
I can understand meeting someone, becoming infatuated, having an affair, and either ending the affair and deciding that telling would do more damage to the marriage than keeping the secret, or deciding to renegotiate the terms of the first relationship. But deciding to deceive one's spouse/partner, advertising on craigs list, and interviewing applicants for the role of other woman? What fucking century is this? Diamond necklace and condo on Park Avenue, or fuck off!
That formatting thing on the kitten page has been fixed!
I've made an effort to make all my comments on the subject gender neutral, except where I was imagining being in the situation.
re: 180
Actually, that's near universally my experience too. When cheating was happening, it was the female partner who was doing the cheating -- with the exception of one male acquaintance who was a notorious serial cheater (and a total dick about it as well).
Again, limited sample size, etc.
but from my own observations (which admittedly don't begin to approach a sample size that would lend significance), the opposite scenario has been more common.
Yes! Keep hope alive.
Apo, there's a big sample selection bias in your study.
I'm assuming that you spend your time out and about, and don't hide in the bushes counting the guys coming and going.
178: No, I wouldn't think so. People are perfectly capable of fantasizing that they're the exception to the rule.
BTW, has anyone seen the Cary Grant/Ingrid Bergman movie Indiscreet? It's actually specifically about that problem. It's one of my favorite movies, I really like the principles the Bergman character has and the fact that Grant's character understands and values them.
Oh, come on. No one wants to run a dog rescue.
And no man's life has ever been changed by a sick animal when there's only men in the room. But get a fuckable woman within earshot and suddenly these experiences magically come forth.
I love that book too. I'll sleep with you based on your taste in literature, not your shitty lies.
Good taste rewarded at last!
I've made an effort to make all my comments on the subject gender neutral, except where I was imagining being in the situation.
I haven't bothered, but yes, women cheat, too. I think statistically, guys are more likely to cheat, but I suspect that has a lot more to do with opportunity than anything else.
Maybe they're ashamed to reveal their true selves with you because you are so scornful and judgmental. Did you ever think of that?
advertising on craigs list, and interviewing applicants for the role of other woman?
I agree that this is total douchebag territory.
182 -- and did anyone ever note that the error messages at the bottom of the comments page went away? It happened a little while ago but I'm not sure Becks was ever fêted appropriately for it.
re: 189
Actually, there was some recent UK research -- I'll try to chase up the reference -- that found that, contra popular belief, women were more likely to cheat. However, if I also recall, it was highly age specific.
That is, younger working-age women were more likely to cheat than their male partners. But, in older age groups the situation reverses.
I don't know re. men and women cheating. I think there's a lot more social acceptance of men doing it, which might make men who do more likely to talk about it. Before we invented the idea that women were naturally purer than men, folks used to believe that women were a lot more insatiable; I suspect that, if the incredible power of social conditioning (everything from constantly bombarding us with images of hott women to slut-shaming) were removed, most women would be far more sexually aggressive than most men.
The conservative solution to the problems we're discussing, for example in Taiwan, is prostitution. It seems to be regarded as less than cheating, in the sense that the prostitute is not in a position to replace the wife / husband. Cheating with free talent seems more likely to lead to dumping of the original mate.
That kind of thing is usually on a "don't get caught" basis, I think, like in Victorian England, where there was a blind eye up to a point but real viciousness if the word got out to the wrong people.
Yeah, prostitution is way grosser than cheating. At least if you're cheating, the person you're cheating with has some fucking choice about the matter.
advertising on craigs list, and interviewing applicants for the role of other woman?
I gotta wonder why he didn't mention anything about the mechanics of the situation in the ad. So as to screen out those whose scruples will not allow them to enter into such an undertaking. Save himself some time and money.
He responded to my ad, but he should have mentioned it in email. It was very inconsiderate to have me come to Midtown for a drink without saying something.
If you had only memorized all my previous comments, the combination of 109 and this was, I thought, a giveaway.
In fairness, he apologized more than once, in person and in email later, for wasting my time.
Maybe they're ashamed to reveal their true selves with you because you are so scornful and judgmental.
Yeah, that must be it. "Tia, you're the only one I can open up to. Because of our amazing connection I feel safe telling you my secret desire to devote my life to animals."
Hee hee.
199 -- Yeah. But I'm trying to picture what a response to your ad would look like, that mentioned the salient detail. Not really coming up with anything plausible. "Hi, I saw your Craigslist posting -- you sound just like the person I've been looking for to cheat on my girlfriend with! Let's do drinks."
gswift, next you're going to tell me they don't all mean it when they tell me I'm beautiful. You're such a cynic.
yeah, w/d, I remembered you talking about some girl business, and also I could hear you speaking the comments in your voice just perfectly.
And 200 -- I hope we won't be interfering with any of your potentially cheating activities next Friday.
204: I've already gotten them. I should really put something in that specifies "single." One said something like, "I can't send pictures, because I'm attached and have many friends and acquaintances throughout the city. We would meet and decide if we liked what we saw." CL is such a cesspool. Asperger's guy is turning out to be the one I liked *best*, which is a little sad.
Actually, I'm lying. I met some nice CL guys but I was not attracted to them.
w/d: It's not cheating, and it's not wrong. Do what you want. And remember that you can always claim "sick wife" if someone gets angry. Or "dog shelter"--I get confused.
204: Don't know re. Craigslist, but the way I've always done it is that I just ask up front and/or say "I have to tell you something" and then explain. It's pretty much the same way I ask about disease status; just kind of a matter of course. It's awkward, but it goes with the territory.
206: I think the only change I made to my commenting style was trying to dropping my "Also, [transition to anything I fell like saying]" tic, and since I'm trying to drop that as washerdreyer, it probably wasn't a big change. Though I just looked, and I used the 'also transition' as soon as I switched back to washerdreyer. It was a good deduction.
207: I was certainly planning on attending, but I now realize that that is #1's last night in New York. Not sure it'll work out, but I'm gonna try.
63 and 78 gets it exactly right.
That w/d has his pick of the ladeez does not surprise me. That he would be the person behind the 2/3-1/3 split somewhat does. What LB said in 115.
I now realize that that is #1's last night in New York.
Bring her along! Then everyone can be uncomfortable, knowing that you're totally cheating on her, or else people can tell her because it's the right thing to do.
63 and 78 gets it exactly right.
Yeah, prostitution is way grosser than cheating. At least if you're cheating, the person you're cheating with has some fucking choice about the matter.
I don't see that at all, in non-slavery, non-underage cases. With prostitution the cards are on the table and there's no pretense of love. In the worst cheating cases, which are not really rare, two out of the three people involved are being deliberately misinformed by the third about what's really going on, and often what's at issue is quite consequential.
203 is mean but it charms the shit out of me. God, I am a bad person.
209: No, it's "my wife is sick and in order to support her and pay the medical bills I am forced to work as an investment banker. But my real dream is to run a dog shelter, and between putting that on hold and taking care of my sick wife, I just really need some comfort...."
I thought 212 was wrong until I read 215.
Weman, aren't Swedes supposed to be "sophisticated"?
The conservative solution to the problems we're discussing [...] is prostitution
Or bestiality. Another point in favor of the dog rescue!
216: Well, despite my having defended the theoretical possibility of uncoerced prostitution, I think that the vast majority of actual prostitutes are coerced either directly or indirectly (e.g., by appalling economic circumstances, drug use, whatever) into it. And I think taking advantage of that situation to get laid is gross.
Seriously, though, why is it impossible that someone just wants to work with dogs? Lots of people love dogs or horses and dream about having jobs with them.
re: 219
"Sophisticated" s/b "mature enough not to create specious justifications for shitty behaviour"
My line -- "I've always been fascinated by Genghis Khan, his 800 wives, and his stacks of skulls sorted by age and gender" -- seldom works, and when it does the results are unsatisfactory. I guess I should have been doing puppies and kitties and horsies all that time.
Horses are the sexiest bait of all. "Are you interested in a live-in position as a horse trainer? You'll get your own horse. Your room will be right next to mine, in case you have any questions at any time."
I was thinking of something nice and genteel in Holland. And a lot of "girl friends on the side" have similiar issues.
222: Of course it's not impossible; it's just such a wankerish cliched way of trying to demonstrate that one is "sensitive." I have to admit that my response to an adult saying something like "I'm an investment banker, but my real dream is to work with animals" is that the person is either bullshitting or incredibly immature.
What's immature? He was going to save the money/invest in rental properties so he could support himself doing it.
I dunno. I'm suspicious of people who say "I've pursued this one career path, but what I really want to do is this other thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm actually doing." It seems more like adolescent fantasizing than reality. I believe that if you're really interested in something, you'll be doing it (or doing something like it) rather than talking about it.
It's kind of like those people you meet who have dead-end jobs and talk about how much they really wish they could be writers/artists/grad students but when you get to know them you realize that they'll never actually do any of it, they just like to think of themselves as destined for greater things but thwarted by cruel circumstance.
But you have to keep in mind that I'm almost 40, and there's a huge difference between someone my age saying "my real dream is to be a star!" when in fact they're a middle manager who doesn't even volunteer with the local community theater, and someone in their 20s saying that they think they want to do X while they're still at the age where one forms career goals.
Of the people I've known with high ambitions, only one accomplished them, and she died young when she was just getting started. Sad but true.
213: Thanks for the first part. As to the second, I'm glad I don't come off as someone who does awkward things that don't accidentally don't follow social convention, but I do. It wasn't something I'd planned to do, just happened.
I think Tia's nailed most of the reasons. Not to mention a bunch of guys on Craigslist.
Ok, I'll return to reading the thread; I just wanted to make that joke.
Also, most people engaged in animal rescue are at least pretty weird, and many are extremely weird. More later.
He's only 32. It takes some financial planning to get the point where he can support Sparky, Fido and the gang.
203 is mean but it charms the shit out of me. God, I am a bad person.
We're just the only ones admitting how funny it sounds.
Of course it's not impossible; it's just such a wankerish cliched way of trying to demonstrate that one is "sensitive."
Every time I picture the conversation I get the giggles. The crew cut, the cartoonish muscles, the sunglasses in the shirt. He's responded to an ad for sex, and she's agreed to a meet. And she's attractive! The free sex is soooo close. And yet, he must demonstrate that he is "warm and kind." And so he reaches into the bag of tricks and pulls out a story about..."this sick dog that changed his life."
You can't make this stuff up.
If it just happened, it was probably less weird in person than it sounds in retrospect.
And come to think of it, I may be moving to 'not necessarily jerky at all' on the jumping the gun issue. If you started hooking up with Woman 1 after she already knew she was about to move, I think that gives rise to a fairly strong presumption that she wasn't thinking of it as anything relationship-oriented at all.
re: 228
It's kind of like those people you meet who have dead-end jobs and talk about how much they really wish they could be writers/artists/grad students but when you get to know them you realize that they'll never actually do any of it, they just like to think of themselves as destined for greater things but thwarted by cruel circumstance.
Yeah. If people are really into doing something creative, they'll be doing it. Even if just at the level of a hobby, or on a part-time or amateurish basis.
I know someone who's quit teaching life science to junior high school kids and is currently working in animal rescue.
And what about the grad students wishing for dead end jobs? Who will speak for them?
241 -- is he available for Tia to hook up with?
217: that'd work for me!
Well, I take it that, if you believe promise breaking is bad and you participate in an instance of promise-breaking, then at the very least you are guilty of a level of moral hypocrisy.
I'm pretty sure I only care about promise-breaking if I actually care about what the promise is. So if it's someone's promise to be faithful and I fuck him, then I'm already doing wrong because I don't want to cause pain to another woman, etc. But if it's someone's promise not to be late for work, and we bump into each other on the street and chat until they're late, then I would feel no guilt. The promise bit adds nothing for me.
General question then (assuming non-open relationships) if something happened between you and someone else, and it was never going to happen again, and you were unlikely to see that person again, and there didn't seem to be anyway that your partner could find out without you telling them, would you tell? Would it make a difference whether it were 'just' a snog, or a night of sex?
I wouldn't tell.
I'm so, so enjoying this thread. I can't decide what to say about the substantive issue, but I will say that our man McLibidinous and his Old Yeller routine sound toolish. You can volunteer at a lot of shelters in the time it takes to get cartoonishly huge.
237 made me giggle too. And I think LB is only changing her mind in 238 because she knows who she's talking to! See? there are no moral absolutes....
238 - Yeah, I could see how that might just happen and how it could not be weird if it made sense in the moment. Very different than if you had predetermined the proportion of the bill you planned to pay based on how "date" vs. "friendly" the outing was.
He said he'd been fostering dogs. Maybe I'm exaggerating his hugeness. He was probably at about the level of Asian guy. Actually, I have a face free mostly naked pic that it would be funny, but wrong, if I posted, so I won't.
You guys are going to drive me into his arms.
The proportions changing in his head every time she said something flirty or less friendly - that would be funny and very weird.
The coming out with it spontaneously just makes you look erm, eccentric.
1.) I would never try to post under a different pseudonym; my writing style (which tends to include typos and dropped words) is too distinctive for me to get away with it. It's also not really in keeping with my character.
2.) The specific dog recue line sounds like the height of douchebaggery, but I have met men whose ideal career path seems to be: work like a dog until you'r 45, then move back home to Texas or somewhere similar and retire. Having a ranch or horse-farm fits with that.
243: She's married. Also, she started out by volunteering to do animal rescue on the weekend while still a teacher.
gswift is probably right.
246: Possible, but the rationale came to mind while I was away from my desk and before I'd seen w/d's unmasking. After all, all that makes it a jerky thing to do is the worry that there's an implicit assumption that he and Woman 1 are in the process of moving toward an exclusive relationship (or at least that she may, reasonably, be making that assumption). For something that started with a move to a new city in the near future, if the two of you aren't extravagantly head-over-heels, the default assumption is that any relationship is time-limited. At which point a little overlap isn't a big deal.
But I may be cutting w/d more slack than I would someone I didn't know.
You know, I made it all sound sappier and more contrived than it was precisely because I wanted to give you guys the pleasure of making fun of it, but now I'm sorry, and I will never give you guys pleasure ever again.
250: But I was looking forward to hearing from Bosto again.
Apparently my new role here is to come late to the discussion, throw a few bombs, and go back to bed. Cheating on your spouse is always wrong, people. And if you do it, you're a bad person. You don't have to be killing people every second to be a murderer. Ditto cheating.
First of all, you took a vow. Breaking a vow is just about the worst thing, morally, you can do to yourself since it means that in some real moral way, you don't exist; there's nothing solid about you. Second, the interpersonal harm of cheating doesn't depend on it being discovered, because the deception immediately changes the kind of relationship you're having with your spouse such that, as an abstract moral matter, you're now treating them like shit, and as a concrete matter, you're preoccupied with covering up your lies.
Well, it was weird, but I had not pretermined anything. I was trying to decide whether to make the offer to pay, had decided I should, and then was just like, "Middle-ground!"
Well, it was weird, but I had not predetermined anything. I was trying to decide whether to make the offer to pay, had decided I should, and then was just like, "Middle-ground!"
Given that the worst thing you've ever done is pour glue on a caterpillar, you're a good and pure man, but your standards of behavior are awfully high.
So then I forgot the Genghis Khan line and told the next chick that I didn't exactly work in animal rescue, but did take pride in the human way I ran the humane society gas chamber, and that didn't work either. Women!
and will never give you guys pleasure ever again
Damn! And I had the meatup activities for next Friday night all choreographed in my head too. Back to the drawing boards.
254 Not to mention Bostoniangirl Bostoniangirl (Wie treu sind deine Blatter).
I can't believe I'm defending Mr. Muscles, but isn't the toolishness of saying you want to work with animals more applicable to someone who's trying to be sort of deceptively seductive? "If I act like I'm all warm and decent and a good person, then maybe I can trick her into fucking me."
In a CL ad-for-sex date, the question is much more going to be are you physically appealing and reasonably entertaining to talk to -- sex is already on the table, so the hard-sell, acting lovable in order to get sex thing, seems much less likely to be in play. Maybe he really did want to work in animal rescue.
258: Like TiVogged knows anything about relationships.
Oh, the other clue to who "An all too regular" was is that I commented in this thread as that name, and then shortly after in the urban trust thread as my normal psued without anyone commenting in the intervening time.
And this was at 3:20 in the AM eastern, when comments aren't bustling.
LB, I refute you thus:
though I specified that inquiring gentlemen had to attempt to demonstrate that they a) were warm and kind and b) were smart, literate, and could spell.
The sex wasn't yet on the table; that was pencilled in for later.
264: That was the evidence for my guess. As is the fact that of the regulars there don't seem to be too many guys who are single, actively dating, not in a relationship.
I really need to spend less time here.
I meant more that they had to give me that impression in their email to me, and I think that was clear from the ad. I would have slept with him, dog story or no dog story, if he hadn't had a girlfriend. I suppose he didn't know that, though.
But I'm figuring he did. "Warm and kind" means something fairly different in an ad looking for sex than in one looking for a relationship -- in the first case it's much more like 'are you nice, and pleasant, and polite' than 'are you good'. The dog story isn't terribly applicable to the first question.
(Now it's possible that he has a toolish seduction routine that he simply applied thoughtlessly, without thinking about the dynamics of the situation. But not certain.)
how can we not have heard from Chopper on this issue of vital significance to our nation's bodily fluids?
Work has been a fucker the last few weeks. I'm mostly catching up with you guys over lunch hours and late at night, so commenting is intermittent. Also, my mother-in-law has been in town for 3 weeks and my brother-in-law has been staying with us for the past week. Plus, I'm taking a stats class for business school.
267: Urban trust seemed active enough when I opened Unfogged that I thought you or teo might have commented between A far too regular's first comment here and "my" comment, there but I didn't preview to check.
I hadn't gotten far enough to tick off the single guys, but I guess you're right -- most of the male regulars are married. Coulda been SMCT, except that it's hard to date when you're a brain in a jar. Teofilo and pdf are both single, right? And I actually can't place anything about eb's marital status or anything else biographical.
Though I specified that inquiring gentlemen had to attempt to demonstrate that they a) were warm and kind and b) were smart, literate, and could spell.
Is 80% good enough? Can I get extra credit on smart and literate?
okay, I wrote him the following email:
well, you should let people know that's what you're looking for. I would have let you know from the outset I wouldn't have done it.
but you can make my inconvenience up to me! I have an odd request. I told a male friend about last night, and he insists you were lying about the dog rescue bit because it sounds so "sensitive" to girls, and I am defending at least the possibility that it's true.
will you tell me whatever the truth is? I won't be irritated if it's not true, I just really want to know.
and he writes back:
The dog rescue part is true. If I were intent on lying I would have made up some story about roomates or apartment renovations, not spilled the truth out right away.
...followed by a somewhat bullshit explanation of why he thought I wouldn't care about his situation.
Tia, dude, I'm pretty sure Tucker Max wants to work in dog recue when he grows up. I'm not saying he doesn't have the desire to, but I keep picturing him leaning a little too hard on that desire when explaining his psychic economy to the potential lay, you know?
a somewhat bullshit explanation of why he thought I wouldn't care about his situation
Hey wait, you're telling us the less interesting part and withholding the more interesting. What a tease!
Emerson, don't do that. Sausagely's a real person who shows up here sometimes. (Conversely, if that was Sausagely, use your own email address, not Emerson's.)
I have met men whose ideal career path seems to be: work like a dog until you'r 45, then move back home to Texas or somewhere similar and retire. Having a ranch or horse-farm fits with that.
Sure, but that's not "my dream is to work with horses, because I love them so." That's "my dream is not to have to work." Also, I question how many of these guys actually ever do that; I would think that working like a dog until one is 45 would pretty much depend on having the kind of character that liked work.
255: Whatever, Ogged. While your judgment hurts, I still maintain that we *all* do bad things and that by strict standards we are all, therefore, bad people. One has to take context into account when making these judgments.
Breaking a vow is bad. But the fact is that marriage vows are conventions, rather than the sort of vows that people make will full thought aforehand; witness how few of us actually talk to our prospective partners about our feelings about cheating and so forth. It's something everyone takes for granted. I don't think that a vow that is taken for granted as part of a larger package that means, to most people, "I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you" is of the same moral magnitude as a vow that's really thought through and entered into with full awareness of its binding nature.
That said, yes; people ought to think through marriage and enter into it with that level of seriousness, if at all. But most people don't, or marriage would be a lot less common than it actually is.
He never actually signs as "Sausagely."
Anyway, that's all fine. I'm sure I lean on certain parts of myself when explaining my psychic economy to potential lays too. I just don't think it's totally invented, which is gswift's claim.
Tia, I think it's slightly unethical to say "a male friend" when you mean "the internet." Not that I didn't read it. But, I don't think you should share the other part except with people whose e-mail address you already know.
Was Emerson's 273 wrong? Sausagely doesn't post under that name, and he included his e-mail for identifying purposes. And if Sausagely did post under that name, he'd spell it "Suasagely." But maybe it should be "e-Sausagely."
Well, I snapped about it because it initially fooled me (which may just mean that I'm slow). Impersonation is fine if it's an obvious joke, but it had better be pretty darned obvious.
Sausagely does not sign himself Sausagely. He uses Saiselgy. No?
But Matt, what she says is technically true...
That's why I didn't share the second part. We could get into a long conversation about the ethics of talking about people on the internet, which I do frequently. I think I share things arguably unethically all the time here. Because I do lots of things that are wrong. But I'm particularly unconcerned about this person's welfare in that respect.
But he also can't spell. He might sign on as almost anything.
No harm, no foul -- I'm sure you thought you were being sufficiently obvious. But you got past me, initially, and I feel the need to defend the integrity of Unfogged for those readers who are as slow as I am.
I'm with Tia, Cala & Ogged on this one. You might find a few exceptions to prove the rule, but in 99% of instances, cheating is wrong and I wouldn't assist someone in it. Unlike Tia, I'd be less likely to sex up a married man (though I almost did, once) than one with a "girlfriend," simply because the base level of committment seems lower in the latter case. However, now that I consider that I live with my boyfriend but we are unmarried & I'd be seriously pissed at him if he cheated on me, I will revise that opinion to "neither, thank you." In reality, it's not an option for me in any instance anyway.
Back in 137, Glenn said "Especially insofar as cheating within a dysfunctional relationship can often alleviate bitterness or feelings of being trapped." That I don't buy, or can't support, because 1) you'd be simply foisting the bitterness & trapped feelings onto your spouse, so it's not alleviated so much as transferred, and 2) you'd be creating all new feelings of secrecy/ deviousness/ guilt/ whatever in yourself, presumably, which would offset whatever relief you got from the other bad feelings. Or at least, that's how I'd feel about it, so it would be a no-win.
Cool! Tia can share secrets, and I can screw around. I win!
I think 287 pretty much gets it right, in that I suspect the real moral arguments here boil down to "I would be really pissed, so I think it's wrong" or "I can imagine doing it, so I don't think it's always wrong." One's judgment seems pretty much to depend on whether one imagines onself in the role of the cheater or the cheatee.
"you'd be creating all new feelings of secrecy/ deviousness/ guilt/ whatever in yourself, presumably, which would offset whatever relief you got from the other bad feelings. Or at least, that's how I'd feel about it, so it would be a no-win."
Well, soitenly, which is why as Bphd said above, cheating is almost always bad. But if you don't happen to feel those things--and you're not a sociopath--I don't feel as if there are extrinsic reasons why it is bad in certain situations.
Also, Tia's inquiry was excellent. Probably a bit wierd to recieve, but I figure he probably deserves it after jerking her around.
when I was married, I wasn't jealous at all to begin with, but the cheating was done in a sort of insulting way, and turned out to be an early sign that there were lots of problems in our relationship. There was no way for me to be a good sport about it.
Sausagely does not sign himself Sausagely. He uses Saiselgy.
Which I've always pronounced in my head as "SAYZE-uhl-jee."
I don't think that marriage vows are any the less binding for being undertaken in part because they are conventions. And the fact that my wife and I have never formally discussed how we feel about cheating does not mean I have the slightest doubt we both consider the marriage vows binding. We were together four years before our marriage, and we had plenty of time to explore our opinions. We were fully informed in the premises.
It seems to me that a public solemnising, in front of your family and friends, is a freely-chosen act of some meaning.
I totally want to keep posting things under this pseud for those situations where I don't want my spouse and friends to find out about something I want to talk about. I think it's somewhat easier for everyone to know that I know who everybody is and that I get the in jokes. Plus, as stated elsewhere, I don't care if site admins know who I am.
Why would anyone want to enable, excuse, or have anything to do with such a person?
dude, baa, you've gotta look out for maximizing happiness!
One's judgment seems pretty much to depend on whether one imagines onself in the role of the cheater or the cheatee.
Yes, totally. But I think I also explained that it wouldn't work for me in the role of cheater either. At least in an emotional way. Granted, I'm not saying that the situation you cited is not one of the 1% of instances where the cheating is justified. I'd trust your judgement there; you knew him and the situation; your call, obviously. It's not a can of worms I'd like to open if it were me in his situation, I think, but I'm not and I can't say for sure.
I don't feel as if there are extrinsic reasons why it is bad in certain situations.
Well, I guess we'd have to outline the "certain situations," but as for "extrinsic reasons"--if I'm reading that correctly, you mean unemotional or rational reasons? I would say that lying is wrong extrinsically, and cheating=lying to your spouse. (Not that I've never lied, but I'd still say it's inherently wrong, and I try not to when I can, esp in regards to important matters.)
I think other people have mentioned the health risks, which I think might qualify as reasons it would be extrinsically wrong.
But really those are just ideas that I found to shore up my position. I think it's wrong because I feel it's wrong. And I'd hold myself to that standard before I held anyone else to it, excepting of course my significant other. Him I hold to any damn standard we've agreed upon, and hell on him if he chooses to change the rules without even telling (much less asking) me.
But there doesn't seem to be any real disagreement here: Everyone is saying cheating is almost always unethical, but sometimes forgivable. Just different visceral reactions.
At the same time, there's more heated arguments between the regulars than I can remember. Funny.
I think 293 is true, and I'm being a little flip in how I explain that. I just meant that Ogged's firmness about the importance of vows is, I dunno, something that I reserve for vows that are fully thought out and fully discussed. The seriousness with which I take marriage vows is part of why I talked them through so throughly with Mr. B. beforehand. It bugs me that so few people do that. But, I dunno, I just don't feel comfortable dictating that it's objectively bad and capital-W Wrong for other people to cheat simply because of some hard-and-fast-rule about vows. People feel differently about these things, and I think it's important to respect that folks can, in good conscience, reach different conclusions.
I would say that lying is wrong extrinsically
but I'd still say it's inherently wrong
Do I misunderstand the definition of extrinsic or do these two statements contradict each other?
Though the positions have shifted somewhat, I'm with Tia, Cala, and Ogged. Especially with Cala in 124 - baffled is just how I'd put it, too.
Anecdote makes not the rule, but my 'rents getting divorced was the best thing for them and for myself. Largely for the reasons BPhD used in 121 to argue the opposite point.
Cheating is the symptom - the divorce usually happens and, IM(limited)E, should happen because of the underlying causes.
274: Not terribly convincing. Where's his backstory?
Fuck, 298 was me again.
Re. my married guy (obviously I am feeling defensive); what bothered me so much about the situation was that he was unhappy, she was unhappy, and they had these young kids who he obviously loved dearly. But he wasn't willing or able to cut back on his career such that he'd be able to be more involved with the children and therefore able to take the risk of addressing the unhappiness with his wife. I actually talked with him about this quite a lot, and our relationship didn't last very long (though we periodically still send email once in a blue moon). It seemed to me just to be a really sad and tragic situation that he was in, partly, because he wasn't the kind of person who really thought through consequences very thoroughly b/c they might lead him to really agonizing conclusions. I really feel like the cheating was, what? Mostly a strange way of trying to ignore his own sadness. I think that what he liked about me was that I didn't let him do that, but I also did care about him. It seemed like he was someone who was trying to do the caring for, rather than being cared for, in his day-to-day life, and that most of his cheating was really just about sex and wasn't actually helping him much. It was just a distraction. I found it rather touching.
That, plus his dreams of setting up a dog rescue shelter really spoke to me.
There were more heated arguments, I should say.'
Weman, aren't Swedes supposed to be "sophisticated"?
No. I read about a poll a few years ago where Sweden had the lowest number who admitted to cheating.
Swedes perceive themselves as less cynical and wordly and more, well, moral than continental Europe, though more so when my parents were young.
We're definitely unapologetically moralistic.
No one really has to get married, but if you do, it seems that it should be taken for what it is, rather than whittled down.
302: This is a whole new topic, but I've felt for a long time that the reason why Scandinavian political institutions work as well as they do (pretty darn well) is that the great majority of Scandinavians are ashamed to cheat and really dislike cheaters. Not just on marriage, but on taxes and everything else. I see something of the same ethic in Minnesota; other places I've lived people often admire charming con men, but not here.
This is not at all inconsistent with single, uncommitted Swedes screwing a lot of different people. It isn't even inconsistent with open marriages.
And I actually can't place anything about eb's marital status or anything else biographical.
And here I thought that I'd been revealing more information over time.
I guess I'm just a total sucker, because I think B's married guy isn't a bad person for cheating, and I think Tia's Chet probably really does want to rescue dogs.
298: The nearest analogy to your situation I can think of in my own life consists in this: not every member of my family knows that I have converted to Judaism or that I have become an American citizen. I would not deny it if challenged, but it would do my relationships no good if I were to insist on everybody coming to terms with it. I know, small potatoes, but these are contentious issues for some people.
So that a situation where a formal wedding, in a church or synagogue, involving conventional vows that you do not in fact fully ascribe to, is an important milestone for your families is easy for me to understand and identify with. This despite the fact that the general spirit of the thing and of the vows is something you very much ascribe to. And the fact that you may, and probably should, have an explicit side-agreement about your actual commitment to one another, known to some of your friends and family but not to all, is too.
re: 299
Yes, Apo, I contradict myself all the time. I think I'm able to believe lying is both extrinsically and intrinsically wrong, though, in the sense that it can be wrong to those on the outside of my situation (at least some of them) and also wrong to me, personally.
I admit, though, that I was a bit befuddled by Glenn's original use of "extrinsic" and took it to mean something other than the strict definition.
You don't have to be killing people every second to be a murderer.
But what if no one finds out?? Are we really sure that what Jonathan Rhys-Myers' character did towards the end of Match Point was wrong?
Mine eyes! I've been spoiled!
Also, what about that ring, it was a little bit lame. And I was talking to a friend this weekend who had trouble buying the movie because he found Rhys-Myers' character unlikable from the start, and didn't see why women for falling for him and other people generally liking him. I disagreed, but having not seen the movie since it was in theatres, couldn't explain why.
The thing is, no matter how hard your situation is, the least wrong thing is always just not to cheat. So it's not some big dilemma. The answer's right there. Sexual deprivation sucks, but I've experienced it, and I'm sure a number of our fair readers are going through it right now. Sure you would get "comfort" from sex, but doing the right thing is not always comfortable. So I can sympathize with people who cheat in some circumstances, but in no case are they making the least wrong choice. (Unless there are the strong economic or cultural pressures I mentioned before.)
BTW -- the proper reply to Chet's "I'm going to respectfully decline to answer" would have been, "Fuck you, clown!"
I guess where I'm coming from is that the statistics I've seen show that divorce really fucks up kids. So I think that there are definatly marriages where there is bad shit between the adults that should stay together. Now, the best solution would be for some renegotiation between the adults, but in most cases, that simply isn't possible, especially with our messed up social norms. Given that, I just don't feel keeping vows is worth condeming people to unhappyiness. Insofar as cheating actually makes the cheater feel bad(re:296), then it's bad. But outside that, given suffeciently screwed up circumstances within the relationship, I can see it being justified.
One's judgment seems pretty much to depend on whether one imagines onself in the role of the cheater or the cheatee.
Disagree. It's really hard to imagine myself cheating, or being forgiving if cheated upon. But that sort of fidelity is really important to me. It might be different for others. When people get involved, they make a lot of explicit and implicit promises to each other. Some (a lot) of them are going to get broken. So how wrong cheating is, to me, depends upon how high up the list "fidelity" is. Basically, you get 100 promises, you get a guarantee on ten, and you get to pick the ten. All of this stuff probably gets worked out at the early stages of the relationship.
OT, but since SCMT is here: Will you not at last admit that McCain is just like the rest of those assholes?
Do the statistics on divorce and children's outcomes control for whether divorce was ever seriously considered, but then rejected solely "for the children"? I'd seriously like to know. I'd imagine that the level of functionality, happiness, and communication in families that have forced themselves to stay in tact for the children would be lower than in families that stayed together because they had some other elements to their bond, and children of the former families might have outcomes that look similar to children of divorce.
FWIW, as a child, I could never tell who had divorced parents. As a young adult, I still can't tell who had divorced parents. There are tells, however, about who had weird parents, or conflict-ridden home situations.
#302: Swedes perceive themselves as less cynical and wordly and more, well, moral than continental Europe, though more so when my parents were young.
But there really is a Swedish Bikini Team, right?
what about that ring, it was a little bit lame.
I thought the ring was a terrific twist. I guess, being a moral degenerate, you can't appreciate that.
I think they do control for that. I have the strong impression that my parents did (they separated for a year when I was in high school, and then split up for good when I was out of college). And I have the impression that doing what they did was worse for them, but much better for me and my sister.
Re: 317
I'm not sure if they did. It seemed like credible social research, so I imagine they controlled for stuff like that, but your hypothesis is also very plausible.
316: They're all jerks, Weiner, even ours. My OK'ness with McCain are is based on two assumptions: (a) his set of cultural values are much closer to mine than any other credible Republican candidate, and (b) he will reduce the influence of Southern Republicans. Point (b) is particularly important to me, as I think that influence is really pernicious (and basically explains (a)), and I think I can depend on him to reduce the influence out of simple self-interest.
But I've already said that I'll vote for the Dem candidate in '08. Even if it's HRC.
I have risen from the dead, for just this one comment, in order to praise Tia/Cala/Ogged, and those others who agree with them.
But more importantly: Woe unto all those who disagree that cheating on, and implicitly lying to, a lover is categorically wrong. Woe I say!
Anyone who thinks this is treating the cheated-on parter as a less-than-fully-equal independant moral agent is fooling themselves. And I suspect would unanimously feel differently if they were the cheatees.
I now must return to my grave.
Also, a relationship can be deeply screwed up without it being obvious in the "throwing dishes against the wall child-damaging" way.
What if I was in a relationship, but went to an Unfogged meetup, out of my other's zip code, and Fontana Labs was ready and willing? Surely you wouldn't tell me that that would be wrong.
I've just skimmed this page on metaanalyses of outcomes of divorce. It's just a summary, so maybe it's leaving something out, but there's no mention of controls for the motivation of the cohesion of the intact families (and it is mentioning other procedural details). Also, it says that the metanalyses are consistently saying the effect size for how much divorce fucks children up is small. Perhaps later I will look at the actual metaanalyses.
I actually think this is worth quoting in full, since, as Cala, said, there's been a bafflingly conservative insistence that divorce is the worst thing ever for children on this thread:
These four studies certainly do not represent all of the research on divorce, but they do seem to represent a summary of what is known. The results suggest that parental divorce can introduce risks for children who experience this significant life transition. It is important that these mild, negative outcomes are not overstated. The differences between children of divorced parents and those of continuously married parents are typically statistically significant, but the practical significance is minimal (Amato, 2001; Reifman et. al. 2001). Thus, considerable commonalities between groups tend to be evident, and there is a variety of outcomes for individual children. In the long run, most children adapt to their parent's divorce and demonstrate resiliency (Hetherington & Stanley-Hagan, 1999). The resources (i.e., emotionally responsive adults and parents, financial security, etc.) that are available to support the child in dealing with parental conflict and divorce appear to be strong correlates of positive outcomes when children experience family transitions.
Neat. Maybe what I read was an outlier, or just plain bogus. Especially in view of:
"Instead of viewing the actual divorce as the cause of poorer child outcomes, it appears that increased family conflict, disruptions in family relations and fewer economic, educational and emotional resources seem to be important factors in determining individual effects. In fact, it seems that the process of marital disruption usually begins long before the actual divorce occurs, and can be conceptualized as involving a predisruption stage-where family conflict, financial difficulties and other stressors begin to occur-and a crisis stage-during which children experience the actual divorce and accompanying transitions."
I think I'll change my position. Can I be un-Woed now?
B, I'll grant your point about the vows, though I do think if you're going to make them (as opposed to just say them for your friends & family), it's no excuse later to say that you didn't realize that it would be hard to keep your vows. What, our culture doesn't make a big deal about marriage? And what does seem to be wrong is deciding, that because you (general you here) didn't really think about it, you can change the terms of the agreement without consulting your partner. That's an argument for taking vows seriously, or only vowing what you mean, not for changing them without the other person's consent.
Again, you might be forgivable. But being forgivable doesn't mean you were justified. Taking an ethical absolute doesn't mean being heartless and incompassionate.
And it's not just moral relativism or that I can't imagine myself frustrated. I'm 2000 miles away from my boyfriend. I haven't seen him since March. I could be shagging philosophers like a rabbit and he'd never know. He could poink half the town and I'd be none the wiser. It's about as consequence-free a situation as one could hope for. I'm lonely and frustrated; I'm stressed with school. I don't get to go out on shiny dates and dance and have someone there to take me out drinking so I don't kill my students.
And I think I'd be an asshole if I just thought, gee, we said we'd be monogamous but it's hard, I'll just decide I couldn't have meant it.
I mean, I don't have dreams of opening a dog rescue center, but still...
--
On a lighter note, I don't think I could pull of pseudonymous pseudonymity.
For one, everyone would recognize the non-standard approach to grammar and sentence structure.
I was personally relieved when my parents divorced, but infidelity was the least of their problems. I'm not even sure if it *was* one of their problems. Throwing things most definitely was, though, mostly on my father's part. And one of the things he often threw was my mother.
Later, infidelity (his) contributed to my mother's divorce from my stepfather, and again my feeling afterward was complete and total relief that this jerk was out of our lives.
That's just my experience, though, not a scientific sample.
Maybe what I read was an outlier, or just plain bogus.
Yeah, and maybe, just maybe, there are people with culture war motivations for overhyping this stuff.
(Snark not intended for you, but for the culture warriors.)
The parish priest told my dad he should divorce my mom. My grandmother asks why my mom hasn't left him. Their marriage is a success only in that they haven't divorced. My dad has many wonderful qualities, but when he is angry or impatient he is emotionally abusive, and he defaults to angry.
I grew up hearing my dad call my mother fat, ugly, and me a lying sack of shit. I've heard 'any husband you've ever had is going to leave you.' I've heard complaints about how my mom is too attached to her family, how she didn't grow into the person he thought she would. I've seen my mom go to every family function alone because my dad hates her family. I've watched her cry and be afraid to ask him to smoke outside the house.
At other times he seems to recognize that he is lucky to have someone like her at all.
I'm not sure if we'd be better off if they had divorced. What might have been is hard to prove. But I worry that my model for how we should expect to be treated by a man is very, very bad indeed.
And if he had cheated on my mother, and tried to justify it by saying he didn't want a divorce for the sake of the kids, he'd count himself very lucky if I didn't rip his face off.
(Told you I couldn't pull off pseudonymity.)
Oh certainly. I'm usually pretty good at sussing out that type of bullshit, but when I was trying to find the study I read to link earlier in the thread, I was astonished how much "Center for the preservation of the family and the american way and all beef diets" there was. It's very possible I got snookered.
I refuse to read anything but quoted bits, but isn't this a bit bogus?
Instead of viewing the actual divorce as the cause of poorer child outcomes, it appears that increased family conflict, disruptions in family relations and fewer economic, educational and emotional resources seem to be important factors in determining individual effects.
This seems to be saying that it wasn't my trigger-pulling that caused the death; it was the increased bleeding and organ damage, etc. It's not like divorce has to be the proximate cause of harm.
When I was a kid (1st-2nd grade) we all thought that divorce was kind of cool, because you got to have two bedrooms.
And in highschool I knew a lot of rich kids whose parents were divorced. For them it meant that they got twice as many presents at Christmas. But for most people, divorce has serious economic consequences. Thus, "The resources (i.e., emotionally responsive adults and parents, financial security, etc.) that are available to support the child in dealing with parental conflict and divorce appear to be strong correlates of positive outcomes when children experience family transitions," seems wrongheaded to me. Divorce is likely to correlate strongly with financial insecurity and be a significant cause of it. Therefore I think that it's ridiculous to say that divorce isn't so destabilizing if we control for economic resources.
Well, but by the same token that "divorce isn't the worst thing that could happen to kids," infidelity isn't the worst thing that could happen to marriage, right? And the married people are adults, even. If anyone's going to make a sacrifice, it should be the grownups.
I thought more about the vows thing. I think part of what lies behind my feeling on that is that the cultural definition of marriage and its expectations changes so much over time (and across cultures). We assume that marriage involves not just committment and partnership but also sexual fidelity. To me, sexual fidelity is far, far less important than partnership and caring. Who my partner fucks doesn't have any effect on me whatsoever (disease risk issues aside). And it bugs me when people act like it's just perfectly natural or perfectly acceptable to just take it as a default that making a commitment to someone means giving up that kind of physical autonomy, and possibly giving up sex entirely if your partner gets sick, or becomes disinterested in sex, or whatever.
It just seems so obvious to me that splitting up a family is way, way worse than putting your private bits next to someone else's private bits. There's no moral equivalence there at all as far as I'm concerned. And yes: lying is bad, hurting someone is bad, all the rest of it. But infidelity doesn't necessarily involve those things, and to the extent that it does, this is because we assume that marriage = no fucking other people for the rest of forever. Which is FINE if people want to make that promise, but I just happen to think it's stupid to assume that that's the most important thing in a marriage. (Which let's be honest: that pretty much is the operating assumption of almost everyone.)
Damn. 338 was pwned by 337. NB: preview is your friend. Labs said it better too.
BG, the authors of that page were not saying that the correlation of economic resources with positive outcomes means that there's no problem with divorce. They're just enumerating the qualifications and details (same to you, FL). But the point is, across large numbers, with no controls whatsoever, the effect size is small. That doesn't necessarily mean anything for an individual family, but it does put a crimp in the "divorce is statistically bad for children, so I am justified in fucking George Michael in the bushes" argument. And I see no sign of controls for intact family functioning, either, so I'm not necessarily convinced that at least some portion of the (already small effect size) negative outcomes for divorced children are not a result of bad family dynamics that would have been present whether or not the parents had divorced, though if economic distress is part of it, that does seem a straightforward result of divorce, as opposed to the family dynamic.
Finally, children are not the only people in the world. Having them does not erase your moral obligations to your spouse.
Well, but by the same token that "divorce isn't the worst thing that could happen to kids," infidelity isn't the worst thing that could happen to marriage, right? And the married people are adults, even. If anyone's going to make a sacrifice, it should be the grownups.
I wrote a whole post about how infidelity was not the worst thing that could happen to a marriage. That does not make infidelity excusable, even if it is understandable. There is zero moral justification for unilaterally deciding that your partner is going to sacrifice actually knowing the status of your relationship for the children. If something needs to be sacrificed for the children, the right thing to sacrifice is getting laid.
I hate to be all moral relativist (or Kantian nihilist?) on every question, but every divorce is utterly different. Some divorces, especially very nasty ones, can totally fuck kids up. My divorce was pretty friendly, no lawyers involved, we still live in the same neighborhood, split everything (including custody) 50/50, the five of us (me, her, the current wife and the kid from each) do things together frequently, etc. All in all, about as good a situation as these things go.
Nonetheless, Keegan is something of a melancholy kid. Now, whether that's just his basic nature or it's a result of having his parents split up when he was three is difficult to say. My basic point, though, is that it isn't really possible to state that "divorce is bad for kids" or "divorce isn't that bad for kids," any more than you can for daycare vs. s-a-h parents, or fessing up or continuing to cover up infidelity.
Finally, children are not the only people in the world. Having them does not erase your moral obligations to your spouse.
Your spouse is not the only person in the world, either. Having one does not erase your moral obligation to your children. Again, marriages are as individual as people. Trying to fit all of them within a unitary rule of right and wrong is ridiculously reductionist.
But funny how everyone has an option that upholds every moral obligation currently in question to their spouse and their children just sitting there right in front of them....
Well, it's a confession of weakness. The position under discussion is someone who's thinking "I can't take this anymore -- I'm going to divorce or I'm going to cheat." You can certainly say "Don't do either -- suck it up and take it," but if you accept those as options, there's an argument that discreet cheating might be the least-harm choice, although less honest than divorcing.
I think the "then don't have sex" thing is just grossly oversimplified. Yeah, sure; people can go a long time without having sex. But going a long time without having sex with someone you love and are living with can be really, really fucking painful. And there's something grossly unsavory about dismissing that pain or using not having sex as a weapon, which is what it seems like saying "well then, do without" is, really.
Trying to fit all of them within a unitary rule of right and wrong is ridiculously reductionist.
pfffff. Someone is apparantly unaware of the categorical imperative.
345 pretty much gets it right.
345: And teenagers don't need abortions because they shouldn't be having unprotected, premarital sex anyhow.
351: It's actually not wrong to have an abortion. It is wrong to cheat on your spouse.
Plenty of people think it's wrong to have an abortion. But the point is, it's the same structure of argument.
(353 to 351)
In any case, I don't expect anyone to go without sex for truly extended periods of time. If someone's spouse is totally uninterested in sex, in a way that seems totally intractable and unamenable to any of the other spouse's efforts to work on the relationship, they are welcome to tell their spouse they need to look for sex outside the marriage. If the uninterested spouse needs to divorce them for that, that's a choice the interested spouse needs to allow the uninterested one. Doing otherwise is not respecting the uninterested one as a moral agent, as Cala and the risen one have said. (Again, barring serious cultural or economic pressures.)
If having an abortion were as wrong as those people thought it was, they would be right that teenagers should bear their children to term.
It's actually not wrong to have an abortion. It is wrong to cheat on your spouse.
According to Tia's book of morality, which you have every right to follow. But not everybody else does, particularly in regards to the first assertion. My point is that humans are fallible and fuck up all the time, and making a blanket statement that there exists a single, proper way to handle it post facto just doesn't ring true to me at all.
I'm not even talking about handling it post facto. I'm talking about the decision about whether or not to do it at all.
348: Indeed I am, but I do know how to spell apparently.
358: s/b "I do know how to spell, apparently." Or "I do know how to spell 'apparently.'"
Punks jump up to get beat down!
If two people who both take the "shit happens" attitude toward unfaithfulness join together in holy matrimony, it's jsut a matter of time before shit happens, and sort of a contest to see who gets there first. If there's an asymmetry of attitude, it can be pretty cruel and unfair. Even people who don't think that way can end up being unfaithful, but I'd say the "shit happens" interpretation makes it more likely. To me it's sort of like an auto mechanic who, if you ask if he does good work, says "Sure! But you know, shit happens." Of course, what he says is true, but it it's a bad sign when someone says it beforehand.
I confess that my high standards for relationships have a lot to do with my reluctance to get involved with one, but my reluctance also has a lot to do with my perception that almost everyone these days, including me, wants to take as much as possible while giving as little as possible, and that combined with almost everyone's uncertainty about what they actually do want, hope for, and feel that they have the right to expect, this means that relationships tend to be booby-trapped.
Grumpy enough for you?
Yeah, sure; people can go a long time without having sex. But going a long time without having sex with someone you love and are living with can be really, really fucking painful.
Exactly. I'm not sure the unmarried crowd is fully understanding.
Single people, try to imagine the greatest boyfriend/girlfrend you've ever had. You live with them, enjoy being around them, do things together, etc. And you'd like to be doing them several times a week. Only they won't. Either never, or maybe a token couple times a year. And you sleep in the same bed with that someone every night. Now imagine this has been going for years. But yet that person expects you to remain faithful to the marriage. That's not really comparable to being single.
Whatever. If I'm a drunk who promises my wife never to drink again, and I do, have I violated a vow? Yeah. Am I immoral in some way? Sure, why not? Does that understanding end up changing many behaviors? No.
People vastly overestimate the effect of their will, and underestimate the variety of circumstances they'll find themselves in thoughout life. If you want to control for this stuff, pick the right mate. My own suspicion is that his or her ability to stick to promises of fidelity or what have you is going to be determined by something other than either his promises or his willpower.
they are welcome to tell their spouse they need to look for sex outside the marriage. If the uninterested spouse needs to divorce them for that, that's a choice the interested spouse needs to allow the uninterested one. Doing otherwise is not respecting the uninterested one as a moral agent, as Cala and the risen one have said.
In relationships with children, it just ain't that simple.
People vastly overestimate the effect of their will, and underestimate the variety of circumstances they'll find themselves in thoughout life.
Just for the record, I don't. I wrote in that other post that I could imagine the circumstances in which I might be unfaithful. But it would be wrong. Because I do lots of wrong things.
364 gets it exactly right in a way that people without children simply have no way of understanding. I'm not trying to pull a wiser-than-thou here; there just isn't any way to conceptualize how having children changes every single aspect of your life until you have them.
364: Why does the cheater's perception of what is good for the children get to trump the cheatee's? Why does one parent get to decide? You can take it out of the realm of infidelity: what are the other circumstances in which one parent gets to make major decisions for the children that the other doesn't get consulted on? When is this right?
What are we even arguing about anymore? Look, cheating is wrong; are people seriously disputing that? It sounds like some of you decadent bastards just don't want to admit that you're a worse person if you cheat than if you don't. But, you know, tough noogies. Just how bad a thing it is to do, and how bad a person it makes you depends a lot on your spouse and circumstance--I can imagine anything from, "shit, who wouldn't have cheated in his place?" to "damn, that's a cold-hearted motherfucker." But can all you fucking nihilists at least admit that, questions of degree aside, cheating is wrong?
361 - I am ripping out my eyeballs in frustration here. WE AREN'T TALKING ABOUT FAITHFULNESS, WE'RE TALKING ABOUT HONESTY! If your life is so fucking miserable you feel you have to "go extramarital", fine. I don't care. BUT YOU HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO TELL YOUR PARTNER. Maybe you are too much of a chickenshit to do so, and maybe that's often forgivable and understandable and human. But let's not go pretending this is not wrong. If you think the relationship should stay together, "for the kids" or for whatever other reason, fine, MAKE THE CASE TO YOUR SPOUSE. Maybe if you trouble yourself to having the conversation about how unhappy you are and how you really need to get some on the side, that could spur on the discussion of why your SPOUSE IS SO UNHAPPY THAT HE/SHE DOESN'T EVER WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU, and maybe the two of you could talk through that, and perhaps even resolve some things. Now THAT would be good "for the kids." Or maybe you'll jointly decide that extramarital action is okay. Or maybe you'll jointly decide to get a divorce. THE POINT IS THAT YOUR SPOUSE WILL BE INVOLVED IN THE CONSIDERATIONS, AND WILL GET TO MAKE AN INFORMED DECISION ON HIS OR HER OWN TERMS. Again, go ahead and sleep around if you must, but inform your spouse of your plans (or admit to yourself that you are doing something wrong). Don't try and pretend like you are deceiving your spouse for his or her own benefit here. That's not your decision to make.
The abortion argument is not the same argument because there has been no prior vow not to have an abortion.
I do think it's suggestive that people with more experience with marriage, and particularly those with kids, are, in my experience, substantially closer to Apo's position than not.
What apo said in 366. I don't know how to explain it, or really if I can.
Note: I've been re-watching all The Wire episodes, so I'm going to be swearing a lot for a few days, you bitch ass motherfuckers.
I feel weird as part of the infidelity lobby, but an answer to the questions in 367 is that a parent's obligations to their children outweigh their obligations to respect the other parents' equal rights over their children.
Say I've cheated on my spouse. And say that I am certain that divorce will be, practically, significantly harmful to my kids. And say that I believe that my spouse is highly likely to divorce me if they know I've cheated. (I recognize that you can contest all these assumptions, but take them as a starting point.)
I'm obliged to use my best judgment to protect my kids from bad things happening to them, and I have good reason to believe that something bad will happen to them if I fess up -- I have a reasonable belief that my spouse will make a decision that is not in their best interests. At that point, my obligation to my kids overrides my obligation to respect my spouse's rights to make decisions for them. For a non-infidelity related possibility, if I were married to a Christian Scientist, I would lie and evade to get my children medical care -- my obligation to get them proper medical treatment would override my obligation to respect his rights to veto that treatment.
But can all you fucking nihilists at least admit that, questions of degree aside, cheating is wrong?
Ceteris paribus, sure. I just don't think that human beings function like. It might be different for you, robot.
Given my beliefs as described in this thread (in brief, you owe some duty of truth towards everyone you communicate with, this duty operates on a continuum which never reaches the point of perfect duty) and notwithstanding things I talked about doing IRL in the present thread, I agree with the majority of Tia's views as stated herein.
Anonymous Shouty Person in 369 is seriously losing perspective.
Tia, I assume. And I've been tempted to go the ALLCAPS route myself in the past.
Is anyone going to attempt to answer 367?
The only thing I can think of is: when you don't respect your spouse as a moral agent. Your spouse is crazy. You think your spouse will flee with the children to polygamist compound. Your spouse is too ill or immoral to be trusted as an equal partner in decision making for your kids. In any circumstance when you do respect your spouse's ability to make decisions for your kids, there's no reason why the outcome your spouse would prefer is better than the one you would.
On preview, to this: For a non-infidelity related possibility, if I were married to a Christian Scientist, I would lie and evade to get my children medical care
Yeah, exactly. It means you don't respect your spouse as a moral agent.
Oh, now that you say it in caps, I understand.
One interesting fact in the vicinity--speaking of the efficacy of the will-- is that people seriously underestimate the effect of sexual arousal on decisionmaking. (That is, they predict it has x effect; it really has 2x.) This is an important thing to know if you're going out to the bars.
No, it's never come up in my life, either.
I do think it's suggestive that people with more experience with marriage, and particularly those with kids, are, in my experience, substantially closer to Apo's position than not.
Yeah, me too. And like apo said, I'm not really sure someone can conceptualize it until they've been there. Lord knows I didn't.
Pick 1 of the following:
a. Cheating is wrong but people do it for various reasons.
b. Cheating isn't wrong under certain circumstances, but in other cases it is.
c. Cheating isn't wrong because under certain circumstances people cheat and those cases prove that the moral standard "cheating is wrong" is based on a mistaken understanding of human relationships.
there's no reason why the outcome your spouse would prefer is better than the one you would.
This should be "worse" obvs.
No, Ogged, I'm not arguing that cheating isn't wrong. I'm saying that the various absolutist statements of "you should either get divorced or be celibate before you go astray" are simply at odds with the reality of the human experience. I'm also not trying to defensively justify my own behavior here, if anybody is suspecting that.
Look, you all are perfectly free to insist that cheating is wrongwrongwrong and must be handled in X manner if you are going to maintain your standing as a moral and ethical person. And I will confidently predict that, over the course of your lives, most of you will cheat anyhow and you'll find the situation isn't nearly as black and white as you see it now.
All this "children change everything" jazz makes me so, so glad my partner and I never had kids. He was good enough at emotional blackmail as it was.
My favorite Ellen Gilchrist line, I forget from which novel: "You'd like to see me again? Great, get a divorce, we'll have lunch."
This whole question seems rather obvious, but not in the way Ogged seems to think it is. Cheating on your significant other is bad, yes, but it's not as bad as, say, taking the life of another human being, and even though killing is an atrocity that renders marital infidelity a trivial absurdity by comparison, there are obviously instances in which it's justifiable (self-defense). People who insist that there is no conceivable circumstance in which having sex with someone other than your partner without telling your partner first are not being terribly imaginative.
I'm also not trying to defensively justify my own behavior here, if anybody is suspecting that.
That's once. The prophecies say you'll deny me three times.
389: And then your cock will crow.
I'm not arguing that cheating isn't wrong
Then we don't disagree. I have no absolute opinions on what people should do in various circumstances, just as long as they hate themselves appropriately for doing bad shit.
Apropos nothing, I'm moved to wonder why I've never heard dirty jokes using the term "three hole punch."
385: But there is -- it's that you, for reasons that you believe to be good ones, think your spouse is wrong, and will hurt your children through their wrongness. If I believe I'm right, and I believe that the welfare of another for whom I am responsible hangs on getting a right answer, it doesn't make sense to be sceptical of my own judgment -- my own judgment is all I have to protect my children with.
(and sorry for thinking 369 was you -- it was just making the same points you were, and I could see a possibility that you might be hitting an ALLCAPS level of frustration with this argument.)
I'm not confident that I understand just what we're talking about, but I can imagine cases where covert cheating is the best/least-bad option. However, the cases I can imagine are also cases involving interesting attitudes toward agency, for example, where someone makes a (true) judgment that the partner won't respond well to discussion or determines that sexual frustration will lead to weakness of will in his or her own case.
Hey, let's write a paper on this!
Ogged has obviously changed the dosage of pain medication.
Also, Ogged, if I'm right in 394, *and* if there are no moral dilemmas, then your claim that cheating is always wrong is false.
391: Jeebus. Then that's the whole ballgame. Cheating is wrong. So is cheating on your diet. And speeding. Was that really your point? I think everyone thinks they'd rather not cheat, that it would be bad to cheat--many just acknowledge the possibility that it might be the least bad choice under certain circs.
How about: cheating is bad, but not that bad, compared with other things people do. So if you cheat, you should feel bad about it. Coming up with excuses for it, and in general premeditated cheating, are creepy, and will have the incongruous effect of making it harder for you to cheat.
"One interesting fact in the vicinity--speaking of the efficacy of the will-- is that people seriously underestimate the effect of sexual arousal on decisionmaking."
If she gives me a sign
that she wants ta make time
I can't stop! I can't stop myself!
Lightning striking agaaaaiin!
Lightning striking again and again and again!If she gives me a sign
that she wants ta make time
I can't stop! I can't stop myself!
Lightning striking agaaaaiin!
Lightning striking again and again and again!
But I think, based on rereading 391, that Ogged believes that there are situations where all of one's actions are wrong or at least merit guilt and self-hate.
I bet I can keep talking to myself for a long time.
I'll just say once again that 386 is pretty much irrelevant to me, because I very well might cheat. And it would be wrong. I think it's pretty unlikely I wouldn't tell my partner, because I think it's pretty likely I will marry someone who shares my values on this. Also, to admit something unflattering, I did once do something akin to cheating--I had unprotected sex during the period when I was non monagamous with G. It's a long story why; it's nothing I'd done before or hopefully will again, but my very first impulse was to tell him, in spite of all the consequences, and they were many: we largely abstained from penetrative sex for three months because I had become a disease risk, and we almost broke up at the time. And what I did was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Boy he was mad. And rightly. Because I was wrong.
Ogged believes that there are situations where all of one's actions are wrong or at least merit guilt and self-hate.
This, again, is why God gave him cancer.
400: Ogged's inner Catholic is clawing its way to the surface.
Cheating is wrong. So is cheating on your diet. And speeding.
See, that's exactly not what I'm saying. Cheating is wrong in a way that should really make you wonder about yourself as a decent human being if you do it. If you find yourself in a situation where it's your best option, you fucked up.
Look, nothing follows from being a bad person. All your friends might still love you. Shit, I might still love you. But you should still hate yourself.
401: It was brave of you to admit that, Tia. Bravo.
386=obviously right.
I think it is generally agreed that cheating on your spouse, like lots of other things, generally is a dishonorable thing to do. The disagreement is over what follows from that. I think we already had an argument on this, but one thing that defniately does not necessarily follow is confessing the infidelity. Generally--and all relationshps are different so I am not stating a rule--confession makes the cheater feel better but just adds hurt to betrayal for the victim.
. Cheating is wrong in a way that should really make you wonder about yourself as a decent human being if you do it.
What if, having lived a normal life that doesn't include cheating, you already wonder about yourself as a decent human being? What then, Mr. Smartypants?
You should strive to be a decent person, and the guidelines out there are really, really good to follow. But if you're sure you know what it takes to be a decent person, dollars to doughnuts says you're not one.
Although I have to say that it sounds as if Graham was more of a prick about it than he needed to be. If you were being non-monogamous (and so was he) presumably you were both having sex with people whose sexual histories you were uncertain of (as not being in a relationship with them and not having reason to trust their self-reports). If Graham was willing to have protected sex with someone whose history he had no real knowledge of, then refusing to have protected sex with you because he knew of one instance of unprotected sex seems less like caution and more like a passive-aggressive way of rubbing your nose in the fact that you'd been a bad girl.
(I could be dead wrong about this - if he had a general rule about no penetrative sex with anyone he wasn't in a long-term, trusting relationship with, then he's very cautious but not being a jerk.)
There are worse things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than cheating to get fucked.
412: LB should totally cheat with you, FL!
What then, Mr. Smartypants?
Then keep it up, you're doing great!
Only if he wears the red nose and baggy pants.
I'm not really sure someone can conceptualize it until they've been there. Lord knows I didn't.
Yeah, I hate the fact that saying "look, having kids changes things" is something that people get so pissed off about (and I used to get pissed off about it too, before I had kids, so there). I mean, in most other realms of life we accept (or we should) that people with first-hand experience have an authority that the rest of us lack. It's very frustrating to not be believed about things like the importance to little kids of having both parents around (and I don't care what the fucking studies show), assuming that one parent isn't abusive or whatever.
I don't think it's "failing to respect a spouse as a moral agent" to fail to tell your partner some things. I think it's consideration. And yes, it can also be a big fat self-serving rationalization. But standing outside of the situation and determining that it's the latter rather than the other--especially if you're making such determination with absolute certainty--is really hubristic.
just as long as they hate themselves appropriately for doing bad shit.
I know this is a joke, but I think it is a mean one. I'm pretty sure that most people who end up cheating hate themselves far more than most of us realize.
And FWIW, the certainty with which people declare cheating to be always wrong, to be always a betrayal, etc. etc., is almost certainly one of the reasons that people don't, as suggested, just discuss it with their partner. Because it's an absolutely taboo subject.
I can't believe Ogged is alone on his side of the argument. I side with 369 (the screamer) and O's 405. (Although not enough to get involved in this thread b/c I'm really busy.)
369 isn't me.
Plenty of people think it's wrong to have an abortion. But the point is, it's the same structure of argument.
Many valid arguments have the same structure. That doesn't make them sound. Any more than the fact that a pro-life position uses modus ponens means we have to ban it forever.
Which is FINE if people want to make that promise, but I just happen to think it's stupid to assume that that's the most important thing in a marriage.
I don't think it's necessarily the most important thing in a marriage, but here's the catch, a lot of people do and a lot of people, even ones who discuss their marriage vows ahead of time, seem to think it's pretty important within their own relationship.
If you don't, and your spouse agrees, more power to you and none of this applies. But if you partner thinks when you said you promised to be faithful, you meant it, you're not off the hook by pointing out that in some possible world, it wouldn't be all that important, if you know it is important in your own relationship. Deciding that by fiat is treating him like a child.
See the difference here. I am not saying 'fidelity is the most important value for me, therefore it must be for you.' I am saying 'if you and your partner agreed that fidelity was important, you can't just change that without consulting the other person without ignoring their agency.'
Now maybe there's cases where treating the partner like a child is appropriate. Insanity, Alzheimer's, belief that the person will become irrational and drown the kids, whatever. And maybe the disagreement here is simply that Tia and I think that there are a smaller number of cases like that out there than most, and we're not willing to accept 'but she might get jealous and divorce me, proving she's unfit to have an opinion on this' as one of them.
What set me off on this is initially, in the pre-coffee sense, wa the idea that the person cheating owed more to the person he was having the affair with than the person he promised to be faithful to.
What's Tia, chopped liver? She's holding up the Oggedian end of the argument quite well (or, actually, if you look at volume of posts, Ogged has chimed in to offer assistance on the Tian argument.)
Wow, this is the strange bedfellows thread.
the person cheating owed more to the person he was having the affair with than the person he promised to be faithful to.
Who said that? Because that is weird.
I don't think it's necessarily the most important thing in a marriage, but here's the catch, a lot of people do
Yeah, sure. But one of the main reasons for this is that we, as a society, make such a big fat fucking deal out of it. I mean, take the Clinton marriage as a high-profile example. She knows he cheats, she's still married to him. There are a lot of assholes out there who see this as a reason for condemning her character.
I just don't think it's okay to say, "well, a lot of people think fidelity is important" without acknowledging that that's not an entirely original opinion on their parts; rather, it's the default going-in opinion, and people think that because that's what they've been taught to think.
I know this is a joke, but I think it is a mean one.
Does it make it better if I say I'm totally serious? More shame and self-loathing for everyone, please. That goes for cheating and also for not confessing. You might find yourself in a situation where not confessing is better than confessing, but that doesn't mean you haven't fucked up.
Ogged, as long as you're here and the highest of moral standards are being upheld, do you still think torturing people to death in public is a neat idea?
And FWIW, the certainty with which people declare cheating to be always wrong, to be always a betrayal, etc. etc., is almost certainly one of the reasons that people don't, as suggested, just discuss it with their partner. Because it's an absolutely taboo subject.
I take the anti-cheating argument here to be more "don't cheat absent a discussion of what fidelity means to you both" than don't cheat at all ever. One of the outcomes of that discussion could be extramarital affairs are now ok, another could be divorce. The wrong is in the not discussing what the vows mean, not in the having sex.
425: There are, of course, many reasons why God gave Ogged cancer.
Really, I think guilt makes us better people. It's one of the best ways to not be sanctimonious. So in that regard, I'm with ogged.
422: That was me. I was saying that, given the man I was seeing had decided to cheat and was, in fact, a serial cheater, I felt he owed it to me to explain what his relationship with his wife was like if he expected me to be one of the people he cheated with.
I'm perfectly fine to say that that is *my* bottom line, and that it's quite cool for him to refuse to explain it and then I just won't sleep with him, no big deal. In fact I did say that I thought it was rather respectable that Tia's date retained the privacy zone rather than complaining about his girlfriend (or whatever). But yeah, maybe I'm a fucking hypocrite, but I think that if you are going to ask someone to join you in something that society generally condems, that it makes sense to give them a clear sense of why you think this situation is exceptional. If indeed you do.
427: If he keeps it up, Yahweh's definitely coming for his other kidney.
430: Oh, that makes sense -- not an obligation to you that overrides an obligation the spouse, but a set of minimum conditions for the affair.
I think guilt makes people into rationalizing assholes. A due sense of responsibility and ethics is more important than guilt.
I really think that empathy is better than judgment. And that empathy for oneself--and I don't mean rationalizing, or self-serving excuses, I mean genuine empathy--is a far better way of being a better person than sitting around feeling like shit.
I think guilt makes us better people. It's one of the best ways to not be sanctimonious.
The world has no shortage of sanctimonious people urging us to feel guilty.
this is when we used to say "a mind so fine."
I really think that empathy is better than judgment.
I know what department you're in.
I'm with ogged tia, and Cala, and like Becks, I'm completely astonished that not everyone is. Per Apostrophers 386, no, there is no one rule for true action. That's obvious, but it is also non-responsive. Not cheating on your spouse is not exactly a high fricking bar for moral behavior. It's less like speeding and more like betraying the one person on earth you have the most direct responsibility not to betray. If I say: "don't join punch some random 11 year old in the face" and you say "there's no one rule for action, life is so complicated." I think I am entitled to some puzzlement about what the hell you're thinking.
And just as an aside to Fontana, I think you can believe there are no moral dilemmas *and* feel ashamed at every choice that's facing you. You aren't ashamed at chosing the best possible choice (which, per ought --> can, is the moral action), but rather you are ashamed of course of life that has brought you to a position where these are your options.
I mean, in most other realms of life we accept (or we should) that people with first-hand experience have an authority that the rest of us lack. It's very frustrating to not be believed about things like the importance to little kids of having both parents around
Yeah, there sure is a lot of fucking certainty flying around here.
So, we're supposed to be able to cheat and not feel guilty about it now? I just can't get behind that. Maybe it's just because I grew up Catholic, but guilt exists for a good reason. If you can do something as big as cheating on your spouse and completely explain it away so you don't feel at all guilty about it, that's pretty sociopathic, even if there are some "legitimate" mitigating factors.
433: it can. but then you're shirking the guilt. accept the guilt and it might make one less sanctimonious on other matters.
guilt makes people into rationalizing assholes
You're doing it wrong.
So, we're supposed to be able to cheat and not feel guilty about it now?
Possibly the argument is that most people will feel quite enough guilt, and needn't be exhorted to feel more?
More seriously, baa, I think I can construct a case where bad feeling is warranted without current *or* prior wrong action.
You're doing it wrong.
And I feel terrible about it.
444: I don't think anyone's saying feel more guilty. They're saying feel some.
If we were all adequately guilty about everything, we wouldn't need to have this thread. This thread is indicative of our shirking of guilt.
I've alwasy thought guilt was the most useless and self-destructive emotion. Realise you're doing or have done something wrong and either change your behaviour or make up for it, or accept it and get on with things. What's the point of thinking, "oh, I'm so awful, I did so-and-so, I feel soooo guilty"?
Other than Ogged.
More shame and self-loathing for everyone, please.
I would never cheat on my wife because I am a nice guy.
Who said that? Because that is weird.
B, way back upthread. The cheater owes the potential affair an account or at least a partial account of why he's cheating; he owes his wife nothing similar. He presumably needs to respect the (we need a word for this.) as a moral agent; he gets to substitute his judgment for his wife's. So, by making a promise to someone, he has *less* duties towards them than to a normal person.
I just don't think it's okay to say, "well, a lot of people think fidelity is important" without acknowledging that that's not an entirely original opinion on their parts; rather, it's the default going-in opinion, and people think that because that's what they've been taught to think.
I'm sorry, this just seems wrong. To take a silly example, if I think that property is a social construction and that it's only 'society' that gave me this unoriginal opinion that people are allowed to own things, I can't use that as a justification for theft. I can use that as a justification for negotiating a new contract for myself, maybe, but I can't just decide to steal your stuff and say, "well, your opinion is unoriginal and unreflective."
Especially since for quite a lot of people, it *is* a reflective, serious belief that fidelity is important.
the point is that it keeps you from pointing out how horrible everyone else is. It keeps you kind. It makes you want to atone.
Baa, hitting a child in the face is nothing like cheating on your spouse. The first causes direct harm; the second does not. All the harm that comes from cheating is indirect.
And yeah, 443 is true. But I really think 434 is more to the point. Fine: in your own life/relationships/marriage, feel guilty. But passing judgment on other people and telling them how they should feel is sanctimonious. Refusing to participate? Fine. Thinking someone is a jerk? Fine. But somehow this whole "you should feel this way" thing just crosses a line for me.
Baa, here is your case, which is just the paradox of deterrence. You're the head of state, etc., I'm the opposite head of state, I have the intention to fire missiles at your civilians just in case you do not have the intention to retaliate after the fact. That is, I can be deterred only by your (sincere) intention. I stipulate that you cannot fool me, you shifty neocon motherfucker. Thus you might adopt the intention or not.
(a) if you do, you commit yourself to wrong action, and that merits bad feeling;
(b) if you do not, you fail to defend millions of civilians from hot fiery death, and that too warrants bad feeling.
QED.
without guilt we run around willy-nilly, doing awful things over and over again, and condemning each other. It's very necessary.
Before we go too far down the road of whether we should be talking about "guilt" or "regret" or "shame" or whatnot, I'll just say that I mean that people should face the badness of what they've done honestly, without trying to excuse it, and they should understand that what they've done makes a real difference in the kind of person they can think of themselves as, and that if they want to think of themselves as better people, they have to try to make amends and do better in the future.
What's the point of thinking, "oh, I'm so awful, I did so-and-so, I feel soooo guilty"?
Because the desire to stop feeling that yucky guilt feeling is precisely what will motivate you to act better in the future.
we're supposed to be able to cheat and not feel guilty about it now?
Maybe you can point me to the person making that argument, because I don't remember it being made.
So, by making a promise to someone, he has *less* duties towards them than to a normal person.
I think this misreads B -- she's not talking about duties the cheater owes her, she's talking about conditions she places on being willing to have the affair (knowing the cheater's justification, and accepting it as reasonable). Saying that the cheater owed her more than his wife would be saying that it would be worse for the cheater to lie to her than it was for him to lie to his wife, and I don't think she made that claim.
ditto for me.
If you stipulate that we are all fallible, and make mistakes, guilt is necessary to ensure that we don't keep making the same mistakes. It probably aids in empathy as well.
Agree with asilon. Guilt is only useful to the extent it modifies behavior. I'm not sure it's that effective; I know it doesn't yield any deep explanations for how you ended up in the place you are.
I think humility, not guilt, keeps people kind.
To take a silly example, if I think that property is a social construction and that it's only 'society' that gave me this unoriginal opinion that people are allowed to own things, I can't use that as a justification for theft. I can use that as a justification for negotiating a new contract for myself, maybe, but I can't just decide to steal your stuff and say, "well, your opinion is unoriginal and unreflective."
That's not so much what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that, given that we know that property is a social construct, it's shitty to say that anyone who steals for any reason whatsoever is therefore objectively a bad person and should feel guilty, because obviously everyone knows stealing is wrong. There are lots of reasons and situations where stealing is not only not wrong, it's absolutely right (e.g., the looters during Katrina).
the point is that it keeps you from pointing out how horrible everyone else is. It keeps you kind.
No, no, no. It absolutely doesn't. Empathy does that. Guilt makes you project and take out your neuroses on everyone around you. Social conservatism is entirely based on a culture of guilt.
I stipulate that you cannot fool me
LAME.
Did you hear that, motherfucker?
she's talking about conditions she places on being willing to have the affair (knowing the cheater's justification, and accepting it as reasonable).
I think it would be entirely reasonable to make this a condition for remaining in a marriage.
we should all feel guilty for a great many things, to the point that we cannot bear to tell anyone else in this thread--or even imply it--that they have done wrong.
then we should all move to new york and live together and make merry.
If someone is only motivated not to cheat on me because they feel guilty over it, I'm not interested. And I find it hard to believe that anyone who genuinely loved someone would want to control their behavior through guilt.
Ogged, you one-kidneyed cockmaster, who are you to tell me what my stipulations can be?
Why can't we have strong feelings re right and wrong without having to feel guilty if we fuck up? My sense of what's right is what makes me do the right thing, not some lingering guilt.
and they should understand that what they've done makes a real difference in the kind of person they can think of themselves as, and that if they want to think of themselves as better people, they have to try to make amends and do better in the future.
I agree with that. Though we probably disagree on the amount of self-loathing that's appropriate or useful.
Part of the problem here is conflating accepting one's own guilt, and trying to make others feel guilty. The latter is basically social conservativism, sure. But the former is just being a good person.
who are you to tell me what my stipulations can be
Look, peter puffer, if you're going to make lame-ass stipulations, why not contruct the case like so?
1) You ought to feel bad, absent any prior or current bad acts.
QED
469: Sure. But she's not claiming greater rights than the wife unless she claims that it is more wrong for the cheater to lie to her than to the cheater's wife. There's an obvious sense in which the partner in the affair is being treated with more respect than the deceived spouse, but that's not the same as claiming that the cheater is obliged to treat the partner in the affair better than the spouse.
471: I think you have eliminated all humans as possible mates. Luckily, there's still w-lfs-n.
473: we can. guilt reduces the amount of mistakes going forward, is what I'm saying. It's basically a stick.
So I think 457 is just wrong. I'm inclined to view betrayal as a canonical case of harm. Why do we need to cash out betrayal, lying, lack of respect in terms of sometihng else for it to be bad? This is like Michael's joke comment above about wanting to cheat with some scummy dude in order to maximize utility. When did we all sign on to hedonic utilitarianism? If you asked people, would they rather get punched in the face, or have their spouse cheat on them without their knowledge, I suspect you'd find *lots* of people would rather get punched in the face.
And that kid will get over it in like 15 minutes, especially if you punch like a sissy because you only have one kidney.
477: Yes, but B seems to be arguing that for a spouse to set such a condition (if there are children) is bad and selfish.
Hmm, I can see that a short sharp shock of guilt is sometimes perhaps a useful prod to make your amends and move on, but more often it just seems to be an excuse for people to indulge in self-hatred and whinge about how guilty they feel without doing anything to ameliorate the situation.
Of course if people do something wrong, they should understand it and not weasel out of it. That's not the argument here. The argument is whether cheating is always inherently wrong. I don't think that just because it would make someone feel bad that it's inherently wrong. And I do think that even if it *is* inherently wrong, that there are a *lot* of wrong things that happen in relationships--they're impossible to avoid--and that it's only one of many possibilities.
Anyway, I don't think that the people saying, "it's more complicated than just cheating is wrong" are in any way advocating weaselling or dishonesty. I think that, if anything, we're the ones facing up to fallibility in an honest way (not generally, or that we're better people--just in the context of this one specific discussion).
Why can't we have strong feelings re right and wrong without having to feel guilty if we fuck up?
Because then you wouldn't be cowed into torpidity by an all-consuming sense of self-loathing.
So for the most part, it's the married people with kids against the single people (and baa, but he's wrong about everything anyhow).
484: That's interesting. Is baa married with kids?
All the harm that comes from cheating is indirect.
Totally agree with baa's 479; this seems nutty. If I were to try to spell it out, I'd say that the relationship--and its promises, bonds, expectations--is like a real thing, and cheating breaks it. Even that gives up a lot though; I imagine most people would say betrayal is just wrong.
we've moved the goal post so many times here, I don't know where to run. you should all feel very guilty about that. I gots to go.
I'll just say, it seems like I'm hearing a lot more whining about not feeling guilty than I'm hearing whining about feeling guilty.
There's an obvious sense in which the partner in the affair is being treated with more respect than the deceived spouse
Sure, but that's pretty superficial. There's also an obvious sense in which the spouse is (often, not always) treated with more respect. For one thing, they are not made privy to wrongdoing. For another, they are not expected to accept some serious limitations on the relationship. For a third, if shit blows up, they get to enjoy the moral high ground and probably most of the social support--which of course isn't really going to make them feel a lot better, but nonethless, it's something the Other Man/Woman is not going to get.
And if I were making that argument, I'd be wrong. But I'm saying having agreed and accepted the terms (don't cheat), you can't change the terms that you've promised without doing something wrong.
This does not entail that I'm judging your marriage, if that's an issue. You and Mr. B. have worked it out explicitly what is and isn't allowed (and you've said so, which is why it is surprising me somewhat). It doesn't entail, also, that I'm judging every individual marriage; in any marriage but mine, I'll be ignorant to the relevant facts.
But the fact that I am in no epistemic position to judge doesn't mean that I can't think that there are rules that, if accepted, mean the cuckolded party has a right to feel wronged.
I just think there's a difference between me saying to my boyfriend, "hey, babe, this distance thing sucks six kinds of ass, let's see other people. even though we agreed we'd be monogamous, we're both miserable, so let's love the ones we're with" and thinking "i'm horny, i'm going to just change the deal" without letting him know or saying "hey babe, monogamy is just a social construct that is pretty meaningless so I'm going to go fuck that hot junior prof before he leaves town, and oh, by the way, if you decide you're leaving, it's your fault for adhering to that social contract, backward thinker."
I don't have much more to say on this, evidence to the contrary.
Saying that the cheater owed her more than his wife would be saying that it would be worse for the cheater to lie to her than it was for him to lie to his wife, and I don't think she made that claim.
The cheater owes her an honest explanation; if not, she's within her right to walk away and he's not free to have sex with her. The cheater doesn't owe his wife an honest explanation; he's allowed to treat her as a child in this. That means he owes the one the respect due an adult, and the other the respect owed a child or mentally incompetent.
Doesn't the argument go through with the weaker stipulation that you don't know whether you can fool me?
Look, peter puffer
An amazingly appropriate turn of phrase, given the millennia-strong movement to induce guilt in peter-puffers.
Yeah, 'obvious' shouldn't be read as 'all-encompassing'.
1) You ought to feel bad, absent any prior or current bad acts.
Funny, I thought that getting your ass kicked would be contraindicated right now.
The serious answer is because I took baa's challenge to be: "construct a case such that our actual norms for feelings say that bad feeling is warranted."
The argument is whether cheating is always inherently wrong.
Come on, that is not the argument. We'd be hard-pressed to think of anything that was always and inherently wrong. The argument, insofar as there is one, is about the fact that some people were like "cheating's not so bad, y'all and others were like, "is so!"
the relationship--and its promises, bonds, expectations--is like a real thing, and cheating breaks it.
If ogged falls in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear him cry, did he make a sound?
W/D, yes, as long as the probabilities are right.
486: What is the direct harm in me putting my pussy around someone else's cock? In what possible sense does that harm my husband, in and of itself?
some people were like "cheating's not so bad, y'all"
That really wasn't the argument, choad-smoker. Until B made it in 497.
What is the direct harm in me putting my pussy around someone else's cock?
B, first of all, the female is always the passive receptacle, but nice try. Second, you hysterical woman, there's harm only if you and your husband have an understanding that you will do no such thing; that's why baa was writing about betrayal.
Number of companies in Fortune magazine's major ranking!
Bitch, you're begging the question. If you think that direct harms have to cashed out in terms of pleasure and pain, for example, you won't think that infidelity is a direct harm. But Ogged and Baa have views of your husband's well-being that include, say, your actual faithfulness, as well as his beliefs about your faithfulness.
The argument in 497 has been a subtext throughout this thread. Or maybe I was reading too much into it.
Dressing casually for the opera totally harms other audience members.
Lookie, I weiner-pwned Labs, and now I have to go to the clinic. This is what they call a Phyrric victory, isn't it?
So for the most part, it's the married people with kids against the single people (and baa, but he's wrong about everything anyhow).
FWIW: I was married, and I'm in the Tia-Cala-Ogged camp.
The harm comes in the discovery, not in the act itself. If my wife doesn't know that I stick her toothbrush up my ass every night after she goes to bed, there's no harm unless she catches hepatitis.
Tia must have deleted that comment, Ogged; I don't see it.
This is what they call a Phyrric victory
No. Look it up, Mexican.
Utilöitarianism is bunk. Plenty of things are immoral even though they don't cause suffering. There's a moral obligation to treat people as adults, to treat them with respect, to not make choices for them. Betrayal is immoral whether or not it ends up causing any suffering.
a Phyrric victory
There's a funny taste in your mouth, but it's not ashes.
Maybe some couples who write their own vows now include expectations for toothbrush behavior.
489: Sure, the person being cheated on has a right to feel wronged! Of course they do! But because they feel wronged doesn't necessarily mean that the cheating was wrong.
What I would say w/r/t "having agreed and accepted the terms" is that, in my experience, it is impossible to really know what you are doing when you agree and accept the terms of marriage (or when you decide to have kids). So yes, in one sense, it's wrong to change the rules mid-game. But in another sense, every game is playing by its own set of rules that you really can't know in advance.
Which isn't an excuse for people to treat marriage casually. I mean, the vow wouldn't really mean anything if you could guarantee the future. But it's surely a reason to recognize that your bottom line isn't *the* bottom line.
My bottom line smells like Colgate.
There's a funny taste in your mouth, but it's not ashes.
Definitely not ashes. More like--wait for it--Ben's mom.
The harm comes in the discovery, not in the act itself
You don't get to assume that. I would, however, like to sell you an experience machine.
Is strasmangelo jones actually Isle of Toads?
Is strasmangelo jones actually Isle of Toads?
I had the same thought after reading 292.
Lookie, I weiner-pwned Labs
I think it's relatively safe to say that Ogged's weiner pwns no one.
there's harm only if you and your husband have an understanding that you will do no such thing
Okay, but then the harm isn't in the cheating itself; it's in the breaking of the vow. And there are lots of other things in wedding vows that get broken all the time, no? Do you always, 24/7, love your spouse? Not when he decides to bring the hose into the house to wash down the walls after you said it wasn't a good idea, you don't. Do you always honor him? Not when you tell other people about his bringing the hose into the house, etc. Are either of those by even the remotest stretch grounds for him to divorce me? Of course not.
501: I see what you mean about question-begging. I'm sure there's some way in which I can reframe things so that I'm not doing that, but at the moment it escapes me.
Is strasmangelo jones actually Isle of Toads?
No. Should I know who that is?
Toads: "Saiselgy": pronounced SAIZE uhl jee
jones: Which I've always pronounced in my head as "SAYZE-uhl-jee."
A commenter who hasn't been around much lately.
--wait for it--
This is the meanest thing ever said to me online.
Shit, why did I do that? Redact, redact, please redact!
the harm isn't in the cheating itself; it's in the breaking of the vow
These are the same act, though. The vow is a precondition for the cheating's being a harm, but there aren't two different actions here.
I'm just being bitchy because Ogged made me cry. Still right about my case, though.
No. Should I know who that is?
It was a commenter of old, who also really enjoyed hating on me. And "strasmangelo jones" kinda rhymes with "isle of toads," so I thought it was a possibility. Carry on.
523: I actually remember reading that comment, but always seemed to attribute it (and the pronunciation) to Standpipe.
Ok, don't redact, but I apologize for that harm that I could have caused if facts were otherwise.
At this point I'd have to say that cheating is always wrong, even if it turns out that you didn't have a spouse in the first place.
strasmangelo is usually over at Yglesias'.
Ok, I need to get back to bed and watch more Wire. Try not to steal your dying grandmother's jewelry while I'm away, people.
528: Well, I'm not really trying to hate on you, Ogged - in fact I think I first awkwardly delurked on the first "Ogged Has Cancer" thread to make with a token "please don't die." The "torture" thing was attempt to be snotty within the recognized boundaries of an Unfogged thread, and I'm sincerely sorry if that crossed the line (and in retrospect it really does like I did, and again, I'm sorry).
I've been skeptical of all the praise HBO shows seem to get - probably because I'm jealous for never having gotten HBO, but possibly because I've come to the conclusion that tv critics are bored with normal tv and automatically favor shows that can swear and show nudity - but the Wire is awesome. I still haven't finished season 2, though.
527: I dunno. What about Carter's having sinned in his heart? Or, the opposite case, rape? Being raped is obviously not cheating in any way, and yet technically it breaks the vow of absolute fidelity (and as we all know, there are people who think that being raped constitutes adultery). Both are extreme cases, but surely they point that the act of fucking/being fucked isn't the same as vow-breaking.
Less flammably, what about the situation where you get drunk at a conference and end up sleeping with someone else who is also drunk? Yes, in a sense, it's cheating, and yes, you'd probably feel ashamed. But I wouldn't consider it a breaking of the marriage vow in any real substantive sense (assuming it happened once and was genuinely unexpected, and that you realized that you shouldn't get drunk at conferences). That is, I wouldn't count it as a deliberate betrayal.
Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but I can't get past the feeling that saying that (sexual) betrayal is "a canonical case of harm" is a real oversimplification. There are, after all, degrees of betrayal, yeah?
Although this: rather you are ashamed of course of life that has brought you to a position where these are your options. I think, is probably psychologically realistic and sound. At least, I would think one would regret and feel bad about a situation that led one to cheating. I'm not sure, however, that it necessarily follows that one should feel guilty about the cheating itself, depending on the circumstances. I'd certainly say that my married guy felt bad about what had happened to his marriage; I don't know if he felt bad about the cheating itself. I didn't.
538-- being raped doesn't break a vow of chastity because it's not an action; it's something that happens to you but not something you do. Ak. Sorry, this is a long question and I need to make dinner. I'll reply to it later, or email me.
what about the situation where you get drunk at a conference and end up sleeping with someone else who is also drunk? Yes, in a sense, it's cheating, and yes, you'd probably feel ashamed. But I wouldn't consider it a breaking of the marriage vow in any real substantive sense
Excuse me while I scoop up my eyeballs and pop them back into my head. This is what happens to you if you don't listen to A Prairie Home Companion.
534: Just fyi, the torture thing was what got me banned. I think there's an uncrossable line there between entertaining a specific argument as argument and attributing to people (O. specifically) something that in fact he finds completely heinous. Anyway, it's really the one instance I've seen of there being a clear line That Is Not To Be Crossed with normal snottiness.
Yeah, the drunk at a conference thing is certainly a breaking of the marriage vow. However, it also isn't the sort of situation everybody seems to be positing where you are an asshole for not discussing it with your spouse first. And, I'd reckon, is at least as common as the premeditated affair.
540: I, personally, have never fucked anyone at a confeerence, and never intend to do so. It's icky. But that has nothing to do with my feelings on cheating.
541: And jones has been duly banned for it. See 535.
In Lake Wobegon, all the children are above morality.
I didn't say it wasn't a breaking of the vow; I said I wouldn't consider it such in a substantive sense. Anyone here who hasn't done something stupid and regrettable when drunk that they wouldn't ever have done sober?
544: Yeah, but I was explaining b/c I don't think he knew the history, which would have helped him avoid the error.
Also I thought you were banning him for being sincerely sorry and apologizing.
Raises hand.
It's a wonder I lived through the summer between my junior and senior years in college. I was living in a small apartment building with porches all up the back of it, and every time I got drunk thought climbing all over the outside of the porches was a peachy idea. And I got drunk a lot that summer.
This is not an exhaustive list of things that were a bad idea I have done while drunk.
547: Actually, I was just kidding when I banned him.
I don't get why cheating is a betrayal. Betrayal of what? Marriage or relationship vows? The other person?
If I promise someone to have an exclusionary relationship, and I cheat, who or what have I betrayed? I've broken a promise, that's what I've done. I haven't betrayed anyone or anything.
You can betray your country, not your lover.
This betrayal/guilt and other heavy-freight words seem to me to load the relationship thing with a lot of justifying-jealousy-type baggage, and I think jealousy is for the birds.
If cheating endangers a relationship, that relationship wasn't worth having in the first place.
549: I realized that. I was over-explaining, I guess.
Actually, I was just kidding when I banned him.
LizardBreath is banned!
547: I did know the history, actually - or at least I knew you'd gotten banned. I was just running on autopilot with the snottiness and should've known better.
Also I thought you were banning him for being sincerely sorry and apologizing.
So did I. Earnestness is also banned!
Oh, well in that case you have betrayed your vow to Unfogged and must feel guilty immediately.
This discussion has become so floppy that I don't know whose side I'm on anymore. I think asilon's, as far as I can make it out.
1. Cheating is bad. You shouldn't do it. I think this is true because it leads to bad outcomes. Beyond that, I still don't understand why anyone cares.
2. If you do it, then you should sort out how not to do it again. If guilt's involved, bully for you.
3. If for some reason you can't do #2, figure out the what the least bad course of action is and follow it. Don't think that the guilt is somehow payment for the bad act. (I think a lot of people do this.)
4. Cheating is a betrayal of your spouse. My sense is that you are going to betray your spouse in many, many ways over the years, and it's really not clear to me that cheating is the worst of them. The primary reason we fixate on cheating is because it's easy to recognize. Don't kid yourself and think that you're a decent spouse if you manage not sleep with someone else.
But I'm not sure I even understand what's actually at issue anymore.
But I wouldn't consider it a breaking of the marriage vow in any real substantive sense (assuming it happened once and was genuinely unexpected, and that you realized that you shouldn't get drunk at conferences). That is, I wouldn't count it as a deliberate betrayal.
It would count as a betrayal, but assuming good faith, one forgivable if the person is contrite and takes steps to ensure it won't happen again, like not getting drunk at conferences.
But we were talking about far different situations, where there was a lot of premeditated rationalization going on. That does seem to be deliberate, and not exonerated nearly as easily.
But, you're right, it doesn't seem to be just about sex. Which is why I never framed it as 'fucking other people is wrong' but as 'deciding that you get to make important moral decisions on behalf of your spouse just so you can fuck other people is wrong, if the spouse is a moral adult.'
'deciding that you get to make important moral decisions on behalf of your spouse just so you can fuck other people is wrong, if the spouse is a moral adult.'
I guess I don't see how cheating and lying about it constitutes making moral decisions on your spouse's behalf. I remember Tia's argument that saying, "I won't tell b/c I don't want a divorce b/c we have kids" constitutes making such a decision, and I can see that (though I think it's extremely oversimplified). But how is cheating and lying making a moral decision for your spouse? Isn't it at most making a moral decision for yourself (I think cheating under the circumstances is okay)?
deciding that you get to make important moral decisions on behalf of your spouse
What moral decision are you deciding for your spouse? You are making one for yourself, but it isn't affecting your spouse's morality at all.
The decision being referred to is, I beleive, that your spouse can't handle item of information X in a reasonable way, and so you shouldn't tell them.
Well, for one you're getting to decide that she or he is forced to live with someone who is cheating on them. (Moral decision was a misspeak) Shouldn't they get a say in whether they want to have a part of it, if you're making a deliberate decision?
But yeah, Cala, back to what you were saying earlier about whether I was taking the anti-cheating argument as a criticism of my marriage. No, I'm not taking it personally; but I think that the reason my marriage is open is because Mr. B. and I agree that cheating is a silly reason to divorce, rather than the other way around, if that makes sense. We did start with the "getting drunk and ending up in bed with someone is a betrayal, but it's a minor one, and who cares?" argument; more importantly, I just think it's extremely unrealistic to expect someone to remain sexually faithful for 50 or 60 years. Yes, people do it; but I think most people don't. And I think expecting it is holding someone you love to a really strict and unforgiving standard.
So I guess the real reason I defend the idea that cheating isn't so bad is that I really think that in many ways failing to forgive someone for minor slipups is worse. And I really think that a person who is considerate of their partner's feelings and a good spouse in most ways, but who also happens to be a horndog is a much better partner than someone who remains faithful but is, say, a jerk about sharing the housework.
Betrayal in the sense of be false or disloyal to.
I agree with SCMTim, except for the "it has bad consequences" part. This maybe more moral philosophy mumbo jumbo than anyone wants. But consider the following:
1. Losing $10
2. Having a headache
3. Having your spouse deceive you
It just isn't clear to me why 1 and 2 are obviously bad in themselves but 3 is only bad if it leads to 1 or 2.
I think my disagreement with ogged, Tia et al. is the following.
Yes, absent some agreement with your spouse that sexual fidelity is not expected or some exceptional circumstances, cheating on your spouse is a bad thing to do. A dishonorable thing of which one should be ashamed.
The disagreement comes from what follows. To play the I'm-old-and-seen-a-lot-of-life card, I can tell you that the opportunities over the course of your life to fail to act honorably and in conformance with your obligations to your spouse and children are legion. Unjustified anger, insufficient support, too little attention, too little trust, failing to compromise your needs for theirs and the list goes on. And on and on and on. It is a part of life that even the best of us have to life with--we will fail to fulfill our obligations.
This does not mean that you are evil when you fail to fulfill your obligations to your spouse. When I think of the persons I admire most in life--my father and my best friend (who, sadly, I do not see much any more)--even they were not perfect. No one is.
So, the point is, it ignores the reality of life to say, as I believe some were implying, that the failure of cheating is perfectly avoidable or unforgivable in a way all the many other failures to live up to what is expected of us is not, or that one is somehow bound to jeopardize a marriage or a family because of that failure, even though all of the many other failures may, ultimately and cumulatively, be much more hurtful. If we were forced to carry the weight of guilt and self-loathing being recommended by some here for each of the myriad failures to fulfill our obligations as spouses and parents, we would not make it to 40, much less to a 40th anniversary.
On preview, SCMT and B.Ph.D. have made this point better than i, but I am tired of deleting comments afte writing them because I write too slowly, so I'm going to post this anyway. So there! And I do not feel guilty about it, either.
I brought it up because about once a month you get a newbie who says 'Wait, you have a boyfriend and you post about it on your blog? Are you cheating on Mr. B? IN PUBLIC!!!!11!!'
And your response isn't 'Cheating is no more important than forgetting to take out the trash' but 'Mr. B. and I have an open marriage, no worries.' And to me this implies that the reason your open marriage is okay is that you two have agreed that this arrangement works, and that if you were sneaking around behind his back, there would be something wrong with that.
I think many instances of cheating are or should be forgiveable. I am probably not capable of it; I'd probably think, I don't want to worry every time he goes to a conference, fuck him, and leave. And if he told me he was cheating because he knew I was chronically depressed and figured it was for my own good that he went somewhere else to get his rocks off, there's be no question.
And I don't think, in the second case, it's because I'm jealous; I think it's because I see no reason to hang around with someone who treats me like a child. Fuck him; I deserve better. (And thanks to feminism, I'll have an income and he can pound salt for all I care.) Maybe I'll become a doormat and more conciliatory once I'm married and my husband decides I'm fat and unattractive and boring with the philosophy and the kids; but isn't that sort of sad?
Ah. Well, the real reason I say "open marriage" (but I refuse to say "polyamorous") is because it makes other people feel better. We arrived at that point because we agreed that sneaking around behind one another's backs *wasn't* a big deal, and once we realized that, there was no reason to lie about it. In other words, being okay with the sex made it okay to be honest, not the other way around. (Which is why I think that if a partner is *not* okay with the sex, it might be the better part of kindness not to upset them if you yourself know that you have no intention of leaving them, still love them, still find them attractive, etc.)
Re. depression, I'm actually pretty forgiving on that one b/c of my own. The 18 months or so when I was pretty severely depressed were probably the hardest part of our marriage to date, and particularly so for Mr. B. I don't think it's necessarily treating a depressed person like a child to hide from them one's own moral failings (though I also don't advocate protecting them from everything). I really think that what one does in that situation is so hard to predict that it's impossible to pass blanket rules for it. I would have felt terribly betrayed and angry if Mr. B. had left me b/c of the depression; at the same time, in many ways, I would not have been able to blame him for doing it.
564: But 1 and 2 aren't moral failings, or blameworthy. The meaning of "bad" in those situations is completely different.
I don't know about a blanket rule, but I think, having dealt with severe (and unmedicated!) depression, I'd rather have a person decide to leave than decide it gave them quasi-parental authority over me.
Oh, and also: I said way upthread that I think it's permissible to hide a one-time affair from a spouse, all things considered. But I don't think you can use someone's depression as a reason to assume that her moral agency just no longer applies, and decide for her that 'faithful' means 'have fun, wear a condom!'
564: Plus, I'd say that "false" and "disloyal" and "being deceived by" happen in marriage all the time. It's weird that we consider sexual betrayal, which really doesn't affect us directly at all (necessarily) worse than, say, the betrayal of being married to one's job, or being disloyal by telling embarrassing stories about one's partner at parties, or false by fibbing about things like having forgotten to take out the trash.
I'd even go so far as to say that the importance of sexual fidelity has a lot to do with the patriarchal history of marriage, but I don't think anyone really wants to get into that argument at this point.
569/70: I don't know that I see cheating on someone who is seriously depressed as treating them like a child, or as deciding that faithful means wear a condom, though. I see it as a rather desperate, understandable need for some kind of emotional connection, because most depressed people really aren't capable of much of that. And I see the lying about it as a way of protecting their feelings at a time when they're really vulnerable, rather than as a way of making a decision on their behalf.
(Which is why I think that if a partner is *not* okay with the sex, it might be the better part of kindness not to upset them if you yourself know that you have no intention of leaving them, still love them, still find them attractive, etc.)
I've got a good thing going here. I have a partner I love and want to stay with and I have sex I enjoy on the side. (Sure there's a disease risk. Sure there's the possibility that birth control will fail and I might have to take on responsibility for a(nother) child. Sure the other person could turn out to have a character that I misjudged and could show up in my or my family's life in ways I didn't expect or want. Sure those things could affect my partner. But I'm careful. I'm trustworthy. I know myself and I know what I'm doing.) Why would I want to ruin a good thing by telling my partner, whose own sense of morals don't accord with mine? It's for my own good and my partner's that I keep this and any other affair a secret.
No doubt it does, but I'd also say all that aside, taking out the trash doesn't have the potential to create emotional intimacy. In a world with no patriarchy, I think sex would still be pretty important, and while monogamy might not be as common, when it was chosen, it would still feel like a betrayal if the other person decided they no longer cared.
(Does patriarchy include a thesis that says there was a time before it?)
And plenty of people get divorced over money, or small lies, or "irreconcilable differences". You don't have to think that infidelity is religiously prohibited in order to think it's serious, and more serious than many other things.
573: I think that all things told we have to assume that some people are not just rationalizing bad behavior, even if we think their behavior is bad. There is a difference between genuinely doing something suboptimal in good faith, and excusing oneself out of cowardice or selfishness. And ultimately I really think that only the person involved and perhaps their very close friends can really know the difference.
taking out the trash doesn't have the potential to create emotional intimacy.
I really don't think this is true. I think that minor selfishnesses that create more work for your partner, or that really upset your partner, or that you've agreed with your partner you won't do, seriously undermine intimacy.
I see it as a rather desperate, understandable need for some kind of emotional connection, because most depressed people really aren't capable of much of that.
Can't you forge a connection with others without violating a promise, though? (I am tempted to say: can't you just go ballroom dancing?)
575: Even if that's so, wouldn't we be better off with the prohibition saying 'cheating is wrong' as a standard for people to try to hold themselves to so they don't rationalize every selfish impulse as one of those exceptions?
576: So, if I take out my neighbor's trash, I'm likely to forge as much of a bond with him as if I started sleeping with him?
577: Sure. But why is ballroom dancing and forming intimate connections with people there--not to mention spending the time and money for classes and cover charges--*inherently* better than fucking someone else?
I understand that the partner might feel very differently about it (although I think that plenty of people are very jealous of their partner's time-consuming extracurricular activities). But I don't see why that difference in feeling is one we grant so much more importance to. If I'm jealous of my partner's ballroom dancing, people will generally tell me to join him or get over it; if I'm jealous of him occasionally fucking someone else, people will tell me to divorce him.
578: Well, we have such a prohibition.
Re. trash, I would say that if you regularly go over to your neighbor's house and take out their trash--like, every week--your partner is going to wonder what the fuck is going on. Anyway, you're oversimplifying; it isn't trash per se as much as it is the daily lack of consideration in small domestic things. When there are conflicts over housework, we try to fix them and if we can't, we try to learn to live with them, or to hire a maid, or something. Divorcing over housework seems extreme (though in some situations, I'm sure we'd think it justified). But I think that it's way more inconsiderate and unkind to a partner to refuse to do housework than it is to have sex with other people in and of itself, absent other kinds of jerkiness.
B says:
I'd even go so far as to say that the importance of sexual fidelity has a lot to do with the patriarchal history of marriage, but I don't think anyone really wants to get into that argument at this point.
This is precisely the point. A lot of this thread is a lame defense of sexual fidelity, and I think it's time people face up to what sexual fidelity is all about. Sexual fidelity says, listen, because I'm fucking you, I have the right to tell you that you're not allowed to fuck someone else.
This worries me. If it's not patriarchal, it's at bottom rather capitalist. It says, "I own your sexuality because you're sharing it with me. I am the master of your cock/vagina because I stick my cock in your vagina or my vagina sucks on your cock."
Sexual fidelity is a sick exercise of power, not some sanctified obligation. It sucks.
(cont.) And if you take out the trash occasionally to be neighborly, yeah, you do form a bond with the neighbors. That's why you do it.
By the same token, having a one night stand doesn't necessarily forge intimacy; and having a casual affair might very well form the kind of friendly bond that one has with the neighbors for whom one takes out the trash, without being a real threat to the marriage.
Sexual fidelity is a sick exercise of power, not some sanctified obligation.
Yes, and the two most relevant parties having agreed to the arrangement with due reflection doesn't change things at all, they're still both engaged in sick exercises of power over the other. Or, maybe it's possible that even with the history of marriage some people can do their best to think about where that cultural norm came from, and, even knowing they can never fully escape it, decide whether or not to embrace it.
Oh no, this isn't going to become the "is sex more intimate than household chores" discussion. We were talking about sex because that was the behavior at issue in the post. The moral discussion in this thread has been about whether it's ok to do something you and your spouse have agreed you won't do, and further, whether it's ok to then keep that knowledge from them. If you promise not to play poker with the boys, and then go play poker with the boys, that's also a betrayal, and you're a bad person for doing it. It's a fact that most people will be more upset with fucking than playing poker, but that's a side issue.
And I really think that a person who is considerate of their partner's feelings and a good spouse in most ways, but who also happens to be a horndog
I just don't think we see this combination of traits so very often. Most of the people I've known who were habitual cheaters were dicks about helping with housework or anything else. Because they were busy.
Of course more people will be upset over sex than with poker. I'm saying there's no real reason that we value the one more than the other, is all. It's not fair to abstract the issue of "if you make a promise, don't break it" from the fact that the issue people think is important to promise about is sex.
Sexual fidelity is bad for capitalism because it prevents the owner of the "means of production" from fully commodifying "labor" in order to accumulate capital in the form of more spouses. The marriage contract ties you into one form of production and if it looks like "returns" will be better if you "invest yourself" in someone with "better assets" no matter how much you feel like you'd enjoy opening a new account and having your "interest compounded" on a regular basis you can't do so. "Diversification" is not an option.
Because you didn't promise never to ballroom dance with someone else. You promised not to have sex with someone else. And, indeed, if the ballroom dancing sucked up all of your emotional energy, your spouse would probably complain.
Now, you may think, as Adam Ash does, that that sort of promise is stupid and we should all refuse to make such a process and scorn anyone who does. Bravely, I imagine. While waving a red flag on the barricade.
But on balance, it's at least as important as other promises, and probably more so because all things being equal, it seems that sex is a more powerful and intimacy creating force than lots of other marital promise-based relationships.
You want to argue that it's just the society or hormones or patriarchy, and there's nothing more to it, fine, but I've seen teenagers go crazy to have sex but not so much with the trash removal, y'know?
The moral discussion in this thread has been about whether it's ok to do something you and your spouse have agreed you won't do, and further, whether it's ok to then keep that knowledge from them.
I think there are two issues here, though.
1. If you break the promise, how awful is it? (And I think that's where B's trash thing comes in.) That probably depends on the individual agreement between the spouses.
2. What are the terms of the agreement, and do they silently change over time? I can see that happening--I think it happens all of the time. In fact, I suspect the classic change of agreement happens with kids. Every parent I've ever known says it's life changing in a hundred different ways. Neither of you agree to the changes--they just happen. And, in such cases, I can see cheating moving silently down the list of promises made.
Polyamory is bad because one's "assets" are "inefficiently" "divided" and lead to bad "returns" on one's "investment", often tying up "capital" for "years" and "years".
This is a fun game.
I think that the anti-cheating argument is using both sides of the fence. If sex is more important than taking out the trash--teens go crazy over it--than it's surely a harder impulse to squash, and therefore more forgivable if someone fucks it up. And I do think that sexual fidelity is important b/c of patriarchy and the idea of sex as property--which doesn't mean that I think people's feelings on the issue are unimportant. Just that they shouldn't be assumed to be unquestionable.
Anyway, re. mcmc's comment, I am not saying that cheating is usually just hunky dory. I'm saying that I think it's more often than we realize not just simple assholery.
587 is nonsense; people regularly divorce their partners and marry someone younger and fresher.
588:
I'm not saying it's stupid to promise sexual fidelity as a necessary ingredient of a relationship.
I'm just saying sexual fidelity is a sick exercise of power. And that if you regard sexual fidelity as a necessary ingredient of a relationship, you're not giving your relationship much of a chance, or any dignity at all.
Sexual fidelity is simply an expression of jealousy and ownership, both of which are inimical to having a good relationship. Sexual fidelity is about exercising power over your lover, and limiting their freedom. It sucks.
The world would be a better if we could all fuck whom we feel like fucking whenever we feel like fucking them -- and at the same time invest enough intimacy in our relationships so that a fuck with someone else won't put our relationships at risk.
587 is nonsense
Well, duh.
Except divorce without infidelity is not infidelity. Divorce and remarriage is not polygamy. So if the argument is that marriage has a function within capitalism, and by marriage we're including the possibility of divorce, fine; if the argument is that sexual fidelity within a relationship is a capitalist relationship because - well, I didn't quite get the because - then: whatever.
Ogged, you're just looking for a way to make people feel bad. I sentence you to a long and detailed discussion with Adam Ash about the nature of cockmastery.
Nearly 600 comments and no one's touched on the genetic theory of the fidelity/infidelity game? For shame.
I politely bow out of any discussion with Ogged's cock.
Just that they shouldn't be assumed to be unquestionable.
And I don't think anyone here is making that assumption. I mean, I disagree, but that doesn't mean I haven't thought about it.
Adam, I don't get how you can hold that counting sexual fidelity as a necessary part of a relationship is a sick exercise of power without that entailing that it's wrong to promise it.
Honestly, I don't even understand 594.
I've been trying to catch up with this thread all day and finally made it.
First off, Bitch has been completely right throughout and those who are arguing with her ought to stop.
The basic concept of a marriage or a relationship floating around here seems to be that the fundamental rule is don't fuck other people and everything else is negotiable. That's bizarre. People keep hammering on the idea that fucking someone else is a betrayal, a lie, etc. Why? Because you signed on to a deal that you wouldn't fuck other people. Why's that the deal? Because it's the deal. Well then.
When I think about fidelity, I think about being with somebody through tough times and easy times, having fun together and a history together, building a life. Where our respective naughty bits are when we're not together isn't exactly the core of the relationship.
There's certainly a strong "don't fuck other people" expectation built into modern romance, but what is that really? I think it's less about where the naughty bits are and more about two higher obligations: don't leave me and don't embarrass me. When pretty much everything in a relationship is negotiable, we cling to sexual exclusivity as a marker of commitment, and if the exclusivity slips we fear that the commitment will slip with it. But it's the commitment that really matters, not the naughty bits. And nobody wants their friends to see them as cuckold, weakling, fool. Really, I don't think the social imperative is so much "don't fuck other people" as "if you catch your partner fucking other people, you must immediately terminate the relationship on pain of being declared a pathetic doormat if you don't." That's just stupid.
It's very strange that I find myself out on the radical fringe on this topic. I'm not like that IRL.
And lastly, I gotta say that I find it a find it a little jarring to be able to throw out the parts of traditional sexual morality that would view finding casual partners on Craigslist as immoral while simultaneously insisting not only that a guy who's doing exactly the same thing, but who is in an existing relationship of some undefined nature, is an obvious asshole, and that the moral rules by which this is so are universally understood. That's not intended as a criticism at all--lots of people hold combinations of views that I find odd--but it's interesting.
I can certainly concede that it's not always assholery, I just think it frequently is.
I can imagine a lot of sets of circumstances that would make cheating understandable, but I don't think most cheating takes place in such circumstances. Usually it's someone being incredibly self-centered, and valuing the ego-boost of a new conquest over actual intimacy, and being willing to sacrifice a partners' feelings to that trivial pleasure, rather than a person enjoying an intimate relationship, yet having time and energy left over to fool around.
Let's take out the terms that have lots of historical, cultural, or emotional baggage.
What if instead we have a thread about schmarriage, which is the institution of two people, upon deliberation and uncoerced, making a solemn vow to each only hold hands with the other for an indefinite period of time which either can end by explicitly informing the other and going through certain formalities. The question that this thread discusses is what are the obligations of people in a schmarriage, if they violate one of those obligations, what should happen next, and if they think they are likely to violate those obligations ex ante (either ex ante to the vows or ex ante to the breaking) what should they do.
Eb, you may want to check out Michel Houellebecq's quasi-Marxist critique of liberalized sexuality. The idea is that in a free (meat) market some will become enormously wealthy while others are subject to absolute pauperization. While I wouldn't sign on with this tout court, it does seem correct to me there's an increasing tendecy for people to view intimate realtions as a form of consumer good. And thise seems to me like one of the many great recipies for ruining your life.
Adam, I don't get how you can hold that counting sexual fidelity as a necessary part of a relationship is a sick exercise of power without that entailing that it's wrong to promise it.
Cala, you're right. I guess I believe it's stupid to promise sexual fidelity, because it's a promise that's sure to be broken.
I think Davel put my point better than I did. Sexual fidelity is the last thing people should expect from a relationship. If a relationship can't survive sexual infidelity, it's not a good relationship. A good relationship will survive any amount of other-people-fucking.
In fact, maybe people should cheat on people they love ASAP, to see if their relationship is can stand the test of fucking someone else.
And "those" with sexual "credit cards" may run up "debt".
I agree with pretty much everything b and apo have said on this thread (maybe because I'm married with kids). B's points seem so obviously right to me that I'm a little shocked at the absolutism I'm seeing in the disagreement.
Part of it is that people are attaching a neurotic degree of importance to whose genitals touch whom. Cheating is bad because, and only because, it is breaking a promise (and sometimes also lying). It isn't inherently worse than any other broken promise or lie, and anyone with experience in long-term relationships should know that sometimes broken promises or lies are the least bad option for everyone involved. We should all do our best to negotiate our relationships so there is as little dishonesty as possible, but things can get really complicated.
w/d:
I think the problems you face are that (a) the terms of any marriage change, often without discussion, and (b) the terms of each marriage are written in different, private, languages. I think I've agreed with both baa and B on this thread, and I think they disagree. As the thread has gone on, I've had more and more trouble understanding what B is saying, though I don't think she's changed her position. It's just that the way she would structure marriage--the terms, and how she would define terms like "fidelity" in of an infinite variety of cases--are different from the way I would structure them. But I still don't think that requires me to disagree with any general claim she's making about marriage.
Which means your hypothetical is hard because we all understand those terms differently, and because I think those terms are in constant, if slow, motion. Which is why I'm comfortable saying it would be wrong for me or for my hypothetical future spouse to cheat, but I'm unwilling to say the same for other people, even when they have seemingly, at the time of their marriage, signed up for precisely the same deal.
>And "those" with sexual "credit cards" may run up "debt".
That's pretty awesome.
Just as an aside, what gives this whole discussion a kinf of "up-is-down" aspect for me is what cheating is all in aid of. I mean jeez, it's not like you're breaking a promise to paint the mona lisa, or fight injustice, or make your life more meaningful in any way. No, you are lying to your spouse because, hey, if it itches scratch it. This just seems to me like really base behavior. Not that it's not tempting, but come on, is it so impossibly hard to live up to this fairly modest standard of behavior? And if so, can I at least cheat on my taxes?
Not that it's not tempting, but come on, is it so impossibly hard to live up to this fairly modest standard of behavior?
But, dude, what if she's really hot? Or better yet, what if it's Angelina Jolie? Don't you have an obligation to the world at large, to Science!, to find out what alien sex would be like?
600 is too abrupt.
In 594: 587 is nonsense because it was written mainly to throw in business words rather than to be coherent.
However, thinking about it a bit more, the claim was that sexual fidelity is capitalist. My claim, to the extent there was one in 587, is that a really capitalistic relation would not limit spouses to only one sexual relationship. Commodified, sex would be more exchangeable than not; fidelity within marriage limits the exchange of sex.
We seem to have agreed above that infidelity and divorce are different things or else we wouldn't have argued about them in opposition to one another. To say that 587 is nonsense because people divorce all the time misses the point because divorce is not infidelity.
However, there's an argument to be made that the system of marriage and divorce that we have is tied up with capitalist relations. We make contracts, terminate them, etc. Marriage functions as a way to distribute property. Marriage structures inequality. But I don't think this entails seeing sexual fidelity as capitalist or infidelity as anticapitalist.
The idea of fidelity, while not universal, is a bit older than market relations.
I agree with everything baa has written on this thread. That's never happened before.
It's all you damn horny hippies' fault.
can I at least cheat on my taxes?
It's all about fiscal irresponsibility with you, isn't it, baa?
611 may make less sense than 594. Sorry about that.
610: what if it's Angelina Jolie? Don't you have an obligation to the world at large, to Science!, to find out what alien sex would be like?
OK so she's got funny-looking lips but she's hardly an alien. That was uncalled for.
Part of it is that people are attaching a neurotic degree of importance to whose genitals touch whom. Cheating is bad because, and only because, it is breaking a promise (and sometimes also lying).
It's a form of promise breaking that in most of the world, and through most of human history, could very possibly result in the birth of a child who was genetically unrelated to the cheatee. Reliable birth control has only been available for about forty years. It strikes me as naive that most people don't seem to be taking that into consideration, when even Western-style "love match" marriages are much, much older. I think the neurosis is much more about having to deal with babies that are not yours than it does the rubbing of genitals per se.
(I will refrain from heading off into Shulamith Firestone territory...)
I really can't argue with people who think sexual fidelity is (a) a capitalist construct, (b) a patriarchal construct, or (c) something you can separate from the romantic impulse.
It feels like shit to imagine your partner fucking someone else. If not, imagine the person you happen to be fucking presently fucking someone else instead, and you should get the same result. It's an easy experiment.
No, you are lying to your spouse because, hey, if it itches scratch it. This just seems to me like really base behavior. Not that it's not tempting, but come on, is it so impossibly hard to live up to this fairly modest standard of behavior?
Fairly modest standard of behavior? Since when is sexual fidelity a modest standard of behavior?
It's a most immodest infringement upon human behavior. It's a stupid condition to attach to any relationship. It should be stigmatized as a sick exercise of power and a constraint on human liberty.
There should be a constitutional amendment that we're allowed to fuck anyone we feel like fucking without having to feel guilty or having to explain it to the one we love.
There are an infinite number of better ways to be faithful to one's spouse or lover than sexual fidelity.
DaveL wins the thread!
609 is way too flip about the power of the sex drive, which is I think the value of apo's comparison to teenage pregnancy. People have, will, and do always do the things they're not "supposed" to do sexually. So yeah, obviously in fact it is pretty damn hard to follow the rules.
611 oversimplifes, I think, still. *Women's* sexuality is totally commodified, and it's surely therefore significant that on this thread we've largely been talking about men doing the cheating rather than women doing it. And yes, the ownership of women's sexuality precedes capitalism, but women's sexuality has been seen as men's property pretty much throughout European history, because the production of heirs was how real property was transferred through generations.
(a) the terms of any marriage change, often without discussion
Well there's one situation where they symmetrically change without discussion. There's a second where one spouse gets bored and changes them unilaterally while doing their best to outwardly indicate that no such change has taken place. Since, as far as I can tell, no one here thinks there's a problem with where your naughty bits go if your partner expects that they might go there or somewhere similar, we're talking about the second situation. And there, I just don't see the relevance.
I can't read 618 without the voice of Austin Powers in my mind, particularly the last bit.
>I agree with everything baa has written on this thread. That's never happened before.
Freeedom!
>Since when is sexual fidelity a modest standard of behavior?
Since I was not brought up by wolves? Seriously, degree of moral difficulty on this one is well short of Paul Farmer.
>Angelina Jolie
Not really my type. If an alien it must be, there is this movie Species...
"it's surely therefore significant that on this thread we've largely been talking about men doing the cheating rather than women doing it."
we have?
and if we had, what would that show?
I think Adam's serious, yeah.
617: That it feels like shit doesn't make it *wrong*. And what people feel is in many ways a function of what they learn to feel. We're taught that sexual fidelity is really important, so we learn to feel that way. OTOH, we're taught that feeling jealous of, say, siblings is bad, so we learn to repress those feelings.
618: So how's this stance working out for you in practice?
The longer this thread goes on the better lifelong celibacy looks.
620: But I would say that capitalism has done more to break rather than to strengthen the historical bonds that made women more objects of exchange than agents able to participate in exchange. For example: freeing up wives' property for their own use rather than tying it down to the husband at marriage.
(In other words: capitalism = good. I will substitute for Labs on days he can't drive baa's limo.)
Is anybody else finding this thread very difficult to follow?
No, that it feels like shit does make it wrong. Really, this is the worst kind of sophistry. Any kind of emotional pain could be similarly washed away as "learned behavior," but without any evidence that it is learned, I am hardly convinced.
X causes others pain, therefore don't do X is the basis of almost all moral rules. If you are going to deny it, then I don't see how to have a rational conversation about this.
*Women's* sexuality is totally commodified
If a husband could sell a wife, I could see this as total commodification within marriage. But wife-selling would be unfaithful, wouldn't it?
621 is incomplete. This may not be universally true, but IME there are all kinds of things in a marriage that change over time by tacit agreement but that would be sources of conflict if it were necessary to make the tacit agreement explicit. And yes, that means there's some room for the partners' understandings of the tacit agreement to differ, and that's where good faith, respect for your partner, and sometimes judiciously keeping your mouth shut come in. (I'm not talking about sexual stuff here, just the rest of life.)
It feels like shit to imagine your partner fucking someone else.
Oh yeah? To you maybe, because you're a jealous bugger who claims your partner's naughty bits as your private porperty.
To others, imagining your partner fucking someone else might be a total turn-on.
624: Well, I think that the importance of *male* fidelity is a pretty recent invention, and because men don't get pregnant, it's more easily isolated as being *just* about love, affection, faithfulness. We tend to think of men as cheating more than women (though I doubt this is true), largely because male infidelity is better tolerated, traditionally, and therefore less taboo so easier to acknowledge. And I suspect that we're more likely, as a group, to find it easy to judge cheating men; we're more likely to be able to think of "excuses" for a woman being unhappy in a marriage than we are for a man's being so. And certainly there's the cult of machismo: you're unhappy? Suck it up.
again, I can't read 633 without the Austin Powers voice. Your use of the term "bugger" only exacerbates that problem.
"naughty bits" too. ok, I call shenanigans; Ash is putting us on.
The basic concept of a marriage or a relationship floating around here seems to be that the fundamental rule is don't fuck other people and everything else is negotiable. That's bizarre. People keep hammering on the idea that fucking someone else is a betrayal, a lie, etc. Why? Because you signed on to a deal that you wouldn't fuck other people. Why's that the deal? Because it's the deal. Well then.
This is ridiculous. Every single person arguing the anti cheating position here, to my knowledge, has granted that there are many circumstances in which you can a) have a different deal from the beginning, b) renegotiate the deal, or c) unilaterally declare that the current deal is intolerable to you, and you will change the deal, giving your partner the option of opting out of it.
To everyone who keeps saying something like "everyone's implying that cheating is the worst thing imaginable", you're not reading this thread closely. I think there are many, many worse things then cheating. I should dig up the link to my prior post that was all about that. I would never end my marriage over a lapse in judgment. Serial cheating like B's guy though--I have trouble imagining tolerating that. It doesn't change the fact that it's wrong to break a promise, and most people, when they make their marriage vows, consider fidelity one of the most important promises they make. If your spouse considers sexual fidelity desirable, but not that important among all the promises you make, then the gravity of the wrong is reduced by however much less important your spouse finds it. But by the time your spouse is so willing to compromise on this issue, you probably won't be making the marriage tumble like a house of cards by bringing it up. That's renegotiating the deal.
The only convincing thing I've read from the "cheating's not so bad" camp was from SCMT, who somewhere upthread argued that the understanding in a relationship could tacitly change without an actual wish for a discussion of those changes. If you can really tell that this has happened, and you think your partner feels the same freedom, it would (highly theoretically) be okay, and not really cheating, to sleep with other people without a discussion. The problem with this model is that it assumes a lot of ability to mindread.
To echo 633, the shittiness of the thought of one's partner fucking someone else is far form universal. It doesn't bother me at all. I know it bothers my wife, so I don't fuck other people, but to think that your jealous feelings are any guide to universal moral rules is a little silly. Lots of jealous feelings are unjustified and baseless.
I don't think there's a meaningful distinction to be made between a male cheating and a female cheating; I don't think we would make the distinction culturally, and I don't see how your argument cuts. It seems to go one way, then the other: first we're more permissive of men, then less permissive.
Personally, I wouldn't think differently of a man cheating than a woman, and this isn't learned behavior: I don't think I've ever seen the situations differently. I don't quite see how the patriarchy fits in here. We never discussed it at the secret patriarchy meetings either.
Not just wife selling; porn, strippers, prostitutes. Hell, ads for telephones.
For example: freeing up wives' property for their own use rather than tying it down to the husband at marriage.
Actually! There's quite a bit of feminist scholarship that argues, in ways that I find rather convincing, that in many ways wives were better off, property-wise, under dower rights and common law. But as movable property became more valuable, marriage became far less important as a way of uniting *property* (and creating heirs was less of an issue as well), so women increasingly came to be seen as financial liabilites--the more so with the alienation of home-based labor. So in fact a *lot* of property laws for a good 150 years or so explicitly defined a married woman as not being a legal individual: she couldn't own anything of her own, she couldn't sue, she couldn't even be raped. All those things were crimes against her husband, and if he broke any promises to her, her only protection was if one of her male relatives would sue on her behalf.
Of course, this creates real social pressures for families with girls (hard to marry off without money) and for widows. So slowly we create laws that say that women can own some property. But even so, given that *most* money flows through the hands of men, women aren't really equal, in terms of capital: after all, women as a class do a lot of unpaid labor. The idea that because women can now legally have property of their own still keeps women poor: now we have arguments that if you don't live in a community property state, and you don't put assets in both names, well, too bad. Not to mention, of course, arguments that it's perfectly okay for women to stay home and take care of kids and not have any income of their own.
630: Does it also feel like shit if your partner fucked someone before you got together? Most of us accept that. Why is fucking someone else during the relationship different? I think it's because of the fear that the new partner will displace you and/or the existence of the affair will become known to others and embarrass you. If neither of those risks actually exists, I don't think the fucking itself is really any different from fucking that occurred before the relationship. I also think there's a case to be made for not necessarily telling your partner things that don't affect them and that they're likely to misinterpret, but that's something to approach cautiously.
Okay - new delurking here. To demonstrate good faith, I bring you all waffles, pastries, and even a delicious cherry-topped Sara Lee cheesecake for B. Also, I bring a whole bag full of cock jokes.
Okay, so this conversation is getting so sidetracked it's driving me crazy. Look, the claims of the anti-cheaters (who are 100% right) don't depend on marriage -- that was clear early on in the thread, but has been lost somewhere along the way. The basic point (which ogged has made) is just one about trust and honesty -- if you promise someone (even implictly) not to do something, and you have every reason to believe that promise is very important to them, that they rely on it, you may in certain circumstances have justifications for unilaterally voiding that promise, but you have a clear moral obligation to let them know. Unless someone has compromised agency (dementia, etc.), you have no right to just decide that you know best. Some of you seem to be arguing that sexual fidelity isn't or shouldn't be important. Fine. That's not really the whole point. If that's unimportant to you think of something else that is. Your child's welfare, perhaps. If you swear to your partner that you won't let the kid do [x] because your partner thinks it's to dangerous, it's NOT OKAY to just sneak behind your partner's back and take the kid to do [x], even if you genuinely believe that circumstances have changed since you made the promise and it's for some reason very important to the kid's moral development that he/she experience [x]. You have to talk this over with your partner. It's not okay to just say "what partner doesn't know won't hurt him/her" - there's no "intrinsic" damage.
Also, I haven't read anyone saying you must in all cases necessarily confess infidelity if you fuck up -- in that case, preserving stability and/or a partner's feelings may be justified. We're talking about premeditated cheating, about adopting a lifestyle, about responding to ads on craigslist and interviewing potential partners.
I really, really can't believe there's dispute about this.
(Also, 369 was me.)
And lastly, I gotta say that I find it a find it a little jarring to be able to throw out the parts of traditional sexual morality that would view finding casual partners on Craigslist as immoral while simultaneously insisting not only that a guy who's doing exactly the same thing, but who is in an existing relationship of some undefined nature, is an obvious asshole, and that the moral rules by which this is so are universally understood.
Also, this? Boy, if I were a conservative, how I would rub my hands together in glee. I'm throwing out the parts of sexual morality that say I don't have a right to basic bodily autonomy. That doesn't begin touch any injunctions not to lie or to keep promises.
Every single person arguing the anti cheating position here, to my knowledge, has granted that there are many circumstances in which you can a) have a different deal from the beginning, b) renegotiate the deal, or c) unilaterally declare that the current deal is intolerable to you, and you will change the deal, giving your partner the option of opting out of it.
But the point is, all those are *exceptions* to the presumed default position, which is that *of course* marriage requires sexual fidelity--unless you make a point of explicitly agreeing otherwise. Which most people don't even begin to think about doing.
I call shenanigans; Ash is putting us on.
Text, throughout the weird "guilt is good" stretch of this thread, I became increasingly convinced that your comments on the subject were a Gordon Gekkoesque parody of moral puritanism. I'm betting Adam means what he says, even if you think he's wrong or crazy for saying it.
And lastly, I gotta say that I find it a find it a little jarring to be able to throw out the parts of traditional sexual morality that would view finding casual partners on Craigslist as immoral while simultaneously insisting not only that a guy who's doing exactly the same thing, but who is in an existing relationship of some undefined nature, is an obvious asshole, and that the moral rules by which this is so are universally understood.
Also, this? Boy, if I were a conservative, how I would rub my hands together in glee. I'm throwing out the parts of sexual morality that say I don't have a right to basic bodily autonomy. That doesn't begin touch any injunctions not to lie or to keep promises.
643 shocks me. The entire point of the "yay cheating" argument (which Adam is making most explicitly) is *specifically* based on the concept of bodily autonomy, and on that being something that it is not okay to promise away.
text:
Re my Austin Powers voice: yep, I like overstating things, which makes it seem like satire. So yes, of course I'm putting you on. But never forget, satire is the most serious mode of all.
Brock Landers, welcome to Unfogged! Here's your fruit basket, and your bucket of chum!
Welcome Brock. I'm going to retire from this conversation. Emotions are tied up in the sex act, or at least they are if you're doing it right. We all deal with that as best we can.
I politely bow out of any discussion with Ogged's cock.
You and everybody else.
This is ridiculous. Every single person arguing the anti cheating position here, to my knowledge, has granted that there are many circumstances in which you can a) have a different deal from the beginning, b) renegotiate the deal, or c) unilaterally declare that the current deal is intolerable to you, and you will change the deal, giving your partner the option of opting out of it.
But you're assuming the whole game away. You start from the idea that relationships contain a very strong default setting of sexual exclusivity and that the setting can only be changed by explicit agreement. Apparently that default setting is so strong that knowing that someone has a girlfriend and has talked to her about having extracurricular encounters is enough to conclude that he's violating his obligations to her in a major way.
I don't think that premise is true. I think that people generally expect their partners not to fuck around, but that your argument (and our society generally) greatly inflates the significance of that expectation in comparison to all of the other things that go into making a marriage work. And I think that over time, the not-fucking-other-people thing is a whole lot less important than the other stuff, that there may be times when fucking other people is either permissible or nothing more than a minor lapse, and that the world would be a better place if we spent less time worrying about whether our partners are fucking other people. And I'd like a pony.
I was sort of putting you all on with the guilt stuff, or it started out that way. Now I leave.
638- but look, if your partner doesn't care if you sleep around, then you should have no problem telling them that you'll be sleeping around. This whole conversation is based on the premise that your partner likely is upset rather than turned on by your sleeping around, and at the very least you have a duty to find this out before you just make this decision without consulting them.
Also, lots of cheating is understandable in the right circumstances. So is lots of child-abuse, honestly. (Please don't take that wrong.) Of course we're all human and we fuck up. And sexual desires are strong and hard to resist. I'm very compassionate and would never say that someone who has cheated has committed The Great Wrong, or done somethine worse than I do regularly. But that doesn't mean it's okay, or not wrong.
643: I thought this was clear the first time around, but I'm most definitely not suggesting that there's anything wrong with your fucking whoever you want to fuck. All I was saying is that it's not clear to me that you have enough information to condemn Chet for wanting to do the same thing.
if you promise someone (even implictly) not to do something, and you have every reason to believe that promise is very important to them
This is it exactly. Sexual fidelity is an implicit promise that's assumed when people get married. Those who don't practice it have to *say so* out loud to each other. But those who expect it, don't have to say so. That's astonishingly presumptuous, especially when you try to universalize it.
640 bewilders me:
So in fact a *lot* of property laws for a good 150 years or so explicitly defined a married woman as not being a legal individual: she couldn't own anything of her own, she couldn't sue, she couldn't even be raped. All those things were crimes against her husband, and if he broke any promises to her, her only protection was if one of her male relatives would sue on her behalf.
These are exactly the laws I'm talking about being superseded as things got more, rather than less capitalist.
642: Best. DeLurking. Ever.
But...
Unless someone has compromised agency (dementia, etc.), you have no right to just decide that you know best.
People decide this sort of thing all the time in a relationship. "I won't mention X, becaue X upsets her, and she (or he) doesn't need the stress right now." I once put off terminating a relationship because the SO was in the middle of finishing up some important work in her program. I'm sure I lied to her during that time, both explicitly and implicitly, about my thoughts on the relationship. I've never felt bad about it. I wouldn't feel bad about it even if she later said that it would have been better to tell her at the time: I know her, and no, it wouldn't have been. Better to minimize the harm.
I'm sorry to have frustrated text to the point where he has to leave.
I used to think that after we all had sex with each other, there'd be a lot of explaining to do. Now I'm not so sure.
Right, and Adam's argument is totally bullshit. It is okay to promise away what you can do with your naughty bits. You can take your right to do what you like with them back any time you want to by informing the person you promised.
It will be very, very unfortunate if the notion that people can determine, assuming they have not promised otherwise, what they do with their bodies becomes inextricably tied to the notion that no wrong inheres in breaking promises or lying to your partner.
657: The Married Women's Property Act was some time in the mid-19th century; capitalism in England, at least, had existed there for a solid couple hundred years by the time that came about.
661: The question is, why is *sexuality* THE test case for promises and lying?
Who would've thought the cheating thread would be more contentious than the Israel thread?
capitalism in England, at least, had existed there for a solid couple hundred years by the time that came about.
The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. Just sayin'.
On the subject of jealousy being a product of culture: To bring up the Tale of Genji, because really, what thread is complete without mention of the Tale of Genji, Heian Japan was a culture in which polyamory was accepted and jealousy condemned. Yet jealousy is the lynchpin of the novel; Rokujo's jealousy causes her to become a hungry ghost, possessing and killing several of Genji's other lovers. And for a picture of a real person consumed and completely embittered by jealousy, I recommend the Gossamer Diary, by the Mother of Michitzune. You'll love the part where she rejoices in the death of her rival's child. So a cultural acceptance of polyamory isn't going to do away with the pain of jealousy. If women had had more power in that society, it is clear that the first thing many of them would have demanded from their partners was fidelity.
I think there's a lot of implicit changing of terms in marriage that the unmarried usually don't get. (I've never been married, so this isn't personal experience speaking.) And the easiest, most obvious example is the change that occurs when you have kids. I've yet to have friends who've had kids not tell me that their marriages have changed dramatically, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with acceptance. (And two of the changes--sex and intimacy.)
Missed it by that much, SB.
Phooey on the stupid Tale of Genji.
663: I never said that it was. This is a straw man erected by the "cheating's not so bad" camp. As it happens to stand, most people who get married think it is very, very important to be truthful about sexual fidelity. However, there are many other just as bad, or worse, forms of betrayal. If my husband somehow scuttled me for a promotion at work to suit his own ends, that would be worse than him cheating. In my prior post on the subject, I suggested that bringing a member of your family into the house who constantly demeaned your husband and never sticking up with him was about equally as bad as getting a blow job from a stripper. That doesn't make it right to cheat.
Also, there is, currently, a presumption in favor of fidelity. You may wish there was not, but there is. That means that there is a necessary communicative step for people who would like to alter the presumption. It's actually not that onerous. The thing that's onerous is dealing with someone who doesn't want you to fucking cheat.
662: That's why I said more capitalist, rather than simply capitalist. I see capitalism growing as a process rather than something that appeared as a fully formed system, immediately sweeping things out of the way; early capitalism hadn't reached as far into social relations. I'm not saying it was linear, constant, progress, because obviously that's wrong.
And there's scholarship, at least in American history, that seems pretty well-respected, that a lot of the scholarship about how the 18th century was better for women is based on a mistaken ideal of a golden age. This (JSTOR) was developed into a book, though I've only read the article.
the change that occurs when you have kids. I've yet to have friends who've had kids not tell me that their marriages have changed dramatically
No kids so far but we got a cat recently. Can I start cheating on my wife yet?
... Adam's argument is totally bullshit. ...
It will be very, very unfortunate if the notion that people can determine ... what they do with their bodies becomes inextricably tied to the notion that no wrong inheres in breaking promises or lying to your partner.
Sure, it's wrong to break a promise. But there are many promises more terrible to break than ones about sexual fidelity. Given the nature of human sexuality, a promise about sexual fidelity is going to get broken sooner or later, so why that should be a default promise of marriage, I find totally bizarre.
654:
I agree, which is why it's important to have those conversations and make the implicit agreements explicit. But in a lot of relationships it can be a really hard subject to bring up, especially since some people have internalized the idea that the very thought is out of bounds.
I was mostly disagreeing with text's thought experiment that seemed to be claiming that a partner having sex with someone else makes everyone feel like shit, and this proves it's morally wrong.
No kids so far but we got a cat recently. Can I start cheating on my wife yet?
Dunno. How much time does she spend with the cat?
This thread is going so fast I can't keep up, so maybe this has been covered, but to say that exclusivity is an unstated condition of marriage, misses the exclusivity (yes? no? are we?) conversation couples often have at the very early stages of a relationship, long before any wedding.
a promise about sexual fidelity is going to get broken sooner or later
You really believe this? One's thoughts may wander, but actual cheating is hardly inevitable.
674: You know, some people are faithful in their marriages. Sexual fidelity is not in point of fact impossible.
670: Oh great. Now the Tale of Genji's feelings are hurt. The Tale of Genji flings itself down on the bed, sobbing. Because of you, heartless Standpipe!
So two observations:
1. Isn't it interesting how the pro-cheating (how unfair is that?) side seem to say "fuck" all the time? It's almost seems like an explicit attempt to desanctify and tear away the veil of mystery and decorum. Just saying...
2. If you want to reenvision the institution of marriage and serious dating so that it does not implictly involve fidelity, good luck to you. I think these efforts are likely to be about as effective on a broad scale as the children's crusade. I mean, I saw this one movie, Iron Monkey, where there was this one 6-year old who could really kick ass. But I wouldn't bet on 6-year olds taking back the holy land. So too with polyamory to infinity on unicorn island. Good maybe for some people, but as a general plan for humans, not promising. But even granting that open relationships work great for Jay-Z, please let us not pretend that in our society now fidelity is not an implicit assumption of male-female romantic realtionships. It is. So if you are cheating, you are, likely, a low-down dirty dog.
Does anyone even know what's at issue anymore? Wouldn't this thread be better spent feeling sorry for me because Rachel Wacholder was playing volleyball in Chicago this past weekend, and I couldn't go because of my fucking hemoglobin shortage? Eh?
Given the nature of human sexuality, a promise about sexual fidelity is going to get broken sooner or later
This is such a sad statement. You really believe monogomy is impossible? That's its never been done successfully?
In that case, no wonder you despise promises/presumptions of fidelity in relationships.
(You're very incorrect, of course. Thankfully.)
Sexual fidelity is an implicit promise that's assumed when people get married. Those who don't practice it have to *say so* out loud to each other. But those who expect it, don't have to say so. That's astonishingly presumptuous, especially when you try to universalize it.
You start from the idea that relationships contain a very strong default setting of sexual exclusivity and that the setting can only be changed by explicit agreement. Apparently that default setting is so strong that knowing that someone has a girlfriend and has talked to her about having extracurricular encounters is enough to conclude that he's violating his obligations to her in a major way.
Oh, for the love of little apples. It's the default, yes. Maybe it shouldn't be the default. But it's not presumptuous to assume that it's the default when it is in fact the default for a vast majority of the population. Is it presumptuous to think that Democrats are pro-choice? Is it presumptuous that someone raised in the U.S. in the late 1900s probably values sexual fidelity and one who doesn't is the exception to the rule?
You probably assume, as a default, that she isn't into BDSM. And that default setting is so strong it has to be explicitly acknowledged. The horrors!
So, yes, if you don't say anything, there's a presumption of fidelity. I'm sorry this is the way society is, and it probably shouldn't be (and indeed, it isn't always, as w/d's situation shows), but that doesn't permit you to assume that your spouse is okay with cheating because she hasn't said otherwise. We have lots of defaults. We have lots of fault that lead to defaults. By making it explicit, you can work to change the defaults, but hey, you gotta make it explicit.
polyamory to infinity on unicorn island
If I were married, I would cheat with baa, and there would be nothing wrong with that.
Does everyone think cheating is OK as long as you tell your partner?
Sometimes it's better to keep the fuck quiet if you value your relationship.
My Dad cheated on my Mom and told her. This hurt her. I wish he hadn't told her.
Do I wish he hadn't cheated on her? Don't know.
Oh, baa, I swear a lot, too. Come here, you fucker, and buy me a cocktail.
Also, Brock Landers is a solid porn star name.
Does anyone even know what's at issue anymore?
Not really. I think B's making a much broader defense than she started with. And surely Chicago has a park where taut young gay men play volleyball, so there's an easy substitute Wacholder.
a lot of the scholarship about how the 18th century was better for women is based on a mistaken ideal of a golden age.
I totally agree. The scholarship I'm talking about argues that in *some ways* relating specifically to property rights, women were better off up to about the Restoration--not the 18th century. I think that in a lot of ways the 18th century was the beginning of a really sucktastic time for women that we're still fighting our way out of.
678/679: No, it's not impossible. But come on: it's pretty unlikely. I'm willing to bet money that both of you have *already* done things sexually that you shouldn't have (Tia, you admitted as much upthread) and you haven't been married for 20, 30 years.
A wide variety of opinions are being falsely lumped together here. I've never argued (though others have) that "cheating isn't so bad" or that it isn't wrong. My stance has been that 1) it's false to aver that in you are absolutely, necessarily doing a bad thing if you don't tell your partner about it, and 2) you really only have the ability to say what is right and wrong in your own marriage.
Also: why does everyone keep saying that fidelity is an "unstated"/"implicit" assumption in marriage? I'm pretty damn sure it's in the vows somewhere. I understand B thinks 'nobody really means those silly vows anyway,' but this is a quite explicit agreement in marriage. Even purely civil ones, right? (Or wrong? I don't know... but regardless, it's certainly included in religious ceremonies.)
It's an implicit assumption in most sexual relationships. It's an explicit promise in marriage.
I'm with DaveL.
The basic concept of a marriage or a relationship floating around here seems to be that the fundamental rule is don't fuck other people and everything else is negotiable. That's bizarre.
Word. Wordy McWord.
If I were married, I would cheat with baa, and there would be nothing wrong with that.
I'll flip you for him.
690: I think fidelity is more common than you think, B.
Actually, B is starting to feel pretty attacked by the tone in (e.g.) 681, 683, and 684, so she's going to quit the argument.
Brock Landers is a porn star name.
I also believe that most people will cheat during their lifetimes. Doesn't make it right, it's just the way it is. Given that it is the way things are, across such a wide number of people, it's common sense that the best way of dealing with it is going to be different for different marriages. What has taken me aback is the moral certitude of people stating otherwise.
692: It's an explicit promise in marriage.
Maybe in yours. I checked my ketubah, and it doesn't say anything like "and neither of us will have sex with anyone else, ever again." (Just saying, all marriages are different.)
But, I don't mean to be in the "pro-cheating" camp. I plan to be sexually faithful to my wife, and she plans to be as well, but we've both agreed that if either of us ever does stray, that we'll make an effor to work it out.
Or, in other words, 691 gets it exactly right.
B - sorry, certainly didn't mean to make you feel attacked. FWIW, 683 wasn't even directed at you. I was quoting (and responding to) Adam.
Yeah, 691 is where I am, too. Once again, the hero.
I should have delurked in a thread more full of cheer. This one is too intense for first impressions.
I am totally laterz on this conversation and completely Becks-style, but mcmc's Tale of Genji example is fantastic. I get questions about this whenever I teach The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. "If she's so liberated about sex, why is she so old-school about wanting them to want only her?" etc. And I have no answer, other than a pretense of romance is hott.
I didn't mean it as an attack. It's just silly to hold that "X is truly a default position in American society. Why would anyone assume it is a default?" and I don't find the argument illuminating unless it's backed up with a good reason why it shouldn't be the default assumption.
And the reason so far has been to assume that anyone accepting it as the default has some strange ownership relation over their partner's naughy parts, and to ridicule them for thinking that they could possibly think otherwise.
I'm willing to bet money that both of you have *already* done things sexually that you shouldn't have
Sure, I've had hookups, and whole relationships, that I've regretted, but never done anything that's even approached infidelity. My ill-advised experiences have all occured while I've been single. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I'm pretty damn certain that I won't ever cheat. One of the few things I feel strongly about in that area (from a personal perspective--obviously other people have different views of it, and that's completely fine).
"What has taken me aback is the moral certitude of people stating otherwise."
I don't know where you got that from. What do you mean by moral certitude?
Also, as for the claims upthread about sanctimony, this is a thread about ethics, in which it is appropriate to have opinions about right action. IRL, I do not go around telling people how wrong they are, except occasionally when they are my friends, and they are employing bullshit rationalizations to act less admirably when they should. When Clementine said it was fine that she was having sex with D though she was still in a relationship with A, because A got to be with her, D got to have sex with her, and she got everything she wanted, so everyone was happy, I informed her how full of shit she was. She stopped, and is glad for it, since she now views the whole episode as the worst thing she's ever done. (She is an exceptionally good person, for the most part.)
When one masturbates, one seldom thinks of one's partner. Usually of someone else. Which proves cheating is endemic to human nature.
Those who don't cheat, simply don't have the conviction of their fantasies.
Brock Landers is a porn star name.
Oh.
I'm totally not feeling the No Wacholder sympathy, people. Timbot the boy bruiser didn't exactly make me feel better.
I totally agree. The scholarship I'm talking about argues that in *some ways* relating specifically to property rights, women were better off up to about the Restoration--not the 18th century. I think that in a lot of ways the 18th century was the beginning of a really sucktastic time for women that we're still fighting our way out of.
Fine, go and say something I agree with after agreeing with something I said. That's totally contrary to the spirit of this thread.
I heard she wears high heels on her days spent away from the court, ogged. I try now to lessen your pain by lowering your expectations.
696: T thinks the tone in those comments was no more abrasive than B's habitual tone. It's fine that that's your tone, but complaining about "attacks" from others is not.
What do you mean by moral certitude?
The notion that deciding not to reveal an infidelity is always treating your partner as a child, that it would always be wrong to withhold it, etc.
There will be many, many things throughout a marriage that you decide not to tell your spouse. Some because they aren't particularly important, some because it would hurt their feelings, some because everybody needs some private mental space of their own, a whole host of reasons.
teo, when is anyone ever "done"?
When you throw them against a refrigerator and they stick.
No, no, when you insert a toothpick and it comes out clean.
The notion that deciding not to reveal an infidelity is always treating your partner as a child
That actually wasn't what I claimed, at least. In at least two places on this thread.
Night-night, ogged. Dream of hot volleyball players.
I slide, my sinuous self, down the fridge like an al dente spaghett'. Tremble.
A toothpick never works. What you need is to stick a meat thermometer in Ogged, stuff him with a good dressing, and bake him in a conventional oven at around 450 degrees while basting periodically.
I don't think anyone in this thread (except maybe Adam?) is pro-cheating, any more than anyone is "pro-abortion". If I didn't think cheating was bad, I'd be doing it all the time. I'm mostly reacting to what seems to be naive absolutism on the part of those saying it's always the wrong choice. And it seems to me that there are many things—intentionally saying hurtful things, ignoring one's partner, spending too much time on work/the Internet when one's partner needs support, etc.—that strike me as far worse than cheating, and yet people seem more willing to accept them as things that happen sometimes in relationships. The focus on fidelity just seems a little disproportionate.
No, when you get up to flush the condom down the loo.
Also, cheating has been presented here as having sex with another person. But I think most people would feel their partner had cheated if they drunkenly made out with somebody, as well. There's a whole range of behaviors that would constitute cheating in many people's minds. And along that spectrum, there are plenty of stops, depending on the three people involved (or more, if kids are in the picture), for which revealiing it to your partner would not be the best or most ethical decision.
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. "If she's so liberated about sex, why is she so old-school about wanting them to want only her?"
Sei Shonagon is much more adventurous than most of the characters in Genji (except Granny, the aging but indefatigable court lady), or in the other diaries I've read from the period. Nice to read about someone who actually seems to be having a pretty good time. I love the section where she describes the ideal vs. actual lovers' morning departure. Also the part where she suggests that a nobleman calling for a lower-class woman with whom he is having an affair ought to get her name wrong??!!!
Didn't we already have one of those "is it wrong to lie to your spouse" threads? And wasn't that other one completely my fault? Well this one wasn't.
I wish all liberation soldiers the best of luck in their brave project to excise the human folly of sexual jealosy from the earth through fucking around behind their spouse's backs. If history has taught us anything, it's surely that ideology trumps human nature.
when you insert a toothpick and it comes out clean.
If it comes out clean, that doesn't count as cheating.
I go away for a while and everyone's having sex with baa. This is so, so weird.
727- Apo: I don't think anyone has disputed this. Maybe someone could, but no one has. If you cheat (or make out with a coworker while drunk,etc), revealing it to your partner may very well not be the best idea. But you should in that case recognize it was a mistake and attempt not to do it again.
The dispute is with those who say: I'm going to cheat (or kiss my coworker while drunk), and that's okay, and it's okay for me to deceive my partner about this.
I just don't understand the ethical justification for this. People are saying it's "okay", but seem to be offering justifications for activities all around it, rather than dealing with the scenario in dispute.
I hope this whole thread wasn't just a misunderstanding.
Text, did you not notice that none of the people arguing with you are "fucking around behind their spouse's backs"? (Or at least none are admitting to it.)
We're hoping to "excise the human folly of sexual jealosy" by talking about it. Some of us managed to get over the petty jealousy thing. It can be done. But the main point is not to try to bring society over to the view that everyone should be able to have sex with anyone anywhere. The point is to convince people that since relationships are complicated, their beliefs about fidelity shouldn't be universalized.
727: I have lusted in my heart.
I would differentiate between drunkely [whatever], and a more deliberate, possibly longer term affair-type thing. It's not the act itself (objecting merely to that is a little too close to a feeling of ownership), it's the betrayal of trust and intimacy. This only applies, of course, if there's a clear understanding that fidelity is to be expected in the relationship. Otherwise, it's still a shitty thing to do, but not to the same degree.
the dispute, Big, is over whether it is required to have a conversation with your spouse before embarking on an open relationship. One argument that has been proposed is: it is not required because although sexual fidelity is the default rule, that's only because of jealousy, and jealousy is unreasonable and bad.
At least, that is the position as I read it, as expressed over many many many many comments. That is what I and many others have been arguing about.
You are free, Big, by all means, to do as you like with whomever.
The point is to convince people that since relationships are complicated, their beliefs about fidelity shouldn't be universalized.
No one is universalizing beliefs about fidelity. They are universalizing beliefs about respecting the autonomous human agency of those who love and trust you.
And I agree about not universalizing any of this. I'm just talking about how I would feel about my own relationships.
I don't mean to mischaracterize: lots of people have expressed many different opinions here, few of them as bizarre as the one outlined above.
But several people have put forth that argument, I did not make it up, and I am responding to it.
Of course I also think your idea to eliminate sexual jealosy through talking it out is also completely misguided and stupid; I just don't think it's quite as morally bankrupt as the other argument.
I shall now defend Graham's honor, because it was impugned by LB and FL.
This is the problem with saying things about your personal life. You then have to say further things for it all to make sense.
First of all, G was not having sex with anyone else at the time. I had unprotected sex with someone who obviously was not that scrupulous where he put his dick, since he was having unprotected sex with someone he just met, who had even told him she had an STD. G eventually (after these three months) went ahead and had unprotected sex with me, despite my STD, since I am probably not contagious, but that makes much more sense as a risk to take for someone you love than someone you just met. If you're doing that for someone you just met, you probably just aren't that cautious. Basically, everything about the guy's behavior put him in the category of disease risk, which made me much more of a disease risk than if I had been having protected sex. Further, a few days after this incident, I started feeling itchy, and this feeling persisted for weeks, which raised a whole other set of questions. Who knows what it was; it eventually went away on it's own; maybe it was psychosomatic, but at the time, we didn't know that, and G felt that he shouldn't risk sex with me. I am quite positive this was not a passive aggressive expression of anger for many reasons, one of which is that during much of this time, it was a great hardship for him not to sleep with me, something that I know he would not have been able to manage just to spite me. We did have sex a couple of times because of the difficulty of it. But G had a total right to refuse sex he didn't feel was safe enough, and if I didn't like it, I could have left.
the dispute, Big, is over whether it is required to have a conversation with your spouse before embarking on an open relationship.
Well, shoot. If that's the argument, then yes. You ought to have the conversation.
735: Interesting. I see you as taking the position contrary to that, but I wasn't seeing that position argued by anyone. That's what I was finding so puzzling. Who is making that argument and where?
They are universalizing beliefs about respecting the autonomous human agency of those who love and trust you.
I think apo's 718 answers that point. You can't tell your spouse everything. In a long relationship it is nearly impossible to be 100% upfront about everything. Many people don't tell their spouses about certain purchases, or about other non-sexual activities they think their spouse wouldn't approve of. Why is sex so much more important?
Those who don't cheat, simply don't have the conviction of their fantasies.
I do not have the conviction of my lust for underwater sex with a many tentacled creature. If only I were not such a coward.
740: That's been the argument the whole time.
742 was totally Jackmormon. 743 was me, though.
This is not the underwater sex blog.
745: Oh, but it could be.
I thought the argument was that it's not really an open relationship if you are acting like it is but haven't discussed it with your spouse.
That's not what I've been arguing. I said from the get go that Chet was well into douchebag territory. The wide majority of affairs that I'm familiar with weren't pre-planned like that; most were brief dalliances that just happened. My two cents: best to leave those hidden, and that's the advice I've always given when asked (and I've been asked a surprisingly large number of times).
The other argument involved children, and I still maintain that children are sufficiently complicating factors that even a long-term affair might be best left unrevealed, and that no easy, universally applicable answer can be applied.
I tried to make it clear several hundred comments ago that I was not talking about what you should do ex post facto, but what you should do if you were deciding on whether or not to cheat on your spouse/s.o. I talked in the earlier thread about what you should do ex post facto, not in this one.
I tried to make it clear several hundred comments ago that I was not talking about what you should do ex post facto, but what you should do if you were deciding on whether or not to cheat on your spouse/s.o. I talked in the earlier thread about what you should do ex post facto, not in this one.
That's been the argument the whole time.
I don't think so, since b, who has been leading the argument, has always been a major advocate of having that conversation. The argument has been over whether not having that conversation is always and in all circumstances infantilizing or ignoring the autonomy of the spouse.
On preview, I should just shut up and let apo handle this.
yes, I remember that subject being addressed also. I think apo's position is reasonable. But then we got back on that other one.
e.b., you are expressing one position in the argument. I think it was also my position. This thread has eaten my life.
B has been the one arguing that you don't always need to have the conversation. You should go back and read like 500-650 or so.
Better yet, don't. Let's all go to sleep.
I tried to make it clear several hundred comments ago that I was not talking about what you should do ex post facto, but what you should do if you were deciding on whether or not to cheat on your spouse/s.o. I talked in the earlier thread about what you should do ex post facto, not in this one.
I could have sworn I'd read that somewhere before.
I believe that this thread has been about many, many things, often simultaneously.
In this particular thread, B has argued that it was not wrong for her guy in 39 to institute an open relationship with his wife without telling her.
Let's all go to sleep.
But I'm trying to procrastinate at work. You're supposed to stay up and help me.
You're right, text. I suppose the summary is that many things have been argued and many things have been disagreed and agreed with.
I am going to base my theory of morality on the universal principle of the categorical denial. No Kantian nihilism for me.
that's usually so, but we have more fun.
Well, I'm off to watch this great cartoon about a talking mustachioed pig who is also a fighter pilot. Let me know who wins.
758- that, and people defended Chet (at least theoretically), who wasn't being honest with his girlfriend. Those are the two things I've been objecting (mostly); the rest of the thread has seemed to wander a lot. Which is okay, I suppose.
I don't think anyone ate any of the waffles I offered.
I am going to base my theory of morality on the universal principle of the categorical denial.
I myself test moral principles by hitting them with my cock.
I took her to be arguing, as I am, that sometimes other factors can outweigh the need to have the conversation. Sometimes the conversation itself can be more destructive than the infidelity. For example, when disease and kids are involved, as in b's example. Human relationships are complex.
So, who's up for some lifelong celibacy?
And the rest of us think that's pretty ridiculous. It's one thing to question whether or not you should disclose an indescretion after the fact, quite another thing to decide unilaterally that an open relationship would be best, but that you need not tell your spouse, because your spouse is fragile and/or you have kids.
Basically, you've already made a commitment to this fragile person to do X; you know that not doing X will hurt that person, but you do it anyway, and conceal it from him/her.
Good luck with the machinations on that one. You're sure to convince lots of people that open relationships are best by embarking on a double secret open relationship.
These are all points that have been made. Good night.
765 is correct; 764 mistakes my position. I was not saying that people shouldn't have such a conversation; I was saying that the only reason they should is because we default to the position that sexual fidelity is part of marriage, and that I think that this default is a cultural construction. That is, that the "should" is practical, rather than moral.
758: He didn't institute an open relationship. He was cheating. I never called it anything else.
765: I take that to be disagreeing with the straightforward position "you should have the conversation." You should have the conversation.
(Barring: cultural or economic factors that make you not truly free; maybe a seriously emotionally disturbed child + a spouse who cannot be trusted to do the right thing. Note that this position does entail not respecting your spouse as a moral agent with equal claim to the guardianship of your child.)
762: Oh, I so want to see that one. Some day soon, when I live near a decent video store.
In this particular thread, B has argued that it was not wrong for her guy in 39 to institute an open relationship with cheat on his wife without telling her.
768:
"not doing X" only hurts the person if he knows about it, and it may be the least painful way to get through things. I think situations like this are rare, but they exist. You're acting like it would be easy to start up a conversation with a depressed and unstable spouse about opening up a relationship, when the other spouse may just need a little human contact to get through through the rough patch to give the unstable spouse the support he needs.
You're sure to convince lots of people that open relationships are best by embarking on a double secret open relationship.
Again, no one is suggesting this, and it's really annoying of you to keep saying it.
764 mistakes my position
You don't test your moral principles by hitting them with my cock?
I find the argument that human relationships are complex particularly compelling.
Yeah, I don't think that I've been arguing that it's okay to start an open relationship without talking about it. That's a meaningless thing to say: by definition, if you haven't talked about it, it's not an open relationship.
773 gets it pretty much right. I don't think it was wrong, or at least, I think it was one of the least wrong possible choices in that situation.
Fuck, "764" s/b "754." Goddamn typos.
the other spouse may just need a little human contact to get through through the rough patch to give the unstable spouse the support he needs
This situation does indeed exist, and it's not even that rare.
Also, I measure all my moral decisions against your cock, apo.
My, what big moral decisions you have, grandmother.
Part of the miscommunication may be that we're arguing for "sometimes least wrong" and others are hearing it as "no problem."
There is supportive human contact that does not involve naughty bits.
There is supportive human contact that does not involve naughty bits.
Yes, but there is no morality that doesn't involve apo's cock, which is really the important thing here.
I just received three spam emails. The subject lines were:
marital exhibitor
Your wiife will screams for more!
unstained Penis Capsules!
The first one was hyping a penny stock.
783-4
But sometimes the kind that involves the naughty bits is the only cure for what ails ya.
And sometimes it gives you new, itchy ailments. You pays your money, you takes your chances.
And sometimes it just breaks your heart.
789: Marriage is not a guarantee that you will get every emotional need met at all moments. It does not become right to seek "cures for what ails ya" because you have to pass through a rough patch. Nor is it the least wrong thing. The least wrong thing is to be faithful. This of course presumes that your marriage places an important value on fidelity.
Oh, for the love of little apples. It's the default, yes. Maybe it shouldn't be the default. But it's not presumptuous to assume that it's the default when it is in fact the default for a vast majority of the population. Is it presumptuous to think that Democrats are pro-choice? Is it presumptuous that someone raised in the U.S. in the late 1900s probably values sexual fidelity and one who doesn't is the exception to the rule?
Coming in late again. Obviously it's the default assumption. I think I even said that. But the argument that's being made is stronger than just default assumption. It's that all we need to know is that someone (a) is in a relationship, and (b) has not expressly cleared sex with other people with their partner, in order to conclude that the person is a big-time jerk. That assumes way too much. Life is complicated. Relationships are complicated. People cope in all kinds of ways, some jerky, some less so. Sex is a big deal, but it's not the be-all and end-all of what relationships are about, and sometimes getting too obsessed about the sex parts causes more harm than good.
In the interests of comity, I will say that I think that most of the screwing around that happens shouldn't. I've also been monogamous since some of the folks around here were in elementary school. But I think that people put way, way too much energy into jealousy and hurt pride and embarrassment and that the whole great drama of You Have Wronged Me and Now You Must Pay the Price does more damage than the screwing around.
The least wrong thing is to be faithful.
This is the absolutism I've been objecting to. I think that's ridiculously naive, and it puts far too much importance on who one has sex with. Mutual love, mutual support, care for children, and many other factors are far more important than what one does with one's genitals, and sometimes those factors conflict.
Where's the scenario where being faithful to someone who, last time you discussed it, valued faithfulness is more wrong than not? It doesn't seem to be absolutism to say being faithful is less wrong if you can't come up with a scenario where being faithful is wrong.
No. Note that I never said what one did with one's genitals was near the most important thing.
So maybe you might dial back the certainty about what marriage is or isn't a notch or two?
I mean I can see thinking: "all those years in an unhealthy marriage, I can't see how X managed to be faithful all that time. I don't think I could have done that and I certainly wouldn't think less of X had X not been faithful."
I have troubles seeing someone thinking: "all those years in an unhealthy marriage, I can't see how X managed to be faithful all that time. That was wrong."
What about "all those years in an unhealthy marriage, I can't see how X managed to be faithful all that time. That was a terrible sacrifice, and X shouldn't have had to make it. How tragic."
I am in fact certain that marriage is not a guarantee that you will get your emotional needs met all the time. I am also certain that a zebra has stripes, though I have never been one.
That's fine. I don't see how that entails makes what X did wrong, though, or more wrong than doing something else.
Marriage is also not a guarantee that people will be perfect. Being imperfect does not make you a bad person.
797: Didn't you say it's always the right choice to be faithful? That is, in effect, saying that what one does with one's genitals is the most important thing.
If a little dishonesty about sex is what allows a partner to get rid of the stress and frustrations so she can give her partner the emotional support he needs, I think that emotional support is far more important than whether she screwed someone else. In that case, I think it could even be argued that being faithful would be wrong.
I don't know who used the phrase "bad person" around here but ogged and maybe baa. I am not ogged or baa. I don't think I am a bad person, and like I've said over and over, I do lots of wrong things.
802: Why do we have to pass judgment on whether people are right or wrong in their marriages? And isn't doing so itself wrong?
805: But you seem to be pretty clearly implying that those of us who don't think that cheating is always and forever wrong are bad people.
"But the argument that's being made is stronger than just default assumption. It's that all we need to know is that someone (a) is in a relationship, and (b) has not expressly cleared sex with other people with their partner, in order to conclude that the person is a big-time jerk."
Utter rot. Tia, Cala, me, etc have all been very clear we don't believe that.
I read like, forty thousand comments to see if this point came up, I swear. So if someone mentioned it in comment 356, I am very sorry. But.
All the people who say it's better not to tell your partner if you cheat in this extremely specific set of circumstances resembling nothing so much as a ticking bomb scenario? I hate to tell you this, but speaking as someone who had lover after lover go searching for other milkshakes, you know when your partner is cheating. They act weird. They start wanting strange new things in bed with no explanation. They kiss differently. If you are cheating on a lover and think they don't know, you're fooling yourself, but no one else.
And as the least-desired milkshake provider on the block, the certain knowledge that someone you care for is sleeping around and doesn't even have the common decency to tell you is pretty much the epitome of suck.
I haven't seen many stable open relationships, myself, but even the worst open relationships are usually better than cheating relationships, simply because everyone has given at least a grudging okay to the situation.
Anyway, your tone is dismissive. "Marriage is not a guarantee that you will get your emotional needs met all the time." Well, no shit. No one said it was.
808: You might want to re-read the post that this whole thread took off from.
806: not saying what's right or wrong is different than saying what's "least wrong." If you're going to object to judging at all, then don't say, "well it was the least wrong" because that's still judging.
I'm not objecting to judging at all. I'm objecting to judging in absolutist terms that act like decisions about this kind of thing are oh so simple. And I kind of object to the idea that by saying, look, this less-than-ideal situation was less wrong than the other options is somehow unsatisfactory, and I am required to say that yes, it was absolutely wrong, and the person I was fucking was treating his wife like a child and failing to recognize her as a moral agent and I was aiding and abetting him and excusing this behavior. Or that yeah, "least wrong" still means "wrong." When the entire argument that I'm making here is that it *isn't that simple.*
801, 810: It wasn't actually the first sentence of 792 that I thought was laying it on a little thick. I might almost think that someone was dodging the point if their response suggested otherwise.
810: I am responding to a tone that is dismissive of me. Specifically, DaveL's suggestion that I should dial back my certainty.
807: Talk about utter rot. You owe me an apology for that. I'm disagreeing. I also think you're wrong to eat meat. I think I am wrong when I eat dairy products. I can believe someone is mistaken in their appraisal of the right, or even that they fail to perform it, without saying that they are bad people. I don't know how many times on this thread I have to say that I either have or am very capable of fucking up in most of the ways I am enumerating. If you can't stand your ox being gored, don't have conversations about personal ethics. I've read through BDSM threads at Twisty's like they were my medicine, and I didn't pout that anyone was saying I was a bad person.
I am seriously unconvinced that it is essential to have sex with someone else in order to provide one's partner with love and support. If the circumstance in question is long term, it might easily become unfair to expect fidelity of yourself, in which case "you should have the conversation." The exception I granted were kids who couldn't tolerate a divorce and a partner too addled to make just decisions for them, but it really does require thinking this of your partner.
Come on, Tia. You're demanding an apology in the same paragraph where you say that I'm "pouting" and tell me not to have these conversations if I "can't stand my ox being gored." (And upthread, you pretty much said I have no grounds for objecting to anyone else's tone--nonsense. When people object to mine, I apologize; that one argues strongly--as you are doing here--doesn't mean that in another context one doesn't get hurt. You know that perfectly well.)
Your tone implies, if not that those you are disagreeing with are bad, that they are at the very least morally dishonest, or weak, or making excuses for obvious truths or something. So fine, I apologize for choosing the wrong word.
Also, you've been using that tone long before anyone started sounding dismissive of you. Even the passage I quoted in 810 was the one DaveL was responding to, not one that was responding to him.
Right. I said those things in response to whining about me saying someone was "bad," which I clearly didn't. Sometimes people's rhetoric invites a change in your own. What on earth is your point in 807 then? That I disagree with you? That seems too obvious to state.
And the passage that you quoted in 810 was one DaveL was responding to. I typed that twice.
My point is that no, you did not specifically say that people were bad, but the dismissiveness of your tone and your insistence that cheating is wrong, period, seems to me to imply a pretty clear disdain for those of us in this thread arguing that it isn't that simple. As does the word "whining." No one is whining. What I was pointing out is that, even absent the word "bad," the implication of the tone is easily mistaken as passing judgment, not only on people who cheat, but on people who argue that cheating isn't an absolute wrong.
815: This is going to sound really condescending, but you're probably pissed off at me anyway, so what the hell: you haven't been in and around enough long-term relationships to be as certain as you are about what's universally right and wrong in long-term relationships. The longer you go and the more life throws you curveballs, the more of those universal principles turn out to be rules of thumb that sometimes work well and sometimes don't. I'm sorry if that sounds dismissive, but you just don't have enough information to support the conclusions you're so damn sure about.
In thinking about the generation gap on this thread, one other thought comes to mind, and that's that sexual exclusivity is probably a lot more important in the early stages of a relationship. At that point, it's a pretty good marker of strong feelings and desire for commitment, and enforcing a norm against screwing around is a pretty good way of weeding out people whose feelings are less strong, who aren't committed, or who are just plain jerks. But as the relationship develops over time, there are a whole lot more ways of determining how it's working and how committed your partner is. At that point the norm ought to be less important, except that there are so many jerks around that the fucking around/jerk correlation stays pretty high for a long time.
I mean, all the way back at 345 you're sounding sarcastic and dismissive of arguments with your position. That's not a reaction to other people's rhetoric. I don't think at that point that the rhetoric was particularly heated.
Actually, it really just means I disagree, and implies disdain for no one. I said SCMT, who has taken a position contrary to mine, was convincing at one point. I perhaps haven't disagreed with apo at all. I am, in fact, passing judgment. This is a conversation about ethics. It is hard to have a conversation about ethics without judging. You are judging people who judge right now. I don't really feel the need to pepper everything with "hmm, maybe you're right," to participate in a conversation. Most people think I'm pretty capable of imaginative projection, so if there's something I don't understand, go ahead and describe it, but the simple assertion that I can't understand it isn't going to get very far with me. I suppose BB was trying to do that with the whole "sometimes cheating is necessary to love your spouse thing," but he didn't do it successfully in a way that convinced me.
Way back in 297 I wrote:
"But there doesn't seem to be any real disagreement here: Everyone is saying cheating is almost always unethical, but sometimes forgivable. Just different visceral reactions."
Since then there's been a bit more disagreements, but they're arguments have been kind of incoherent, or seemed so to me at least.
My guess as to what drives the discussion is a strong investment in the belief that people dislike cheating because of "jealousy" and that not feeling jealous is more admirable than being jealous.
Maybe I'm wrong. This present discussion strikes as weird and frustrating, anyway.
Way back in 297 I wrote:
"But there doesn't seem to be any real disagreement here: Everyone is saying cheating is almost always unethical, but sometimes forgivable. Just different visceral reactions."
Since then there's been a bit more disagreements, but they're arguments have been kind of incoherent, or seemed so to me at least.
My guess as to what drives the discussion is a strong investment in the belief that people dislike cheating because of "jealousy" and that not feeling jealous is more admirable than being jealous.
Maybe I'm wrong. This present discussion has been rather weird and frustrating, anyway.
I have insomnia, so you get to deal with me for a few more minutes.
This is probably my fault. teo said, what do the philosophers think. I took that as an invitation to write, well, what I thought the ethics of the situation were. I wrote that down. People began asking what I meant, so I've had to say a lot of things in clarification. Most of which has been ignored, which is fine, it's a big thread, and I haven't been able to keep up the whole time.
And the argument seems to be now:
1) Are you married? What the hell do you know?
2) Who the fuck asked you to judge us?
To which I can only say, you (collectively) asked for an ethical debate. You got one, and if you think that means we're judging you for having a different opinion, that's just incorrect, any more that the vegetarianism debate we had means Tia thinks I'm crazy.
But saying 'here is what I think the ethical principle is and here is why' is all that's been going on. If we want to have the debate that all ethical principles are useless here, we can do that.
I don't even know what to say to 829. It appears that you've been reading a different thread than I have.
And 827 took 826 to be to 824/5, but that's not important right now.
Yeah, I think Weman is probably right, too (more in 297 than in 824/5, though). But I also think I've read the same thread Cala describes. Are these contradictory positions? You have 800 comments to work out your answers.
Well, 297 is arguable, but 824/5 is wrong. Let's try it this way:
I don't think there's much disagreement about principles. You should keep promises. You shouldn't hurt other people. You should treat your partner with respect.
I also think there is, or purports to be, agreement that it's not really about who did what with whose naughty bits. I think this agreement may be a bit in the anti-Clintonian, "it's the lies not the sex" vein, but we'll see. In any case, I think we're agreed that it's OK to sleep with other people if that's OK with your partner and that it doesn't matter who your partner slept with at any time when they weren't in a committed relationship with you.
There's also consensus that relationships normally involve an expectation of sexual exclusivity. There's disagreement over how fundamental that expectation is in comparison to other expectations.
What I think we're mostly arguing over is how those principles get applied in real relationships, particularly long-term relationships, and how the expectation of sexual exclusivity fits together with other things that are important to the relationship.
I assume it's non-controversial that a largish chunk of ethical reasoning has to do with what happens when two or more principles seem to be pushing in different directions. The reason that I found Cala's 829 so bizarre is that it seems to suggest that we can engage in ethical reasoning about relationships without needing to know much about how actual relationships actually work over time. It's great to say that you must always be honest and loving and true with your spouse, and your spouse with you, but it doesn't always work that way, and then what do you do?
I've been trying to think of an illustration that might work, and here's what I've come up with: suppose you're in a rough patch in your marriage. Suppose your spouse is stressed out because of stuff at work and has been just really unpleasant to be around when she's around at all. OK, easy, right? She should be nicer to you and you should be understanding of the stress she's under. And ponies. IRL, it doesn't always work that way. And it really, really sucks when you're tired and stressed and being treated like shit and you know that this is likely to continue for a while. You can really get to the point of wondering if you can take any more, if you're married to a monster, if you should just get divorced.
So now the love, honor and cherish until death do us part thing is in some danger. Can't violate that, but can't keep taking this. There are a lot of things one might do at that point, along a spectrum from saintly to really nasty. If, during that time, you have a long talk with an opposite-sex friend that helps you keep it together, no one would object. If you gripe to all your friends about what a bitch your wife is, that's pretty jerky in my view, but I don't think you'd get a lot of blame for it. If you sleep with your spouse's best friend to get even with her for being bitchy, that's a definite asshole move.
What about if instead of talking to your friend you slept with her, both of you were discreet as hell, and it helped you through the rough patch? Wrong? I'm not seeing absolutes. It may be a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but I can hypothesize circumstances where I'd think that was a more defensible coping strategy than, e.g., griping to your friends about your bitchy spouse. YMMV, but I just don't think the answer is a straightforward "don't cheat" when "love, honor, and cherish" is at risk.
(I'll confess that the hypothetical rough patch might have an autobiographical element. The hypothetical sleeping with someone else doesn't, and I've never thought seriously about trying to cope with my own rough patches that way, but it's the best I can do right now to come up with a somewhat plausible scenario where I'd argue that sleeping with somebody else isn't necessarily wrong.)
Another thing worth noting about honesty and respect and such is that sometimes when your relationship lands you in circumstances that you really didn't want to be in, you find out that those circumstances aren't such a big deal after all, and sometimes you get to be a better person that way. It takes respect and understanding and such, but sometimes you want A, she wants B, you both want to stay together, and somehow it works out.
And back to Weman's 824 and jealousy: does anyone think jealousy is a good thing? It's a human thing, and you have to pay attention to it to avoid hurting people, but would anyone go further than that? I certainly don't think I'm immune to jealousy or ever will be. I just think that jealousy and stupid pride do a lot of harm that could be prevented if people thought a little more before going into full-on I've Been Betrayed mode.
Way too long. Getting late, even out here.
Jealousy is a bad thing. It means you get angry when you have to share. That's a stupid way to feel.
Bitch vs Tia -- catfight!
Tia has crusading, righteous youth on her side, but Bitch carries the honorable scars of experience.
As a typical stoopid catfight-enjoying male, I'd bet on the one with the biggest tits, but I don't know who that is.
In any case, on the larger meta point of my certainty, that's another thing that's being asserted, not really demonstrated, because I've already altered what I was saying in response to things people were saying on this thread. (I added a children disturbed/spouse untrustworthy case to the instances in which I could imagine justifiably not just talking to them about the changed understanding and I thought about what that meant for your opionions about your spouse; I thought SCMT might be right about tacit communication.) It is a new rule around here if in an argument it's expected that I qualify every statement with the possibility of my wrongness. Just as a point of comparison, in the Hirshman conversation, e.g., people were making a far, far more speculative point (arguing for a moral imperative for women whose benefits were much harder to see immediately (behavior X will make things better for women, will add to the total sum of justice, or will help modify the structure of the workplace and family versus I have kept a promise to my spouse)) and I think implicitly defending a much greater scorning of people who do otherwise (because LH was extremely scornful, and a bunch of people were just fine with that) than anything that's gone one here (nearly everyone expresses their sympathy for people who are put in difficult situations and cheat) with no such qualifications. Which is fine. Some people who were agreeing with Hirshman, like DaveL, were effectively telling me what I should do as a woman--even though they had never been one! I've occasionally made the same point in this thread at different times to see how the people who were around arguing at that given time would respond to it, whether anyone had changed with they were saying, whether I'd misunderstood what people were saying, etc. It's one of the things one does in arguments. Getting people to respond to what I think about these things reveals more about what they think and more about what I think, and may make me alter my opinion and may not.
I've been reading the same thread as Cala and eb.
This thread is stupidly long.
Tia and Cala are still right. Also, delurker Brock Landers in 642 puts the position well.
Also, a possibly not totally exclusive list of people who are or have been married who've taken something like my position in this thread: ttaM, Emerson, D.A., baa (?).
And me. Should we discuss something else now for another 161 comments?
baa is married. Emerson (afaik) is the only one of the four who has a kid.
Is it less wrong if you cheat on your spouse with a clown, in the name of poetry?
It is mandatory to cheat on your spouse with a clown in the name of poetry, but your get additional props if you arrange a three-up with your spouse and the clown and document it in classical hexameters.
838 -- I am not reading the same thread as you and Cala and eb; that is to say my reading of this thread includes fewer than 200 comments. But! I am married, and I'm witcha that cheating (which I take to include lying about it, by definition) is bad and generally not defensible. Though 'Postropher also makes sense to me when he says there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Clownio; and also when he says that we should fuck clowns and write poetry about it.
I cheated on my wife once (well not counting all the Mineshaft encounters) and it was a big mistake and caused a lot of trouble in my life.
Also re. 840, I have a child. Has the one fat Englishman?
(Also not exactly sure what 840 is driving at. Neither 'being married' nor 'being a parent' seems from the evidence in this thread to bear directly on someone's opinion about the morality of cheating.)
this thread "the portion of this thread that I have read"
845: It stemmed from LB, Idealist, BitchPhd, gswift, and me all standing in the "there's a lot of gray area here" camp.
846: Some call him NoFatEnglishbabies.
There should be a second sentence in 848, stating that it was about kids expanding the gray area, about which some of the folks without kids seemed to disagree.
That's a stupid way to feel.
That's a dumb thing to say.
848 -- Ok, so a bunch of parents are in the "yay cheating!" camp. I find myself feeling the "boo cheating!" argument more, what I can follow of it (and I tend to agree with -gg-d that we should all feel bad about ourselves all the time regardless), but yeah, I can see some gray area too.
I don't want to add too much fuel to the fire. There are severalpoints that I thought about making that I will refrain from making for now.
It foes, however, bother me a bit that noone addressed Winna's point. Mostpeople aren't nearly as discreet as they'd like to think. As a practical matter, this "It doesn't hurt anyone, if they don't find out" line may not hold up. Even if the spouse never finds out about specific affairs, he or she will probably have a sense that something is being hidden,, and taht kind of secrecy seriously undermines trust. And just because the spouse doesn't say anything, it doesn't mean that they don't suspect you of either sexual infidelity (or other transgressions that B et al. might find more serious, e.g., hiding financial assets in an offshore account.)
Also, if you're ever going to have sex with the non-knowing spouse again, your cheating puts that person at risk of disease without their knowing it. If you're not planning to have sex with your spouse again, then you are probably not in a mutually supportive, adult relationship, in which case you are not treating the adult spouse as a fully moral agent, as Cala has written above. I've seen this, and I think it happend frequently when insanity is involved. It's even understandable.
But if someone treated me that way, and justified a premeditated affair by saying that he needed secual companionship that I couldn't provide, and I couldn't handle a discussion abotu that, I would consider that decision a betrayal. That betrayal would be even greater than the actual actual sex act, and I think that a great wrong would have been committed.
I find myself feeling the "boo cheating!" argument more
Maybe that's not really your kid.
I could see cheating on your spouse if you learned that he or she habitually pooped in the shower. I'd also find a different place to shower.
My cat is very disraught that I cheat on her with other cats, including her hated rival who lives on the other side of the apartment. I don't care, though. Jealousy just makes her seem softer to touch.
Bless you, Bgirl. I thought my post was in some magical font invisible to all but me.
I was married, once.
The fact that my husband thought that it was just fine and dandy to cheat on me without giving me the option to object, and thought I'd be too goddamned stupid to put two and two together is one of the reasons I'm not. I'm not coming down from the mountain to say that in every instance it's wrong to cheat. I can't say that. I can say that if you have to justify your fucking around with crazy hypotheticals odds are pretty good it's not one of those times where it's not wrong.
In addition to the whole joy of disease, there is the possibility of your husband/wife acquiring a child through the process. There is also the social unpleasantness that arises when everyone in the community knows you're being fucked over and everyone 'feels sorry' for you with that nasty pity that's composed of equal parts of contempt and glee.
I'm saying that the odds are good you're not fooling anyone if you cheat. Your wife/husband knows something is up. They may not have classical evidence like lipstick stains etc, but in these days they're more often than not likely to have harder proof if they look for it, like chat logs and credit card bills. And while it may be nobler to say 'Gosh, I'm glad that they went to find some physical companionship that they felt I could not provide, undoubtedly in order to strengthen our marriage', the reality is that finding out that someone you care for would rather fuck other people than try to work on what you share is devastating. It is certainly not going to do these hypothetical 'fragile, mentally unstable spouses with terminal cancer and a heart plug and a quiverful of cherubic children' any good. And you think those children won't eventually find out? Kids are not any stupider than wives are.
If you have to have sex with other people, the only decent thing (in my non-child, non-wacked hypothetical world) is to talk to your partner. It's not like people don't discuss these things anymore. Hell, it may even come as a relief to them to have it out in the open. But taking a unilateral decision for both parties is something that isn't really justified in normal circumstances, and the odds of someone's spouse being truly too unstable to be able to confront are vanishingly small unless I vastly underestimate the numbers of crazed fragile terminal patients getting married these days.
I haven't seen anyone else address it from the point of view of that person who's being protected from what's going on for what is supposedly for their good but what in reality is the convenience of the person 'protecting' them. The person who is being cheated on knows something is wrong. It doesn't take much effort to confirm that, and even if you don't it's an enormous strain. Communication at least gives them the option of laying ground rules. They should at least be given the dignity of that option.
It pisses me off that a disagreement between two women about an ethical problem is referred to as a 'catfight'. Perhaps it was irony.
854 -- fortunately with my daughter, there is no question of whether my wife adopted her with another man. At the playground the other day I helped a neighbor girl extricate herself from a climbing structure she had got tangled up in, and my daughter looked at me archly as if she suspected infidelity.
833: I appreciate the effort to explain, rather than assert that I just can't understand. I really do.
The problem for me is that all these scenarios are provoking no moral recognition. Hell, early in this thread B was saying that one of the times it was okay to cheat was if your spouse was dying of cancer. I say no. So everyone who thinks "it's complicated," but can't tell me how in a way that makes sense to me doesn't convince me that it's complicated.
I look at what you wrote and think, I've never been married, but I know what sex and sexual comfort are, and I really can't imagine why it would be absolutely necessary to have that, on the side, to be patient with your spouse (presuming your spouse has not been withholding sex from you for a period of years). There are a number of ways to express your sexuality that don't involve fucking, and a number of ways to get emotional support, too. (Really, I'm not the one who's elevating the importance of sex above all else here.) If anything, I think the guilt would make you less likely to be patient with your spouse. If you don't feel guilty about cheating on your spouse, I think that's likely a problem too. So I can't see this as some kind of "Do I save the trolley or Kirsten Dunst" situation. You can do both. It is hard to do both. I might well forgive you if you fail to do both. But it is not outside of human power.
Now I'm imagining being the cheated on spouse, and being told by my husband in all seriousness that really, he did it for us, because he just couldn't support me and be patient with me without having sex with another woman. I think my response to this would likely be derision, and it would make me angrier than the fact that he had cheated. (On the other hand, a straightforward and unqualified apology would be great, and if I was at that point emotionally, hopefully I'd apologize for being such a shrew.)
Now I'm imagining being a friend the prospective cheater comes to for advice. What should I do, she says? My husband is being so mean. I want to have sex with Greg from the office. It will make me feel better.
I cannot imagine saying, "yes, that's what you should do." Even if I believed that there was only harm to her husband if he found out, and I don't believe that; I think betrayal is harm in and of itself, there are too many ways he could find out, and other harm could come to him.
eb lists some of them here: I've got a good thing going here. I have a partner I love and want to stay with and I have sex I enjoy on the side. (Sure there's a disease risk. Sure there's the possibility that birth control will fail and I might have to take on responsibility for a(nother) child. Sure the other person could turn out to have a character that I misjudged and could show up in my or my family's life in ways I didn't expect or want. Sure those things could affect my partner. But I'm careful. I'm trustworthy. I know myself and I know what I'm doing.) Why would I want to ruin a good thing by telling my partner, whose own sense of morals don't accord with mine? It's for my own good and my partner's that I keep this and any other affair a secret.
And further, winna's 809 seems instructive to me.
The only situations so far listed when I could think of giving the advice to cheat are the aforementioned cultural and economic stuff, or if her marriage was hopeless and yet her husband could not be trusted with honesty, because he was an inferior steward of the children's welfare, and the children were exceptionally vulnerable. There may be some other situations involving tacit communication. If my husband had Lou Gehrig's disease (longer term than a cancer death), I would talk to him about my having sex with other people, but maybe her husband has Lou Gehrig's disease and somehow found a way to let her know without telling her. But like I said, I'm suspicious of the efficacy of mind-reading, and I think it would easily be warped into bullshit rationalizations.
Now I'm imagining being approached by a man who's in your situation. This is how this whole conversation got started, and outside of the social and intellectual exercise of a conversation about ethics, the only practical reason why I would give a shit about other people's marital arrangements. However, it has already come up three times in my life (not with married men, but with men with girlfriends), so it's a live issue. What is right for me to do? Nothing in your scenario suggests to me that it is right for me to help this guy cheat on his wife. If he's my friend, I should be supporting him and helping him deal with his situation, but, always presuming sexual fidelity is an important value in their relationship, I'm helping him harm her if I sleep with him. I might do it anyway if I were in a situation where I wanted sex badly enough, but that wouldn't excuse it.
There is no plausible scenario I can imagine where Chet isn't a tool. (Not necessarily a global tool; I'm sure he's kind to dogs, but in this respect.) He has plenty of economic freedom; he has no children. If his girlfriend is mentally ill she needs treatment, not pity fucks. Okay. Maybe his girlfriend is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. If that's the case, maybe I should have slept with him.
attempted thread-hijack. does anyone know where women in their early sixties can get pants that are comfortable (so she wears them) but actually fit and look reasonable?
i'm serious, i have to take my mom shopping.
i'm begging you here. where does one go?
greater dc metropolitan area
things she can wear on the weekend or when not at work. not too expensive because she hates to spend money on herself.
(you didn't really want to keep talking about infidelity, did you?)
Also, re: 792 So for the most part, it's the married people with kids against the single people (and baa, but he's wrong about everything anyhow). and all the similar arguments that followed...
It would also be the (less loaded word for sanctimonious) parents against the children of divorce. And yet that doesn't stop said parents from saying divorce is The Worst Thing For Kids, and it didn't stop us from entertaining your arguments.
Just sayin.
I shouldn't reopen this, but I missed the last 400 or so comments. If anyone wants a pretty exact statement of where I stand, Ideal's 565:
The disagreement comes from what follows. To play the I'm-old-and-seen-a-lot-of-life card, I can tell you that the opportunities over the course of your life to fail to act honorably and in conformance with your obligations to your spouse and children are legion. Unjustified anger, insufficient support, too little attention, too little trust, failing to compromise your needs for theirs and the list goes on. And on and on and on. It is a part of life that even the best of us have to live with--we will fail to fulfill our obligations.
and B.'s 663:
661: The question is, why is *sexuality* THE test case for promises and lying?
speak for me. Marital vows cover a lot more than sexual fidelity: they include lifelong mutual emotional, practical, and economic support. Most people (other than Ogged, who never hurt anything other than a caterpillar) will, to some degree, break their marital vows in some regard -- spending more time than they need to at work, not pulling their weight at home, not treating their spouse with love and respect. I haven't meant to say in this thread that oath-breaking is okay -- just that married people do break their vows to each other all the time, and it doesn't make sense to treat the oath of sexual fidelity as the one facet of the marital vows that it is catastrophic to break, while other breakages are a matter of renegotiation and healing.
I don't mean to attribute contrary views to anyone who I've been arguing with -- I just wanted to make it absolutely clear what I am arguing for.
For clarity I disagree with no part of 862.
no question of whether my wife adopted her with another man
Glib smartassery bites me in the ass. Sincere apologies if that was in poor taste.
parents against the children of divorce.
Some of us are in both of those camps.
apologies if that was in poor taste
Sez Mr. "Fuck you, clown!" -- no worries, poor taste is a feature not a bug.
Hey Tia, want to get blogmarried? My understanding is it will drastically improve any arguments either of us choose to make.
Less snarkily, what was annoying about the "I am or have been married" point wasn't that some of the married people are claiming to have had experiences that I and others haven't. That's trivially true, and quite possibly relevant. What's annoying is that these experiences apparently can't be explained in my primitive human language such that I might gather the wisdom (wisdom part is not snark) that you guys have to impart. But I was thinking about how the "I've been married" point was being used, and have come up with a version of it which if it's some people in this thread have meant would make a lot of sense to me.
So Tia's made the point, which I've pretty much agreed with, that things suggested by some commenters namely making an ex ante decision that getting a little on the side will improve your marriage without consulting your spouse or having reason to believe that your spouse would agree given the opportunity, involve, in that instance, treating their spouse as less than a fully rational moral agent. And seeing people respond to that with "you haven't been married" wasn't making sense to me. But here's what would: people are suggesting that marriage is (or can be) an agreement that one spouse can at times allow their judgment of what's best for the other trump that others, and both agree to this being done without there being full disclosure. Is it this sort of meta-agreement that people have been asserting?
Also, I really wanted this thread to end hundreds and hundreds of comments ago, pretty much when it stopped being about me, but oh well.
For clarity I disagree with no part of 862.
Comity!!
w/d, do you promise to tell me if you blogcheat? I won't blogdivorce you.
Arrrrg. Thanks for pointing out that the 'when you're older and married, you'll see that you're being unreasonable' argument isn't held by all the married folks, or even all the married folks with kids.
I don't think I'm being a crazy moral absolutist. So here's a long list of things I think, conveniently in one comment box.
1. Confessing to a past indiscretion is neither always blameworthy, nor always praiseworthy. I tend to suspect in most cases, it's more trouble than it's worth. What to do after the fact has never been part of the discussion.
2. There are a whole class of cases that I think are in ethical gray areas: economic dependency (spouse can't divorce due to resulting poverty), extreme social expectations (maybe the French JE talked about, arranged matches, etc.)
3. While divorce is indeed a tragedy, the fact that a) most marriages end in divorce and b) we don't normally shame the person for ending their marriage, it seems bizarre to declare suddenly that infidelity is preferable to divorce, made more bizarre by winna's points.
4. Cases where one spouse is truly mentally incompetent: Alzheimer's, dementia, schizophrenia, etc.. In these cases it seems impossible to respect the other person's agency, and I would not count infidelity as a moral wrong.
5. So, now I consider the rest of the cases. And, I assume, for the sake of argument, that no one will ever find out about the cheating. I propose that cheating is still wrong. My reason is this: a) it is important to honor promises and b) when deciding you don't need to honor a promise, you are treating your partner's reason as though it doesn't matter, treating their agency like that of a child: subordinate to yours.
Doing so changes the nature of your relationship with that person.
5a. This does not mean that the person cheating wrongly in 5 might not be understandable, that his or her guilt might be mitigated, that it might not be appropriate to respond to his or her plight with empathy. This does not mean that the person must choose divorce right away when they find out. Healing and forgiveness are possible. All wrong means is 'better to refrain from doing it than to do it.'
5b. This does not mean that there is only one acceptable negotiation of sexual fidelity, just that whatever it is must be decided (and not just as a practical matter) by both parties. Even if you think sexual fidelity is just a matter of the influence of the patriarchy*, respect for you partner would require that you both are on the same page.
5c. SCMTim's point, that the agreement changes over time and both parties may understand the changes implicitly is pretty compelling. I point out that if this is the case, then no one is treating anyone like a moral child. I'm still inclined to say that if you're moving from a marriage that valued fidelity highly to one where you hope you're permitted to fool around now, you're probably better off making that explicit.
6. I do not presume, as one outside of these marriages, that I am privy to the relevant facts. In the hypothetical examples, however, which I'm taking 'wife dying of cancer' and 39, I do think both of those are wrong absent some sort of implicit thing like SCMTim's talking about. And yes, in hypothetical examples, I'm comfortable with calling someone's behavior wrong.
I think that covers it.
---
* I think some concept of sexual fidelity is here to stay overall, patriarchy or no patriarchy. I put this down to the emotional power of sex, which I do think is greater than most other actions. No, this does not entail that all sex acts lead to an emotional attachment, just on which way I'd bet. I imagine 'what counts as fidelity' is somewhat flexible and definitely culturally determined, but I don't think a society where everyone just fucks like they're on Logan's Run is really possible.
I don't know, do you want a blogopenmarriage or would you prefer a a more traditional blogmarriage?
866/868 -- who will officiate? where will the reception be held? I reckon you need a party planner to consult with you and work out all the details -- allow me to humbly offer my services. I accept PayPal.
mmf!, I have no idea. Your question seems like it might fit better in the new thread about Lance Bass and Tori Spelling. I'm also afraid that this thread is getting so long that it might break the site.
I want a traditional blogmarriage, I just want you to tell me if there's a problem so great that you've been blogunfaithful. I'll be mad, but if you still bloglove me I think we can get past it. Because, as I've said all along, blogfidelity is not the most important thing in blogmarriage.
Editing 866: "a version of it which if it's what some people in this thread have meant would make a lot of sense to me." Bunch of problems in my next paragraph too, e.g. missing a comma before "namely", going back and forth between second person singular possessive and third person plural possessive.
873: I agree to all that, as long as we don't discuss what bloginfidelity would be so that we can both imagine that whatever we do doesn't constitute it.
Do traditional blogmarriages demand that the partners merge their blogs? Do we have to give you presents of subscriptions to Movable Type and big quirky clipart collections? .
A feminist blogmarriage will keep separate blogaccounts and identities, in case one divorces.
869: If there's any force to the "I'm married and you're not, and I can't explain, rather than blankly assert, why that changes anything" argument, it's that it's the source why I think this:
While divorce is indeed a tragedy, the fact that a) most marriages end in divorce and b) we don't normally shame the person for ending their marriage, it seems bizarre to declare suddenly that infidelity is preferable to divorce, made more bizarre by winna's points
is wrong. I haven't been divorced, but based on being married, divorce is an awful, awful, terrible thing to happen to the people involved (maybe stats show the kids turn out fine -- I'm talking about the grownups). I can't say I know for sure, and both of these possibilities are very, very unlikely (IMO), but if I found out Buck had cheated on me, I would be very angry, and we'd have a lot of work to do to get over it. But I'm pretty sure that there's a fairly good chance that if he still wanted to stay married, we could work something out that, five years down the road, would leave me not particularly dwelling on it, and thinking of it as a bad patch we went through. If he left me, on the other hand, I am fairly certain that I would be sad, and hurt, and angry, for the rest of my life. (Not that I wouldn't enjoy anything ever again, or that my life would be over. I'd bounce back and manage, and get along okay. But the first is the sort of injury that heals, the second doesn't seem to be.) I can't defend this belief, but it comes from my experience of what it is like to be married.
A really traditional blogmarriage would demand that Tia sign all her posts with W/d's name. But he would have to pay for any domains she wanted.
Tia sign all her posts with W/d's name
I was thinking "Tiadryer". or "T/d" for short.
I agree totally with 877 but can't figure out why it's relevant. The question is not "would you rather Buck cheat on you or divorce you?", the question is "if Buck decided he wanted to start sleeping with other people behind your back, can you imagine a scenario in which you that would not be wrong?" (Other than your own dememtia.)
who will officiate?
Kotsko, obviously.
Excellent. Now I have to go to work. I'll see you later honey.
Or: Or! they could hyphenate! Since "Tia" is a singleton, the resulting last name would be dryer- or -dryer. I would recommend the former as it would be easier to alphabetize.
Just trying to sort out the example -
less-painful: Buck cheats. You get mad, but forgive.
more-painful: Buck cheats, and also leaves you. You cannot forgive.
I would have to agree. But I thought the point Tia et al were making was:
more-moral: Buck cheats. Tells you so you can forgive or leave.
less-moral: Buck cheats. You never find out. You are powerless in the cheating & consequences decision.
And, you know, all that stuff mentioned many times about it not being the cheating, but the betrayal, etc.
On preview, what 881 said.
Fair enough, LB. I should probably amend that to serious infidelity. I still think you're wrong, mind, mostly because I think quite a lot of infidelity will end in divorce anyway, and I think that most people who say 'I'm cheating so I don't have to divorce' are probably damaging their spouse more than they would otherwise, for the sorts of reason winna brings up.
I just can't imagine being in a situation where someone said, yeah, I know I've been ignoring you and sleeping around serially, but hey, at least I'm not divorcing you and feeling like they made the best decision.
I just found the claim weird given that most of us here would accept if a couple got divorced because of money, or mismatched expectations, or any other reason, we wouldn't say 'Should have stuck it out for the children', and I don't see why infidelity, given that it's important at all, should be any different.
Hey, it was your day to get the blogkids, asshole. My blogcareer is going nowhere.
Hmm...I need some blogcomfort...
881: If he, for some reason, decided it was one or the other. I would think it was wrong of him to make that initial decision, but given the intitial decision I would think the decision to cheat rather than divorce was preferable. I was responding to, and disagreeing with, the statement that "it seems bizarre to declare suddenly that infidelity is preferable to divorce". I do declare that, and based on my marital experience I don't consider it a bizarre position to hold.
We need to start making ASCII veils and things.
@-->---
@-->---
@-->---
Look! I'm a flower girl!
I am going to cry when my art breaks the thread.
885: While I basically agree with you about that too, and my husband better be likeminded, my only point in this thread is about the prospective morality of cheating, not about what you should say about past indiscretions.
885 suggests to me that this thread has mushroomed to nearly-900 unhappy comments in large part due to careless reading.
Your more- and less-moral points are not what's in dispute here. Re-read 869. Focus on point 1.
877: So all of our secret plans to steal you away from Buck are likely to come to naught? Damn.
It strikes me (caveat: based largely on found blog knowledge) that this is really an argument between strict contructionists or originalists and living constitutionalists. Some people are saying that the explicit (or so widely recognized as to be effectively explicit) terms are all important, and some people are saying that things change, and we change our understanding of the terms of the agreement to meet them. Some people are saying you must follow the rules laid out, and some are saying that no, the important thing is to "preserve the Union," and that's paramount. I'm a Northerner by culture, so I feel more comfortable with the latter group. The rest of you are pretty much objectively pro-slavery.
What, no one wants to blogcomfort me?
It depends on how the person is cheating. 'Woops, I was drunk at a conference and had sex' is vastly different than 'Woops, I was having an affair because you are a failure as a wife'.
I've heard a lot of stories about when the cheating comes out, and usually the first instinct of the cheater is to blame the person s/he was cheating on. That kind of act tends to shred holes in one's respect/faith/love for the person. Even if you try really, really hard, it's always there.
I still think you're wrong, mind, mostly because I think quite a lot of infidelity will end in divorce anyway, and I think that most people who say 'I'm cheating so I don't have to divorce' are probably damaging their spouse more than they would otherwise, for the sorts of reason winna brings up.
This is pretty much (IMO) the only really important point the 'pro-cheaters' are trying to make. Sexual fidelity is, in an unexamined way (not by the people in this thread, who have examined the bejeezus out of it. But by society.) treated as the touchstone of whether a marriage can survive -- violating it is the unforgivable insult, an insult which it is almost wrong to forgive (see how people claim that Hillary Clinton's decision to stay with Bill shows that her moral character is flawed). That's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if infidelity has to end a marriage, then it can't be less wrong than divorce because it includes divorce. I'm trying to argue that that unexamined elevation of sexual betrayal to a level more important than any other betrayal is not a good thing.
862: Where are these paragons who can carry on clandestine affairs while still meeting their obligations at home and treating their partners with "love and respect"? As far as I can tell, they are myths. I've been where Winna's been, and before I found out my partner was cheating I was busy making allowances for his inability to be present in the relationship. Demanding work and all that. Believe me, when you find out, you don't feel loved or respected. You feel you've been living a lie and have been made a fool of.
And generally, if someone is a habitual cheater yet wants to stay married, it's not because he's planning to give up cheating. A one-time thing? maybe.
In retrospect (long retrospect) the way I found out was sort of funny. girl-on-the-side A called me up and squealed on girl-on-the-side B. Because she was jealous.
re: 894
If you don't mind meeting in bloghotels.
881: Not quite.
Situation. Buck is unhappy with LB and is ridiculously frustrated with his marriage.
Should he:
a) Cheat
b) Refrain from cheating
c) Renegotiate the relationship so it is more suitable
d) Ask for a divorce.
?
People were responding with
e) Divorce is prima facie so horrible that the options are really only a) and b), so you should choose a) so it doesn't lead to a divorce. And a) is no longer wrong.
I am saying that I think d) is incorrect, on both the practical and moral grounds.
girl-on-the-side A called me up and squealed on girl-on-the-side B
Was your ex-husband the Cat in the Hat?
I've heard a lot of stories about when the cheating comes out, and usually the first instinct of the cheater is to blame the person s/he was cheating on.
Not blame, winna, explain. The cheater is just letting the cheatee know how the difficult behavior of the cheatee made cheating the least harmful possible course of action, and thus the best possible decision. Really, the cheater was doing it for the cheatee all along. Don't you understand?
Hmm. I could offer relevant examples from my first marriage, but it would require revealing all sorts of things about my ex that I'm confident she'd rather not have in a public forum (especially since I'm not remotely anonymous).
More's the pity.
The rest of you are pretty much objectively pro-slavery.
This is unquestionably true.
899: And apo was saying that it's not a multiple choice question. The individual circumstances of a marriage change what will damage it in ways that you can't understand from outside that marriage. That doesn't mean oathbreaking isn't still wrong, but how wrong it is, in comparison to other wrong things that we accept without thinking about it, is a very individual question.
897: Isn't the answer to that that if such people existed, you wouldn't know? A lot of people in marriages that remain intact cheat -- I don't think it can be assumed that all those marriages are globally bad ones.
892: Or careless tenses. "Cheats" should read "is cheating" or "has decided that he is going to cheat."
In other words, Cala's cheating without discussion (Cheater tells Cheatee) is immoral argument. In terms of 877.
On preview, or you could just read 899 which is Cala in person making said argument, and better.
People were responding with e)
My response was that there isn't one answer that will fit all marriages.
900: I don't get the connection, because as a child I loathed the Cat in the Hat, and expunged it from my memory as quickly as possible. Maybe you can post an explanation on Standpipe's joke-explaining blog.
LB, that's what set me off yesterday, because it seems to be a) assuming that no one except the 'fidelity isn't a big deal' types have thought about it (wrong) and b) it shifts the responsibility for the failure of the marriage onto the person that doesn't cheat when presumably (since it's cheating) both of them have agreed they wouldn't.
I'm not arguing that sexual fidelity is a virtue from on high: I'm saying that if a couple has agreed to it, presumably they think it is important, and I think there are good reasons to think it might be important, and that a sustained breach of fidelity might be more important than a sustained failure to take out the trash.
And I think the argument was trending towards, 'if you divorce someone over infidelity, you're just a jealous asshole beholden to the patriarchy who should work past that, but if it's just that you dont have much in common any more, divorce away.' If you guys have all turned into covenant marriage types overnight, let me know, and this will stop seeming bizarre to me.
893: That's brilliant.
906: Thing-A and Thing-B are characters in the story.
Not blame, winna, explain. The cheater is just letting the cheatee know how the difficult behavior of the cheatee made cheating the least harmful possible course of action, and thus the best possible decision. Really, the cheater was doing it for the cheatee all along. Don't you understand?
Suddenly all is made plain! How foolish of me to have objected. I should have been grateful, but it never occurred to me that cheaters are simply utilitarians.
And just because the person being cheated on isn't throwing everything out on the lawn, it doesn't mean they don't know. Sometimes it's easier to just close your eyes and hope it goes away. Particularly when you don't feel you have the option to do anything else.
The individual circumstances of a marriage change what will damage it in ways that you can't understand from outside that marriage. That doesn't mean oathbreaking isn't still wrong, but how wrong it is, in comparison to other wrong things that we accept without thinking about it, is a very individual question.
869.5a.
869.6
893: I'm pretty sure the conflict is between people who are being somewhat more deontological and others who are being somewhat more act-utilitarian. I also think secession is textually prohibited, but that's just one of many crazy things the writings of Akhil Amar have convinced me of.
898: Okay. I'll get the check. You're giving me blogcomfort after all. If it's a long way bloghome, I'll even pay for the blogcab.
908: Isn't it actually Thing One and Thing Two?
We probably should shut this thread down -- Becks is away, and I'm afraid of breaking the site.
I'm pretty satisfied that most remaining differences are those of emphasis, rather than fundamentals But if anyone want's to keep talking about this, let me know and I'll put up a fresh post.
Bouquet toss:
$:-D @}---}
@}---} !
:- 0 :-0 :-0 :-0
:-) = @}---}
:-( :-( :-(
914 -- right you are; but the Little Cats were lettered. They went all the way up to Little Cat Z; but who's to say mcmc's ex had only the two?
If 862 is agreeable, I don't see why there's been continuing argument for almost 900 comments, because I'm pretty sure that no one in the pro-cheating camp is saying anything other than what 862 sums up.
If at a real wedding you break a glass, wouldn't you break a site at a blogwedding?
let me know and I'll put up a fresh post.
Oh, let's not shut it this close to 1000.
No, 862 just says infidelity is understandable and forgivable. It doesn't say anything about "not wrong" or even "least wrong" which are the positions the anti-cheating camp is arguing against.
918- I also totally agree with 862. I'm pretty sure the pro-cheaters have said things quite different from this. But if at heart this was all they meant, then: comity!
921: 'What the anti-cheating camp is arguing against' is not precisely equivalent to 'what the pro-cheating camp is arguing for'. I think most of this argument has been about emphasis and certainty, rather than about fundamental disagreements of morality.
On second thought, you're probably right, LB. This thread has to be straining the server. I'll close it.
