Today’s topic comes courtesy of Mizzlovelippz who responded to my desperate twitterplea for something – anything! – to write about when the well was running kinda dry. (We also have to give a little shout-out to Boboleechron who suggested I write about “rainy days and stewed pigtail”, even though I couldn’t find a way to make that fit for the blog).
Ah, cheating. It’s one of my favourite relationship issues because it is so ripe with material. Who cheats more, how we cheat, why we cheat, what is cheating, it’s a never-ending discussion. But for today we will focus on MizzLoveLippz’s question, which was this:
Wo/men who cheat and claim they love their [partner]
Are cheating and love mutually exclusive? Consider this scenario. I have cheated once in the past. Well, twice if you want to get technical about it but the second time didn’t really count. I’ve also been cheated on. My first love and I cheated on each other in different ways, for different reasons, and we chose different methods of dealing with it. I was looking for something that I was missing in our relationship; a level of closeness that Snickers would not let us achieve. And I think he was looking to punish me, probably for that and various other things that had gone on over the years.
I think cheating gets a bad rap. People are quick to blame, accuse, judge, and scorn a cheater without examining the behaviour that contributes to the cheating. Not that I’m justifying it, but the truth is that in a relationship, we hurt each other in a lot of ways; we abuse trust, we withdraw attention and affection, we betray and we disrespect our relationships. But none of those behaviours seem to carry the same stigma as cheating, and I wonder why that is.
Consider the case of Jon and Kate. If you follow me on twitter you know that I was near to barfing watching Kate’s interview on Monday night. Not just because of her bad mullet I disagree with the notion of bad mouthing the father of your children on television, but because her version of what has gone on is just way too convenient for me. She has a trump card and she’s using it – the ‘photographic evidence’ of Jon’s infidelity is the shield behind which she deflects all blame or responsibility for the demise of her marriage. But what she seems to be forgetting – or what she clearly wants us to forget – are the ways in which she went wrong; from what I’ve seen of the show, she belittled, undermined, and emasculated that man on the regular. So is it any surprise that he took up with some young thing that probably made him feel like a god?
None of which is to say is that it’s our fault when our partner cheats on us; but the fact is that people have needs and if they’re not met in one place they will – consciously or not – seek to meet them elsewhere. That’s just life.
So what does all this mean, really? Does the fact that Snickers and I cheated mean we didn’t love each other? I’m inclined to say no. I think that what I did was completely incidental to the relationship; to be honest I really wasn’t thinking about Snickers at all at the time. And in a lot of ways, what I did was helpful to our relationship…it made me more careful with him than I would have been otherwise. As for Snickers, I think his act of cheating in itself had nothing to do with me or how he felt about me, but I know that the way he chose to go about it was a kind of punishment. And in the end, it wasn’t what he did that caused our undoing, but how he did it. And even though the relationship ended, the love never did.
I guess the main distinction for me is the way in which the cheating was done. Can a man love his fiancée and still get a fast hood suck from a stripper at his bachelor party? I’d say yes. But does a man who loves his wife have an affair with her sister for 10 years before he files for divorce and tries to take their children away? I’m not so sure. I think it comes down to whether the act of cheating is really taking anything away from the relationship. If my boyfriend or husband got a little beats from a side girl from time to time, it wouldn’t even faze me. To me, that is taking nothing from me and our relationship is continuing uninterrupted regardless. But if my boyfriend was wining and dining another woman, confiding in her, and sharing details of our relationship with her, please believe we’re gonna have some problems, even if he never saw her privates.
That being said, cheating is still an assholey thing to do. Unless you’re lucky enough to be with someone like me who doesn’t give a shit, that fast beat that you grabbed on the side is gonna cause your girl a whole lot of hurt if she finds out. And the fact that you’re willing to take that risk might not mean that you don’t love her, but it definitely says something about you. And not in a good way.
I think cheating gets a bad rap. People are quick to blame, accuse, judge, and scorn a cheater without examining the behaviour that contributes to the cheating. Not that I’m justifying it, but the truth is that in a relationship, we hurt each other in a lot of ways; we abuse trust, we withdraw attention and affection, we betray and we disrespect our relationships. But none of those behaviours seem to carry the same stigma as cheating, and I wonder why that is.
Consider the case of Jon and Kate. If you follow me on twitter you know that I was near to barfing watching Kate’s interview on Monday night. Not just because of her bad mullet I disagree with the notion of bad mouthing the father of your children on television, but because her version of what has gone on is just way too convenient for me. She has a trump card and she’s using it – the ‘photographic evidence’ of Jon’s infidelity is the shield behind which she deflects all blame or responsibility for the demise of her marriage. But what she seems to be forgetting – or what she clearly wants us to forget – are the ways in which she went wrong; from what I’ve seen of the show, she belittled, undermined, and emasculated that man on the regular. So is it any surprise that he took up with some young thing that probably made him feel like a god?
None of which is to say is that it’s our fault when our partner cheats on us; but the fact is that people have needs and if they’re not met in one place they will – consciously or not – seek to meet them elsewhere. That’s just life.
So what does all this mean, really? Does the fact that Snickers and I cheated mean we didn’t love each other? I’m inclined to say no. I think that what I did was completely incidental to the relationship; to be honest I really wasn’t thinking about Snickers at all at the time. And in a lot of ways, what I did was helpful to our relationship…it made me more careful with him than I would have been otherwise. As for Snickers, I think his act of cheating in itself had nothing to do with me or how he felt about me, but I know that the way he chose to go about it was a kind of punishment. And in the end, it wasn’t what he did that caused our undoing, but how he did it. And even though the relationship ended, the love never did.
I guess the main distinction for me is the way in which the cheating was done. Can a man love his fiancée and still get a fast hood suck from a stripper at his bachelor party? I’d say yes. But does a man who loves his wife have an affair with her sister for 10 years before he files for divorce and tries to take their children away? I’m not so sure. I think it comes down to whether the act of cheating is really taking anything away from the relationship. If my boyfriend or husband got a little beats from a side girl from time to time, it wouldn’t even faze me. To me, that is taking nothing from me and our relationship is continuing uninterrupted regardless. But if my boyfriend was wining and dining another woman, confiding in her, and sharing details of our relationship with her, please believe we’re gonna have some problems, even if he never saw her privates.
That being said, cheating is still an assholey thing to do. Unless you’re lucky enough to be with someone like me who doesn’t give a shit, that fast beat that you grabbed on the side is gonna cause your girl a whole lot of hurt if she finds out. And the fact that you’re willing to take that risk might not mean that you don’t love her, but it definitely says something about you. And not in a good way.
