My colleagues at the Alligator, Amelia Harnish and Jared Misner, wrote a defense — or at least a justification — of infidelity in their Jan. 14 Avenue column at www.bit.ly/secretscrewing.
Amelia wrote that cheating is “sometimes a necessary evil,” and unless you’re all-knowing and all-seeing — or perpetually sober — everybody will likely one day “be bored enough to do something cruel yet delicious, like getting humped in a hammock at that party your boyfriend was too tired to attend.”
Jared wrote about how he’s “not really sorry” about having sex with someone else’s significant other and that all of us “who have had the chance to score” with someone as hot as he did “should feel proud rather than guilty.”
I don’t agree with them.
This isn’t about a puritanical view of sex or sexuality. Sex, after all, is supposed to be pretty great. If it’s not, it’s probably not being done correctly. And everybody should be free to make his or her own sexual decisions free of stigma or societal shame as long as they’re consensual, responsible and honest about it.
In fact, this isn’t even necessarily about sex. Cheating is any violation of the promised commitments members of a relationship have made, either implicitly or explicitly, to each other. And while that often includes sex, every relationship can have its own idiosyncratic, sometimes-non-sexual boundaries: Couples who don’t have premarital sex may define cheating as holding someone else’s hand. Those in more sexually open relationships may allow outside sex but draw the line at kissing on the lips or saying “I love you.” Crossing the boundaries, whatever they are, is always wrong.
In the column, Jared wrote that “[b]edrooms become a battle where lovers are in a constant search for the antidote to monogamy,” but this isn’t about monogamy at all. In fact, that’s a common red herring among those defending infidelity: the point that monogamy is an artificial construct—that it’s naïve, outmoded and unrealistic. But even people in open relationships set boundaries and, more importantly, abide by them.
This is simply about respect. It’s easy to get hurt in a relationship, even when those involved act as though it’s incomprehensible for someone to go out of the way to be hurtful.
As far as bad things to do in a relationship, infidelity is particularly terrible. It doesn’t just poison current relationships: The jading effect and can potentially poison future relationships.
It makes all of our commitments seem a little less meaningful and a little more suspect. Normalizing infidelity means normalizing automatic skepticism toward each other, and that makes it harder for all of us to love and be loved.
I understand that this is a very strange time to be looking for someone to love. What constitutes a “relationship” or a “significant other” is going through a fluctuating redefinition in the era of social networking. But the ephemerality of human connections is abundantly clear when people uproot their entire lives and move across the country, or around the world, with little more than a plane ticket and a painfully scarce job offer. And just being alive when there are nearly 6.8 billion people on the planet highlights how many opportunities we have to fall in love — and get our hearts broken.
In the face of all this, it’s not unreasonable to try to find some new, postmodern approach to relationships. But infidelity is an expression of selfishness, immaturity and often cowardice. Far from being anything radical, these are very old and very base parts of who we are.
On the other hand, protecting not just your love but the love of others and the love of those you may never meet aren’t just good things. They’re mildly revolutionary things.
Joe Dellosa is an advertising senior. His column appears on Tuesdays.
