No knitting here.
I was pointed to this blog post today. In short, it talks about how pretty much everybody these days knows someone who has been cheated on by their partner, or has been cheated on themselves, and has had their heart broken when they were expecting to be in a committed, monogamous relationship. And it sucks.
It seems that in the dating world, there are are only three types of people (with a few exceptions, of course): 1. People who innocently expect a monogamous relationship and are blind to the possibility that their partner would ever want to stray. These are people who invariably wind up hurt at some point. 2. People who want to stray, and who never seriously intend to stay committed, because if they seriously intended to not cheat, then they simply wouldn’t – it’s really not that hard to not stick your dick in someone else, as that involves quite a lot of activity. Those are the people who invariably hurt others. And 3. People who are clingy, possessive, distrustful, paranoid, and desperate, those who want a monogamous relationship but cannot trust that in this day, their partner won’t up and cheat on them. These are the people who both end up hurt because they invite people to mistreat them, AND hurt others, the ones who truly deserve to be trusted, who prove that they’re trustworthy, who intend nothing but good.
Prior to meeting each other, both my husband and I were in long-term relationships with people (he was married, I was not) who ended up cheating on us, lying about it, being confronted about it, denying it, shown the proof about it, still denying it, lying about it, finally admitting it and trying to justify it, then winding up breaking off the relationship with us when we sought to try to mend the relationship and whatever was wrong that led them to cheat. We are both serious monogamists, and we are serious about making our relationship work. Does it mean there will never be anyone else who seems interesting, ever? No, but it does mean that we believe we will still love each other, and that we made a promise to always stay together, and we intend to keep that promise, and we also promise that if there’s anything at all wrong, we will work extremely hard to fix whatever’s wrong, rather than giving up and “quitting” the marriage. As things are, anytime we have a disagreement, we can’t just let it fester – we work through it, don’t just argue about the issue, and figure out what’s really wrong, what’s causing us to argue or causing there to be an issue, and we work on THAT. We’ve learned a lot about each other, and we don’t tend to have repeat arguments.
And we both firmly believe we’ll stay together.
But how many couples do? Not many. The divorce statistics are staggering. And if someone were to do statistics on how long people stay in relationships, or how many partners people have in their lives, or how many partners people have as compared to how many committed relationships they have… I’m sure those results would be equally disgusting. There’s nothing wrong with going on a date or two with someone to see if you like one another, there’s not even really anything wrong with doing what you like so long as you’re both unattached with no one relying on you (and that includes kids) or expecting your affections to be theirs alone.
But when you’re actually in a relationship with someone, the expectation is generally exclusivity. It shouldn’t have to be spelled out. That’s actually the excuse my ex used as his defense – he said we never explicitly said, in our 8 years of involvement, that we were going to be exclusive. I kinda figured it was assumed to be the case. Most people assume that. Except the people who just want an excuse to cheat.
People suck. But there are some people who do have solid morals, and who can trust. And while those people are out there, I believe there is still hope for our future generations, and hope for the rest of our race.
That’s a little bit harsh. I have a couple points in response:
1. Divorce rates have gone up compared to, say, fifty years ago, because people now have the OPTION to divorce and get out of a crappy marriage instead of staying miserable in a shitty one forever. Because one thing that hasn’t changed and probably never will change is the ability of people to enter into bad relationships.
2. People change. Even if a relationship is great at the beginning, as you change and grow and become different people you’re not going to necessarily stay compatible. And there’s not anything wrong with that.
3. I agree with you that the expectation is still exclusivity, in general. BUT the fact that someone is not interested in that does not necessarily make them a bad person. Your ex was a bad person because he was an emotionally abusive asshole who knew full well that you wanted exclusivity and used “but we never SAID…” as an excuse for his cheating. That doesn’t mean that people can’t make those agreements up front and have open or polygamous relationships that don’t involve bitterness and coercion. I’ve read a lot over the last few years and while it’s not something I’d want, it’s not something I’m going to excoriate someone else for wanting.
4. Seriously? People who don’t want a monogamous relationship have no morals and are incapable of trusting/being trusted? Do you realise how close that sounds to “Atheists have no morals and can’t be trusted because they don’t believe in God”?
Welcome to my comments. >:-D
I… don’t think I said that people who don’t want a *monogamous* relationship have no morals and are incapable of trusting and being trusted. If I did, I totally didn’t mean that. I did say there were exceptions, and the exceptions I was referring to were polyamorous folk, the people who actually admit to it. If people enter into a relationship, knowing that there will be more than one partner, and everyone is okay with it, then fine, you can all be happy and do that. Doesn’t work for me, but it does for some, and when people are honest about it, I really don’t see a problem there.
I understand, too, that people change, and people split up, but you know what? People ought to learn each other better before getting married if that’s going to be a problem, and even if they change, they STILL promised “’til death do us part” (at least, in theory), and they ought to stick by that. Marriages should be for forever, so I believe. Commit to one person, work together, make it work. Even if you change, you can still work together and make the relationship work.
If you REALLY can’t make the relationship work, though, and BOTH PARTIES *want* to split, amicably, then that’s fine. But the problem I’m really referring to is the number of divorces and separations that happen because one spouse cheats on the other, or in some way totally screws the other spouse over. And that… there is no excuse for. There are so many people that enter into marriage with no real intent of having it last for forever – they just figure they’ll stay married ’til they feel like ending it, or until something better comes along, or until, “I dunno, whatever.” And that’s what makes me so angry.
People are bigger jerks these days. People have incredibly short attention spans. They want what they want now, and they just take what they want if they can get it, when they can get it, and damn the consequences, and damn anyone else. Why do people think this is okay? Why do people not think, for a second, “Wait, this is a SERIOUSLY SHITTY thing to do! Y’know, I’m just not gonna do it, ‘cuz I’m a decent human being.” But the cheaters don’t say that. They just do what they want, and they don’t care who they hurt.
The problem is the LYING. It’s not the multiple relationships. It’s the fact that someone is in a relationship, which, by definition, is assumed to be a commitment of (usually) only two people sharing their affections between only each other, and one person not just cheats, but they lie and hide it, when they are also pretending to be this committed person to someone else. If they weren’t in a relationship, if they were in an admittedly open relationship, if all parties knew what was going on at all times, this wouldn’t be a problem! The problem is the lying and sneaky behavior. If you were being a good human, there would be no reason to cover up what you were doing to anyone else, especially there would be no reason to hide your actions from your declared partner, right? And yet.
Welcome to my responses.
I will always welcome your comments, you know that!
No, there’s no increase in lying and cheating and bad behaviour. It’s always been around. It will always be around. We may THINK it’s worse, because we’re living this now and humans tend to paint rosy pictures of the past, but if you look at writing from fifty years, a hundred years, five hundred years ago, you’ll find that things are really no different. People were cheating on each other and lying about it just as much in our grandparents’ generation, and they will keep doing it in the future. Our current era is not special in the amount or quality of its lying.
And, you kinda did imply that, about the morals. “People suck. But there are some people who do have solid morals, and who can trust. And while those people are out there, I believe there is still hope for our future generations, and hope for the rest of our race.” That, coming after the condemnations of society today and the blanket statements about divorce and cheating, *pretty much* just says that your way of viewing relationships is the correct one, and anyone who thinks differently is “Doing It Wrong.”
I didn’t actually see anywhere where you implied there were exceptions. In fact, in your list of three types of dating people, number 2 is the closest to where the polyamorous would fall, and you explicitly said that they will definitely end up hurting people.
As for the swearing forever – well, in theory I agree that promises shouldn’t be made if they can’t be kept. But if we’re going to hold everyone to that, we all need to stop making promises, period. No vows, no swearing. Because nobody keeps every promise they make. And the human lifespan is a long one now. Spending even five years getting to know someone before you marry is absolutely no guarantee that you’re going to know the person they will be twenty, thirty, forty years from now.
Also, in response to your description of the spark for the post? Yeah, I know people who have been cheated on, and who have cheated, and most of those relationships have ended (if not all). But I know a lot MORE people, a LOT more, who have done neither.
The very first thing I said in my paragraph about three different kinds of people was that there were exceptions to these descriptions. But the number of people in monogamous relationships is an overwhelming majority. And, I’m sorry, but I can just about count on one hand the number of people I know who haven’t cheated or been cheated on. That might be exaggerating a little, but really not much. Maybe two hands.
The ENTIRE POINT of a wedding is that you are making a promise, before however many witnesses and before some kind of legal and/or religious official, that you are promising to stay with someone. You don’t get married and only swear that you’ll remain together ’til you feel like sleeping with other people. You don’t even promise that you’ll just stay together ’til you both get older and find you’ve turned into different people. In most cases, people are making this promise, for life. Heard and witnessed. (Though, yes, I’ve been to some handwriting ceremonies where the couple’s were honest enough to only promise to commit to each other for a year and a day. They want to dissolve things after that? Fine, at least they didn’t just lie to each other or start things off under false pretenses,) The entire point is that promise, we build whole huge ceremonies around it (yes, I know, not EVERYONE, not anything applies to everyone).
If people didn’t need to state that promise, and in front of so many people, then what would a wedding be? Heck, what would differentiate a marriage from any other long-term relationship?