To ask why cheating is so wrong?

[Tandora]

Inspired by another thread, where people are emphatically insisting that no one should need an explanation for why cheating is so wrong.

AIBU to ask for one?

I mean I get that it’s horrible when someone does something behind your back; so the lying aspect of it- I see how that is wrong. But it’s more than that isn’t it? like it’s not just any old lie.. after all people tell lies all the time (including in relationships), yet it seems that cheating is considered almost the worst thing that you can do to someone. But why?

I get that if you’ve committed your life to someone , it’s a betrayal if they suddenly abandon ship for someone else, but why do people get so beyond upset about casual flings, where there’s no intention to leave? Or is it because they are afraid a fling might lead to abandonment?

It seems quite strange to me to be so wound up about what someone else does with their body, and to feel so entitled to control that…

Sooo… can someone explain it to me? I don’t really get the concept. Genuinely..

<Puts on hard hat and ducks for cover 😅>

For a start by cheating you are risking your partners sexual health (the person you claim to love) and it’s a massive betrayal, you’re not only ruining the current relationship but you also risk ruining future relationships for the person you cheated on, they will always doubt themselves and question everything and that isn’t fair.

not to mention every time someone has sex there is always a risk of pregnancy, selfish risking bringing a child into the world through your infidelity. 🤷🏻‍♀️

but if it was a total stranger , he doesn’t think he’d care that much 🤷🏼‍♀️. I guess we are as weird as each other

Or he has already cheated on with you with a stranger and therefore can't judge you for it. 🤷🏼‍♀️

There are many types of relationships out there, when I was younger I had a relationship that was more friendship based and honest in the way that we were very much alike and could speak openly about many subjects, including love and sex with previous partners, just generally like best friends with a sexual relationship, we grew close and made each other laugh but there was something missing.

I could have ended up with that man but the drive and effort needed to make it exclusive for a long time was not there. Eventually I met someone else, good looking, just the type for reproducing, he felt the same and from that point a conditional contract was drawn up, it didn't need to be verbally discussed to death, we both knew each other wanted to be manogamous, emotionally, physically and financially, to work as a team.

I think when you meet that match there has to be that level of trust to bare your soul, your weaknesses, your vunerability, it's frightening stuff and takes some real courage to allow yourself to let go and love one person fully, totally and forgo all others to keep one another safe and secure, but you both want it.

Love has many parts to it and I think, and I don't mean to be rude but if you do not care about infedelity then you have not fully given yourself to someone, you have held back to some degree in certain areas of your relationship.

So as I was saying, do you have children, are you married, do you have a mortgage togther are you tied financially in any way?

Only you know your own unique contract that holds you together but to analogize for your lack of understanding for the pain many feel for affairs could be this..

Imagine your partner coming home tommorow, you have your boundaries, you love him and feel you could never be hurt by his actions as you have a pretty flexible relationship, allowing him greater trust and forgiveness, but if you found him to have a second life, a wife, children a house and you never knew, would you be shocked. He has broken your contract, you only said affairs were acceptable.

As for describing that pain, my analagy for you would be imagine your parents if you love them and they love you, all your life nurturing you, making you feel safe and secure in the world, well imagine turning up at their house tommorow and they shut the door in your face, tell you to fuck off when you ask what's wrong, they say nothing is wrong. Then you find out they have re written their will out to the next door neighbour and left them all their money, and they do not want to see you or your children anymore.
You ask why, and they tell you and everyone in the family you are fucking crazy and will phone the police if you do not stop bothering them.
It's brutal and barbaric.

It's the confusion that hurts, that one day someone loves you and the next they hate you, how on earth you ask could they have ever loved me if they could switch so easily. Have I imagined my whole life up to this point ? It's very scary to wake up with a completely different reality.

Quite frankly you wil be less hurt if you do not give all to love, yet despite all my hurt I don't think I could have gone fifty years not experiencing that exclusive love.

🙄 whatever.

@Whatever00 your comment made me howl 😂😂😂

Infidelity is rarely really about shagging someone else. My partner told lies about me ( the nagging wife) and spilled my secrets to the other woman. In text messages I could see them mocking me about things that were my deepest insecurities. I had made myself vulnerable and trusted this person when they told me I was loved and lovable in spite of my flaws only to find they were using them as a reason to cheat. It destroyed my sense of self magnifying my insecurities and making me doubt my ability to pick friends/partners. The fact that my partner fucked this woman while I was devastated at my aunts deathbed was just further proof of my naive idiocy and their callousness. It’s the feeling of having been utterly vulnerable with someone that you should be safe with and having that trust violated. I’ve never been insecure about my partners fancying someone else or even really worried about the idea of consensual non-monogamy - I’ve had a couple of open relationships previous to this so it’s not about jealousy or insecurity.

I would feel (and did feel) like my trust was broken. I was young when it happened to me with my first serious partner (and the first man (hahaha) I had sex with), he ended up in bed with a school friend of mine who would come and stay over at my place from time to time.

To top that off, apparently having sex with me was like being with a log! How the heck was I to know what I was supposed to do...

I thought both of them would have had moral boundaries in place at least out of some sort of loyalty to me, but no.

I think I was a good person then and now and certainly didn't deserve that, nor the reference I was a log in bed, nor the carry on later when I had moved out of the family property, to find male callers were bugging an elderly family member to find the school friend for a shag, and my name was being used as the ''friend to see''.

Whatever confidence I had then was clearly shattered and I went on to make a couple of bad choices thereafter.

People just don't have the right to treat someone else like that.

Because it hurts, it makes you doubt everything you knew, it changes what you expected your life to be. Leaves you financially worst off.

OP, it’s a tricky one.

I’ve been in monogamous relationships, polysexual relationships (ok to have casual sex with others), and polyamorous relationships (ok to have deep emotional romantic-sexual relationships with others). I’ve been cheated on in all three scenarios. Infidelity is still possible in ENM, because it’s the ethical aspect that’s important - the openness and agreements made around that.

What I’ve taken from this is that the reason infidelity is so traumatic for most people comes down to one or both of these factors:

Betrayal - When you make a pact of trust with someone, either explicitly or implicitly, the betrayal of that agreement can completely and permanently damage your ability to trust anyone, ever. If what you believed to be true isn’t true, how can you ever be sure that you are aware of reality again?

Abandonment - It’s not just physical abandonment that can deeply hurt someone. It can also be other forms of abandonment - especially emotional abandonment. When you’re in a relationship and fully invested and present, and they are elsewhere emotionally but don’t actually leave you, it can be a devastating feeling.

Humiliation and being taken for a mug are other factors. I guess they come into it, more so for some than others. But I’d say it’s really more about the other two.

In my case, I still have absolutely no problem being in a poly relationship with someone who has an existing long term partner. The thought of them having sex or being emotionally intimate doesn’t bother me at all - I think it’s beautiful, hot, or I’m indifferent. Where I struggle is when new partners come in. For me, it must relate to some kind of feeling of threat, a fear of abandonment (emotional or physical).

I used to think that monogamy was possessive, but I don’t think that any more. I don’t think it’s about possession. It’s about seeing fidelity as sacred. In ENM, fidelity isn’t seen as sacred - but emotional openness and honour of agreements absolutely is. So it’s about trust.

I don’t think that you love with less depth if you don’t feel fidelity is a sacred thing. It may be that you value other things (honesty, etc.) more. Or it may be that you haven’t experienced the specific type of abandonment or betrayal that is deeply triggering for you personally. Or it may be that you are lucky and just wired to be very chill and free about emotional bonds haha. I wish I could be that chill 😅

@Tandora I think it’s interesting that you and your partner find it acceptable to cheat after getting drunk. Why does this make it acceptable? Because you are making less of a conscious decision? Ask yourself and your partner if you both made a conscious and premeditated decision with no drink involved would this also be acceptable if it was a “one off”?
If you decided you fancied a one off shag with someone (say at work) who your partner didn’t know - would you be able to tell him about this and he would give his blessing beforehand? And vice versa?

If he had a prolonged affair that involved a sustained period of frequent lying / deception , then I think that would destroy the trust. Because it would make me wonder what else he might be lying about, if he could lie so constantly and easily. If I found out he did something like my previous partner did, I honestly, hand on. heart, don’t think that would shake the safety of the relationship for me.

That's what people are talking about. Cheating is about breaking trust. It involves deception, whether that's a long term affair or a one night stand.

That's different to having an open relationship where either one or both of you have sex with other people with full knowledge and permission from your partner.

👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻 this

Very well written. I totally resonate with this.

Because it's not just a lie, but a betrayal of trust. That someone would risk losing their relationship means they do not value that relationship as much as they should.

if you look at the emotional, financial and logistical fallout of an affair and subsequent breakdown of family, it’s not that different to being a victim of a crime. This is my observation of the breakups around me.

Don't think there is anything wrong with op or her partner. They wouldn't mind if either had sex with a random stranger, that's basically what swinging is. They would be more upset if it was a prolonged affair or with someone they knew, but otherwise view it as just sex. That is basically our inner urge to be honest, and it wasn't that long ago really that it was a lot more common. Monogamy is quite a new thing and not everyone has come round to the idea yet.

I don't view it like that, nor do most people. It's cheating to me and would end the relationship.

It seems quite strange to me to be so wound up about what someone else does with their body, and to feel so entitled to control that…

Maybe you'll feel differently when thry give you herpes.

Or father a kid they have to pay forfor 18nplus yrs to the detriment if your household income .. and have a relationship with usually); that your kids, who thought they were in a nuclear family, have to find out about.

Polyamory (being in consensual relationships with several people at once) or consensual non-monogamy, is very different to cheating.

Both are OK, the difference is that the former is agreed by everyone involved and everyone knows where they stand emotionally in the relationship.

Cheating is not OK because it's something that one partner didn't sign up for. The reasons for not being OK with cheating are individual to the person involved, but probably involve things like feelings of betrayal, abandonment, risks of STI's and pregnancies, and just a general ick factor of having someone else be intimate with your partner.

Those are all perfectly valid feelings.

A partner is one of the most important people in your life and cheating inherently involves lying about something that is very central and core to that relationship - sex and intimacy. Of course that is generally going to cause a lot of heartache.

It's not always 'why did they need more than me?', sometimes it's 'why did they not feel OK to tell me about their needs/ have this conversation? Why did they have to do it behind my back?' - the latter can be a lot harder to cope with.

Anyway, all this monogamy is a social.construct BS. It's so fkg not ... it's entirely based in men not wanting to provide resources to offspring who aren't theirs, and women not wanting to.share a man's resources with other women's offspring.

Both scenarios make their offspring less likely to survive.

Its at the heart of all animal mating.

Nothing social or constructed about it.

(Where it says 'both are OK' in my second paragraph - I meant polyamory and monogamy are both OK - not that cheating is OK!)

*Both scenarios make their offspring less likely to survive.

Should add, in some cases, it wouldn't even be about their offspring being less likely to survive for the men; but about having any offspring of their own at all.

Until relatively recent times in the scheme scheme things, the vast minority or men fathered the vast majority of children and many men did not even have the opportunity to reproduce.

It's fairly obvious isn't it? It can really mess up the innocent party's mental health....a real visceral heartbreak. Unless you're in an agreed polyamorous or "fwb" relationship, being monogamous is the norm for truly romantic relationships. If you fall out of love with someone, don't overlap with another. It's shitty, unempathetic, selfish and childish. I've never cheated on anyone and I'm pretty certain previous partners cheated on me. If they did hey-ho, it was a long time ago and DH certainly wouldn't have the energy for it! I've seen it happen to others and it's just disgusting.

I can see your point op; I think it depends how closely you equate sex with love- I’ve had one night stands and I don’t mix the two up so I could have sex with someone on a night out, it would mean nothing but I’d have been unfaithful to my husband

I think there’s a difference between drunken sex with a random person who you’ll never see again and falling in love with someone else. Cheating can be just a random shag or it could be your partner giving someone else all his time and attention and thoughts that he used to give to you. Falling in love with someone else is much worse than just a random shag after a night out.

Plus if you want to hook up with a new person make sure you're rid of the previous one. Fewer complications, no need to try to remember what lies you've told then.

Cheating is about outwardly agreeing to dedicate your resources to offspring (or potentisl offspring) with a particular mate, in order to get them to agree to the equivalent .... and then breaking that agreement behind their back so you get the benefits of the arrangement but none of the sacrifices of the arrangement. In the case of men; the benefits of a woman agreeing to be your exclusive mate, only hsve sex with you, and only produce your offspring.... while not going along with the "deal" that you likewise only have sex abd offspring with her, and dedicated your resources to her abundance any offspring.

It's the ultimate mating "fraud".

That's why it causes the feelings it does.

Ateotd, relisble contraception has been around for the blink of any, we gave evolved to be all about reproduction and resources.