lock thread please

[BloatedGuppy]

That doesn't really fit the definition of "cheating" though does it.

As neither party was aware of what was happening, as the mother's diaries detail her suspicion and jealousy of the secretary, and as the father seemed to be battling resentment the distance of strain of his marriage ("No I don't miss her" was his response when asked if he missed his departed wife), I'd say it absolutely does. It certainly wasn't representative of a "mutual decision". The only mutually made decision was to stay together. Why? Because splitting up "wasn't done". Why? Because our society still views inviolate monogamy as the "proper" state of a relationship, and castigates anyone stepping outside of it. To say nothing of how divorce would've been viewed when they were younger. It's not remotely close to "polyamory". They were both miserable.

It's certainly not the only example I'm aware of, just the most recent and one that actually exists on film (as opposed to simply being an anecdote of mine). I've actually known quite a few people who got cheated on, or who cheated. The split between "That was pretty scummy" and "That was entirely understandable" is about 50/50. According to many members of this forum over the years, the split should always be 100/0.

Last time I remember it coming up was some viral story about a snoopy patron at a ball game reading a woman's texts, divining that she might be cheating on her boyfriend, and alerting the guy in question. Thread was very similar then, too. Burn the cheater, praise the dude. Context and substantiation be damned...an accusation and self-promoting story by a nosy individual is all the proof I need! It would've been easy to ascribe it to the ongoing "gender issues" frenzy these forums find themselves eternally embroiled in...the alleged culprit was, after all, packing two X chromosomes. I think that would be missing the mark though.

Because these forums also have a wild and hairy hard-on when it comes to the subject of cheating. After I'd watched that documentary I'd considered making a long thread about it. Discussing how many incidents of cheating I'd encountered (including being cheated on twice personally) and how many felt completely justifiable (50% of my personal experiences). Of the many reasons why it's often not as simple as "LOL I THINK I'LL FUCK SOMEONE ELSE NOW BECUZ I M MEEN". Why we shouldn't be so quick to judge, condemn, etc, etc. I opted not to, though. The general tenor of the discussions around here over the last year didn't lead me to believe I'd get much in the way of quality input. The overwhelming likelihood seemed to be a lot of enthused commentary by angry teenagers. Which is not to denigrate teenagers or their outlook on life, but I'd as interested in their input on the subject as they would be in the input of grade schoolers.

As someone who has been in many relationships...some long, some short, some healthy, some NOT SO MUCH...I can totally understand how situations come to pass where people cheat. I think it's completely possible to be in love with more than one person at the same time, through absolutely no fault of anyone involved. I think a lot of people behave in ways that they might later regret, I think people occasionally act out selfishness or simple lack of consideration, and sometimes I think it's part of the natural death throes of a failing relationship. Occasionally, it's been something that's SAVED a relationship by giving it a jolt it needed. Is it sometimes shitty? ABSOLUTELY. But unless you know the details from both parties, I find it's best to refrain from judgment.

TLDR - Cheating is complicated. Peeps need to stop being so judgmental. But they won't. Moral condemnations of strangers are fun, and addictive.

 

[Pseudonym]

Nah, no way. It raises a few eyebrows but that's it.

Keep in mind I mainly talk to people who have a hardcore liberal approach to interpersonal relationships though. I have no idea what the general sentiment among the new wave of "liberals" in my generation thinks.

Wait what? Really? What a silly question. Is breaking the rules of your relationship more socially acceptable than following rules that were mutually consented to? I don't get it, how could people view polyamory as cheating? You can't decide what constitutes cheating for other people, that's fucked.

Maybe I'm just hanging out with the right people but I've never felt judged or anything, and people know about what my fiancé and I get up to.

I'm pretty much in the same boat with regards to my friends. Most people I know (those of my age, at least) wouldn't really give a fuck about polyamoury, I think. I know I wouldn't. Whereas cheating is not done. I don't know how representative my circle of friends is for the rest of the world. I suppose it depends your social circle. If your social circle is a bunch of religious conservatives who all think that marriage is the only sexual relationship you are allowed to have, then I imagine they wouldn't look too kindly on polyamoury. I also think it differs depending on where precisely you live.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Um, no, not really. Polyamourous relationships, whatever your personal opinion is, are volunteer stuff. You and your partners agree to it, setting terms/conditions and eventually exit points. Its all willing. Some people may frown at the idea, but no one says "Oh yeah, my boyfriend forced me into a polyamourous relationship with his coworkers and ex-girlfriend." Its all volunteer. It has to be.

Cheating, by definition, requires one person to not be okay with it. That's why its called cheating and not polyamory.

Think of it this way: its the equivalent of sharing items among friends, or stealing shit from them. Either way you're getting new stuff, but one is seen as sharing. The other is stealing.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Um, no, not really. Polyamourous relationships, whatever your personal opinion is, are volunteer stuff. You and your partners agree to it, setting terms/conditions and eventually exit points. Its all willing. Some people may frown at the idea, but no one says "Oh yeah, my boyfriend forced me into a polyamourous relationship with his coworkers and ex-girlfriend." Its all volunteer. It has to be.

Cheating, by definition, requires one person to not be okay with it. That's why its called cheating and not polyamory.

Think of it this way: its the equivalent of sharing items among friends, or stealing shit from them. Either way you're getting new stuff, but one is seen as sharing. The other is stealing.

Sure, but the OP specified "socially acceptable" rather than "morally acceptable", and that isn't always the same thing.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Um, no, not really. Polyamourous relationships, whatever your personal opinion is, are volunteer stuff. You and your partners agree to it, setting terms/conditions and eventually exit points. Its all willing. Some people may frown at the idea, but no one says "Oh yeah, my boyfriend forced me into a polyamourous relationship with his coworkers and ex-girlfriend." Its all volunteer. It has to be.

Cheating, by definition, requires one person to not be okay with it. That's why its called cheating and not polyamory.

Think of it this way: its the equivalent of sharing items among friends, or stealing shit from them. Either way you're getting new stuff, but one is seen as sharing. The other is stealing.

Sure, but the OP specified "socially acceptable" rather than "morally acceptable", and that isn't always the same thing.

Yeah, but morality is a social concept. They're not exactly interchangeable, but they're very closely related. Its rare for a society to judge something as immoral while maintaining it's social acceptable. Likewise if something is considered moral, its rare for it not to be socially acceptable to do.

If you take cheating for example. Most people would say its immoral to do. You can kinda' extrapolate that those same people would say its not socially acceptable to do. Are the numbers gonna' be exactly the same? No, but they're gonna be pretty damn close.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Yeah, but morality is a social concept.

Well, yes, but then this forum is a small subset of society as a whole. The morals as discussed by people here might not reflect wider society that closely.

Its rare for a society to judge something as immoral while maintaining it's social acceptable. Likewise if something is considered moral, its rare for it not to be socially acceptable to do.

Oh, I'd disagree there. Or at least, there's lots of things that are nominally considered immoral, but that people will turna blind eye to.

 

[renegade7]

As many as 70% of married women will cheat on their partners, as will about 72% of married men, at least once. Additionally, 25% of married men have had extended extramarital relationships at least once: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-cheating/2012/02/08/gIQANGdaBR_story.html

Cheating may be frowned upon, but if it was considered socially unacceptable we wouldn't be seeing nearly that much of it. At some level, society has wholeheartedly accepted infidelity even though we ostensibly criticize it.

This happens because society demands that everyone get married, marriage is blown up to be this existential imperative and you're a failed, unloved person if you don't get married, have 2.4 children (gotta sustain the population growth to prop up the loans we take out against the future, regardless of how sustainable an exponentially increasing population is), take a loan out for a house (to keep the bankers rich), and die at the appropriate time (before you can take up too much Social Security, but preferably not before you've spent enough time paying into it!). People cheat because marriage serves no functional purpose. People claim to hate cheating because marriage is a sacred cow that none dare criticize.

Infidelity used to be a crime in the US. In some states it still is, though it is not prosecuted. Polygamy, on the other hand, remains illegal, and it doesn't look like this will change any time soon. In the Supreme Court arguments by the gay marriage advocates earlier this year, even the people fighting for marriage equality stopped barely short of implying polyamorous relationships were perverse. Obviously they were just trying to not give the anti-equality group any ammunition by admitting that polyamory could be next, but that just further evidences the point that polyamory is considered deeply taboo when society finds it so repulsive that even the people fighting for equal rights to be granted to all family structures have to pay lip service to denigrating it.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

The couple had a non-traditional relationship which involved partners outside of the marriage that society failed to understand and condemned in response to this. Sounds pretty damn close to polyamoury to me.

It wasn't a polyamorous relationship. It was two married individuals cheating on one another. Both emotionally and physically.

Why not both? Something can be both scummy and understandable. Like most things in life it's not a black and white thing, it's several different intertwining greyscales.

Yes, something can be. It can be everything on the scale from "completely justified" to "morally reprehensible". I'm actually the one arguing that it's shades of grey, here. The majority of the posts are "NO! BLACK AND WHITE!".

Let's take cheating completely out of the question, say that these texts implied she was scamming her husband out of money instead of cheating.

You mean, let's say she was stealing something away that belonged to him? This is a treacherous analogy.

Whatever the case, I don't think evidence of a crime makes a good comparable for infidelity.

Would it be wrong for us to pass judgement on the woman without context?

Yes. Cheating aside, I would argue it is almost universally wrong for people to pass judgment without context. History is literally stuffed to the rafters with the problematic repercussions of judgments without context.

Everywhere has an extreme reaction when it comes to cheating, be it online spaces or real life. It sells papers, it gets views, it loses sponsorships and it triggers resignations. There's no need to condemn this community based on an almost universal human response.

It is not a universally held belief that cheaters are wicked and deserve to suffer. It is belief held by a sizable contingent, but not a universal one. High profile cases of infidelity are usually hotly debated, with sympathy and condemnation on every side. What is universal is that almost everyone feels they deserve an opinion on something that really has absolutely nothing to do with them.

I am a recovering drug addict. I know many other addicts, some recovering, some still in the main throes of their addiction. All of these addicts (myself included) developed our addictions in response to something that was wrong with our lives. For some this meant something as mundane as simply being bored and living in an area where there's literally nothing else to do, for others it was a way of dealing with childhood abuse. All of these reasons are understandable, but none of them excusable. Using drugs as a way of coping with our problems was wrong, for us and those who care about us. And like it or not it says something about our characters that we did so.

What is your feeling on mentally ill people using prescription drugs to cope with their problems? Some of them are just as addictive and insidious as "recreational" and illegal drugs. Genuinely curious what your stance on that is as a recovering addict.

My views on cheating are very much similar. There are many reasons to cheat and I am understanding and empathetic towards many of those reasons. But that doesn't make the act of cheating permissable, excusable or (as you put it) entirely understandable.

I think there are often better ways to resolve bad situations, but I think there are optimal ways to resolve all of life's problems, and people seldom manage them. That doesn't make them bad people. It makes them people. In an ideal world, the husband/wife in the documentary I watched would've had a marriage with healthy communication, would've lived in a society that didn't demonize divorce, and would've separated amicably and been free to pursue romantic entanglements with people more suited to them. None of that happened, and it's not because the people in question were sinister or selfish or weak or morally decrepit.

Don't get me wrong, I'm going to make the judgement that it makes them a selfish/weak/dishonourable human being, but the action they took was those things, so I'm also not going blame others for making that judgement.

I think you meant to say "I'm not going to."

People make selfish decisions every day. Being selfish is not inherently bad, or even always an inherently "wrong act".

The same way I wont blame others for thinking that I'm weak, that I'm careless or that I'm hedonistic for developing a drug addiction.

Those people should also withhold judgment. They didn't live your life. Whatever happened to the old "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"? There's a lot of cheery fucking stone casting going on these days. I must assume all the people doing it are moral paragons.

TLDR: As a base line cheating is wrong. You can pile justifications on top of that and yeah, they might pile so high that you can ignore that underlying truth, but a truth it still remains. It's not "sometimes shitty" as you put it, it's always shitty.

Any action you can take that might cause another person emotional distress (even yourself) is "as a base line" a problematic action. I'm not in the camp of "Viva la Cheaters", or "Everyone should try it at least once!". I *am* in the camp of "Anyone's capable of it, even you", "It doesn't automatically mean you are a monster", and "People should put their fucking pitchforks away, what goes on between two people in their romantic relationship is their business. Don't have all the facts? Then keep your uninformed opinion to yourself".

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Yeah, but morality is a social concept.

Well, yes, but then this forum is a small subset of society as a whole. The morals as discussed by people here might not reflect wider society that closely.

Its rare for a society to judge something as immoral while maintaining it's social acceptable. Likewise if something is considered moral, its rare for it not to be socially acceptable to do.

Oh, I'd disagree there. Or at least, there's lots of things that are nominally considered immoral, but that people will turn a blind eye to.

Sure, but doesn't the fact you have to turn a blind eye to something mean that its not socially acceptable? I mean you don't look away, metaphorically, when a father takes his son out for ice cream after the big game. You don't turn a blind eye to a boy scout helping an old lady across the street, or a teacher coming in on a Saturday to help underprivileged children learn to read.
You turn a blind eye to a kid lying during confession or someone taking a penny from the share-tray at a gas station without replacing it.
Or with cheating. Your bro says he has a side chick and you turning a blind eye means you're not okay with it, you know you're not, but you're letting him get away with something not acceptable. Otherwise, if it were acceptable, you'd buy him a beer or something.

Right? I mean I'm making sense here, right? Turning a blind eye means you're keeping it secret. If its a secret, you don't want it known. And if you don't want it known, chances are its something that the public wouldn't be readily happy to hear.

Unless its a surprise party. Those are always cool!

 

[Lufia Erim]

Um, no, not really. Polyamourous relationships, whatever your personal opinion is, are volunteer stuff. You and your partners agree to it, setting terms/conditions and eventually exit points. Its all willing. Some people may frown at the idea, but no one says "Oh yeah, my boyfriend forced me into a polyamourous relationship with his coworkers and ex-girlfriend." Its all volunteer. It has to be.

Cheating, by definition, requires one person to not be okay with it. That's why its called cheating and not polyamory.

Think of it this way: its the equivalent of sharing items among friends, or stealing shit from them. Either way you're getting new stuff, but one is seen as sharing. The other is stealing.

I agree with you on every front. Thats why i said socially acceptable and not just plain acceptable or morally/ethically acceptable. Bassically my question is would society accept you more if you were a knwon cheater than of you were a known polygamist.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Um, no, not really. Polyamourous relationships, whatever your personal opinion is, are volunteer stuff. You and your partners agree to it, setting terms/conditions and eventually exit points. Its all willing. Some people may frown at the idea, but no one says "Oh yeah, my boyfriend forced me into a polyamourous relationship with his coworkers and ex-girlfriend." Its all volunteer. It has to be.

Cheating, by definition, requires one person to not be okay with it. That's why its called cheating and not polyamory.

Think of it this way: its the equivalent of sharing items among friends, or stealing shit from them. Either way you're getting new stuff, but one is seen as sharing. The other is stealing.

I agree with you on every front. Thats why i said socially acceptable and not just plain acceptable or morally/ethically acceptable. Bassically my question is would society accept you more if you were a knwon cheater than of you were a known polygamist.

Oh I know. But what I'm saying is the two are closely linked. The numbers won't line up exactly but if we're working off thumb, generally feelings and anecdotes, I think its a fair bet to say if something is considered immoral by society its probably not socially acceptable to do too.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Somewhat.

I mean that cheating website was made and was popular enough to gather alot of people who wanted to cheat HOWEVER at the same time, it drawn in those hacker to threaten to leak out their clients information unless they shut down permanently.

 

[maninahat]

Yes, I'd say cheating is more socially acceptable. Some people just can't get their head around the idea of polyamory; that they think love is something that can't be divided between any number more than two - people accept cheating (no matter how much they condemn it) because they see it as either a case of "you love your partner but wanted a bit on the side" or "you don't love your partner and love another person"; i.e., they still see love as as exclusively monogamous contract. Polyamory requires people to understand you can love more than one person in the same way, which goes against every depiction of every "normal" healthy relationship ever.

 

[Batou667]

Weirdly, because it goes against the Harm Principle, I think cheating is more socially accepted than poly relationships.

The logic, I think, is that cheating is a temporary transgression which everybody (including the guilt-wracked philanderer) knows is wrong. Cheating is bad but it's usually resolved by atonement, revenge, punishment etc, leaving the status quo of monogamy=correct intact.

Polyamory is on some level more objectionable because it undermines and subverts the usual rule of "people come in pairs". The fact that a hypothetical woman is happy in the knowledge that her husband is screwing another chick (or man) in the next room (or any other arrangement of people of genders and sexualities) in a way means there are two guilty parties, not just one. The husband, who is transgressing normal coupling protocol, and the wife who is condoning it. Never mind that all three people are happy with the arrangement, it's morally wrong because... reasons. The potential for abuse and power imbalances in general, perhaps?

I struggle to pin down why, but I have a pretty strong gut instinct against polyamory that goes beyond "live and let live".

 

[renegade7]

The 70% is only true for 1993, in a 2004 it's only 25% and in general it heavily depends on where they took the people, what they consider cheating and if they manipulated the data to have something to write about.

They were distinguishing between any cheating and having an affair. The 1993 study looked at people who were doing anything at all qualifying as marital infidelity, the 2004 study looked at people who had had ongoing relationships with another person outside of their marriage. Either way, even that lower figure of 25% of all married men having affairs is still a huge number of people.

Cheating is accepted as prostitution is accepted, that does not make it automatically "okay", in a perfect world both would be non-existant.

Why not? People who have more money than emotional availability shouldn't be allowed to have some semblance of intimacy? It's not like it hurts anyone. And cheating is not "accepted", it's considered quite unacceptable, but quite a large number of people are apparently hypocrites.

The 3rd paragraph is such liberal bullshit it's amazing, marriage is an incredibly funtional and essential concept, you have the family with described roles,

Heaven forbid people pick their own roles in life, right? But that aside, what function does it actually serve, and what makes it the only thing that can perform that function?

you have a good sizable income and have children so you would not die alone

That's certainly no guarantee against dying alone, and children cost more than enough to outweigh the income benefits. Remember: nearly 50% divorce rate. Also, many married couples are unable or otherwise choose not to have children. As for "sizable income", that's very debatable. Yes, you have a sizable income, but that's because you have to prioritize earning, and most of it will be spent on your children. Priorities of personal fulfillment or benefit to society take the backseat.

(against, for instance, Japan where the elderly slowly becoming a huge burden on the economy),

That is the fault of those countries for failing to plan for a future economy in which there are fewer people, and expecting that endless growth was sustainable. I will explain.

Maintaining the dependency ratio is a basic amortization problem. Assume that for every person who will retire, "a" people are needed to support them ("a" being some constant greater than 1). This induces the difference equation:

p[n] = a*p[n-1]

p[0] = b

Such that the population at the nth generation must be the scalar factor "a" times the population of the previous to maintain the dependency ratio. This is the elementary first-order difference equation, with the solution p[n] = b*a^n

Which is to say that in order for the prevention of the elderly straining the economy in a system like social security, the population must increase exponentially and indefinitely. Any disruption of this increase will direly threaten the stability of the economy. Disregarding the global impacts of overpopulation, it should be clear why this is unsustainable even at a short-term entirely practical level. Where are we going to put all of those people? Will there be enough jobs for them, especially in an age of ever-increasing automation? If not, are we okay with a vast and perpetually increasing number of people living in dire poverty? If we look to a welfare state to support them, the increasing number of people would force that society to trend towards a completely flat distribution of wealth (ie pure communist), are we okay with living in such a society? In reality, population growth is bounded because there is not an unlimited supply of resources.

Another solution to taking care of the elderly must be found, because what we have now cannot work forever.

the fact america warped the concept and got itself into a fucked position does not invalidate marriage throughout the world. You can find "some" societies that does have a different ways of having a family but their ways are pretty much incomprehensible to western mind set.

America's not really doing that poorly, to be entirely honest. But the countries that are doing very well, and have surpassed us on a number of measures economic, social, and existential, are seeing a reduction in the popularity of the typical marriage. We're following the same trend, just a few steps behind.

The fact Infidelity is not prosecuted does not make it okay, that's why there's still a huge stigma against it.

Really not the point, so much that infidelity was legalized decades ago whereas polygamy remains illegal. That doesn't make infidelity a good thing because it still hurts people, but the reason it happens on such a vast scale is that people are expected to get married and stay married when they ultimately don't want to.