Love and war

There is an occurrence that has always been present in marriages and is as prevalent today as ever and to identify it in the least offensive terms, it’s called cheating and cheating is defined as being unfaithful to your spouse.

There are a thousand reasons for it, each one different and unique based on the situation and the individual personalities of the people married but the most common reasons are boredom, predictability, and sameness. A natural tendency of humans is to be able to anticipate what’s going to happen to them before it happens so they make great efforts to plan out their day ahead of time so there aren’t any surprises. And although this does lead to predictability, it also leads to boredom and that’s one of the main reasons people choose to stray.

Researchers have been asking married people about their infidelity for years, trying to pinpoint how prevalent it is and they haven’t had much success in doing it. The reason why is obvious. People don’t like to admit their perceived failings to anyone and most especially to strangers.

So the research has been all over the place from 20 percent up with the average being around 40 percent. But social scientists who analyze behavior rather than just asking others about it put the percentage at double that, around 80 percent because they believe people are just as likely to lie about infidelity to someone else as they are to their spouse.

In addition to cheating on your spouse, a curious event happens when the cheated upon person finds out about it. They go after the third person instead of the spouse. The third person didn’t break your marriage vows, your spouse did. But often times, the spouse is forgiven and the couple picks up where they were before the infidelity happened. I’ve never understood how someone could be publicly embarrassed and humiliated when their spouse is having an affair that practically everybody else knows about except the spouse themselves and yet they blame the third person and forgive the spouse. I’ve always believed that a person can’t be stolen unless they want to be stolen and I still do.

Regardless of the looks, personality, or seductiveness of a third party, if a person is in love with their spouse and committed to their family and their marriage, neither that person nor anyone else will be able to convince a married person to have a fling with them. And yet it seems to happen with great frequency.

The reason for that is that we don’t really know the person we’re marrying until we marry them. During dating and engagement, they tended to show us only their good side as we showed them the same with both people trying to hide the bumps and blemishes that made them less than perfect people. But once we’re married, we can’t hide those faults forever and they slowly but surely come out. Our true nature, personality and disposition also come out when we live with someone and sometimes it’s not the personality we were led to believe it was. Sometimes we find out about anger and fits and temper tantrums and assaults and we feel like we’re trapped because we should have been smart enough to have figured this out ahead of time and now that we’re married, we don’t want to lose faith by getting a divorce and being perceived by friends and family as ‘failing’ at marriage.

So even though the world may look much brighter and promising on the other side of the fence, we choose to stay where we are and accept mediocrity at best and abuse at worst and convince ourselves that no one’s life is perfect.

But even with that being true, many lives are a lot better than our own because we chose to settle for less.