Hello. So last week I went to a school reunion for the 20th anniversary of my hometown school. I’m not the kind of person who enjoy this kind of social events, but for this time I made an exception. My old friend from that time asked me to go and I thought I would be funny (spoiler alert: it wasn’t funny). After the event and speeches, all my classmates and I went to a restaurant. I sat in front of a girl that I had a bit of a crush on when I was a kid. During the dinner I was mostly in silence, they were talking about gossips, old memories, relationships, comparisons… At some point she talked about a boyfriend she had. She said that she cheated on him like 10 or 20 times, she didn’t know the exact number. The thing is… She was laughing about it, and so the others. “I told him I cheated on him, I don’t know how many times…” She said, like nothing happened. My ex girlfriend told me that she also cheated on his fiancée some time before the wedding. She always said that infidelities are always there, like it is normal… But is it? I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, because I know some other cases. But I don’t understand… There is no sense of morality ot loyalty or empathy?
My understanding is that infidelity is very nearly binary in its commonality.
There are groups of people for whom infidelity is normal, it is the norm. They believe that everyone cheats, and in their experience everyone does, because they are cheaters and are friends with cheaters. They believe that fidelity is impossible, and claims to the contrary is just social posturing
Then you have groups of people for whom infidelity is basically unthinkable. That it is the greatest breach of trust possible. It is not just not normal, it is non-existent— you don’t cheat, your partner doesn’t cheat, your friends don’t cheat, no one you know cheats. If someone you know cheats, or someone known by someone you know cheats, it is legitimately horrifying: this is not merely social posturing, it is literally shocking to you, because in your world, cheating simply does not happen. It is horrible.
Cheaters think everyone cheats. Non-cheaters believe no one cheats, or only horrible people cheat. These two groups tend to self sort themselves into groups. Bad things happen when the two groups intermingle, in fact.
What’s also a tragedy is when someone who would naturally be in the non-cheating group ends up, mistakenly, in a cheating group. They will begin to feel like everyone ELSE in the world cheats, while they themselves never would. They keep getting hurt, they keep getting betrayed, and they don’t understand why. They need a better friend group… and let me be clear: non-cheating groups ABSOLUTELY EXIST. Those groups simply don’t interact with cheating groups— they basically don’t even know that the cheating groups exist, and would be horrified to find out. So if you’re caught up in a cheating social circle, getting out is really hard! You need to find people who have literally nothing in common with the people you already know!
It kinda sucks. I don’t know a solution.
Absolutely. I belong to a non cheating group. It’s just seems completely unfathomable that it could happen. Most of us are in 15+ year relationships and are friends with everyone. It’s not just a “the women are friends with the women, the men are friends with the men” situation. We got a blend of genders all participating in the same hobbies. There would be so much social cost to cheating it would be kind of insane.
Where I work though there’s a decent amount of drama in that regard though and I have noticed that one common factor is that the relationships are atomized. They either keep their old friends going in and there’s almost zero expectation of their partners integrating into each other’s friendships or there’s just this expectation that men and women are fundamentally different creatures. That whole men are from Mars women from Venus shtick. From the outside it seems like emotional distance where people look at each other like they aren’t targets of empathy - more like they play by a book as if they can just put the right inputs in they will get the desired outputs.
I know this is entirely anedotal and that anybody could theoretically cheat for any number of reasons… It’s just something that I noticed about the groups of cheats that I am aware of.
I don’t know anyone who cheats… Except my Uncle Chris, who has been unilaterally excommunicated from the whole family.
Infidelity is somewhat common but I would say it’s not “normal” at all to openly discuss and laugh about it at dinner with a bunch of people that you haven’t seen for years.
Seriously- wtf is wrong with these people? That one person sounds especially horrible.
Also - don’t go to any more reunions. I’ve managed to avoid 40 years of that shit and I like to believe that I’m happier for it!
Yes, Right? It was too much to talk about it. Definitely that was my first and last reunion
No, people who commonly do bad things, will often justify it to themselves and others by thinking most people do the same thing. And despite their protesting and arguing, they’re pretty much always wrong.
I’ve heard more than one petty thief confidently claim that “everyone” steals something like a candybar when they go to the store. And it’s why there are so many stories of cheaters accusing their partner of cheating.
Cheating is like divorce it’s common if you look at the percentage of relationships. They are both less common if you look at at individuals. Cheaters always cheat again, those who get divorced often do so again.
I personally don’t cheat, wouldn’t cheat, being Demi/ace. But unfortunately everyone around me either cheats or has an open relationship then gets jealous when their SO gets some action. A lot of them have STDs.
In my experience yes.
My ex was always rambling about how men were always unfaithful, “oops I slipped and my dick ended up inside her” she used to say, to describe how easily men are unfaithful. She made it absolutely clear she wanted a monogamous relationship.
I was never unfaithful to her, but of course it turned out she was herself unfaithful numerous times, and it was crazy how bad she was at hiding it, almost like she wanted me to break up. So I did, and good riddance!!!
Later when I was moving in with a new girlfriend, and I was collecting some of my things at my ex, she was all dressed up, and all over me, kissing me and trying to win me back. She tried to kiss me on my mouth but I turned my head so it was on the cheek.
My girlfriend was waiting in the car outside, and she saw the lipstick on my cheek when I came back, obviously not too happy about it. But I explained it was all my ex and not me.
Lucky for me she didn’t ditch me, and later my new girlfriend agreed to become my wife, and we’ve been together for 20 years now! 🥰A friend of mine had just bought a very expensive apartment in Copenhagen together with his girlfriend. The papers were signed and the deal was closed. There are a few days where you can get out of the deal, and in that period my friend was told his girlfriend had been unfaithful. He didn’t believe it at first, but the day after the deadline for getting out of the purchase, his girlfriend broke up!
I’m not saying women are worse than men, but the idea that men are more unfaithful than women is bullshit. There are more men than women in the relevant age groups, so obviously on average women have more sex than men do. That’s simply a statistical necessity.
Married 20 years, never thought abut cheating, got divorced , and remarried 15 years now, and never think about cheating. If you commit to somebody, they should be your one and only, IMO.
It seems fairly common. What seems to happen a lot is people get dissatisfied in their current relationship but don’t want the drama or risk of breaking up.
For some odd reason it seems easier to meet people when you are already in a relationship so they take the opportunity to cheat while still staying with their stable partner.
Cheating is complicated. Yeah some people just will, they are fooling themselves when they say they won’t. Some people find it sexy, they literally want to cheat, they think it’s hot. Others will if the situation gets extreme, people in dead bedroom situations who want to keep their family together and make the calculation (or miscalculation) that cheating is less damaging than divorcing. I worked with old people when I was younger, my bosses were old Spanish people who married for business reasons but had lovers, they did not love each other in a romantic way.
I’d say that as divorce becomes easier to get, marriage more based on love rather than alliance and monogamy less required, there is probably less cheating. But it won’t ever be zero.
If you are asking is cheating universal? No. It’s not.
I am not one to force monogamy on people, though I personally am not interested in being with anyone but my partner. That being said, I think it’s wrong for anyone to violate a partner’s trust. I find it messed up that your high school peer bragged about betraying someone who she claimed to care about (at the time). In a nutshell, it seems like it would be good for society if we got over our puritanical zeal for enforcing monogamy, since some people clearly are wired to need multiple physical partners while still wanting to emotionally connect to one person. But I personally would continue to only be with my chosen partner.
I’m not sure what kind of infidelity happens in high school, but I suspect if someone cheated on me by kissing someone else while we were in high school, I wouldn’t be upset, mostly because the nature of relationships in high school I don’t think of as long lasting. I’ve never cheated nor been cheated on though.
I agree. In high school is different. We all fall in love with a different person every day. But I think she was talking about her mid twenties.
I guess this means that cheaters are more inclined to go to school reunions.
Seriously, I think that fits. Many people (not all) cheat because they are unfulfilled in life. And the same cohort also might go to class reunions for the same reason… to try to find fulfillment.
The “infidelities are always there” part sounds like a cope. I’m not a great authority on relationships or marriage as I’ve mostly opted for single life but I have spent a lot of time around the various aspects of substance abuse and the way you describe this discussion sounds eerily similar to people with substance-use issues saying “everybody drinks” or “everybody uses drug x.” It might be true of the people they surround themselves with but it’s not representative of the broader population as a whole…
-On a seperate note you’re really making me want to attend my 20th reunion next year. /s
-Lastly I just want to clarify that i’m interpreting the term “cheating” to being different than a poly/open-relationship. As I understand there’s an element of deception or lack of communication when it comes to “cheating.”
I think infidelity varies, but one thing doesn’t: people who cheat and have zero remorse are not trustworthy.
You may have had a crush, but it sounds like you got lucky by missing out.
I guess there is some cultural nuance - my impression is that for some people, sexual exclusivity is understood as an impossible virtue which it is important to appear to uphold, but where breaking it is kind of like sneaking a cigarette after having quit.
Which doesn’t make them untrustworthy necessarily, they just have a different understanding of how big of a deal it is.
I can’t answer as to frequency, but I can say that recently a woman I know slightly cheated on her husband of 20 plus years, and the reason I know this is because he hired a private investigator and put the video of her kissing the other dude on Facebook. Apparently he did not include the video of them having sex but it exists. That seems like a really heinous thing for him to do, but if you know this family they’re actually really well raised good members of the community, and he’s clearly extremely hurt, stating that the depth of her lies to him was unreal. This woman’s mother is a saint walking upon the earth, without a shadow of a doubt, and her daughter was what seemed to be a very ethical well brought up mother herself raised in the Christian faith (not the conservative kind but the really decent person kind), so this was all a big shock. Apparently she was just lying to everyone, including her saint of a mother, all along. Her husband asked her to stop the affair (which was with some guy she had known for years) until they separated houses, but she kept on and kept on lying about it until she was caught on tape.
So until someone’s mask slips, you just really never know what someone will do.
