So, a while ago it came out that my uncle（who's from outside the family and married in) cheated on my aunt (mom's sister).
They're still married. Honestly not sure what they'll do since he is the one with the job and our family doesn't have enough to support her and her children.
But I just don't get it. I get falling out of love or even finding other people besides your spouse attractive, but cheating is just such a layered lasagna of shit.
1.You want to eat your cake and have it too. (There's an entire community of people who cheat on their spouses called "cake eaters."). I don't understand what you get out of that though unless you're just really lustful (and even I wouldn't do that and I'm a lustful removed). If you want to break up/divorce that's fine but you can't just have emotional/physical relationships without changing anything. Which leads to point 2
2.How little fucking respect do you have for your wife and family? Because the thing is that youre denying your partner any autonomy in the relationship. You dont even respect them enough to even talk about it, or you don't respect them enough to think they deserve to know about it or will ever find out.
I mean look, there been some stories I've heard where I understand, if the relationship is already dead. It still sucks but I can understand if it's inevitable anyway. But otherwise i just can't conceptualize how selfish and shit you have to be to do it.
And I wouldn't ask if it wasn't so common. I mean it doesn't happen in every relationship but it's so common basically everyone is paranoid their partner is cheating on them. So I just really don't get it
Eh, on this part, I feel like these are two pretty different points:
(1) Giving up on sex: Sure, it's a pain, but you can live without it. There are people who have trouble even finding a partner in the first place, which can last for decades. I'm not sure sometimes if this is made easier by having supplementary ways of getting off, like porn, or if porn actually makes it worse because you can get close mentally but don't actually get the real thing. But either way, you aren't dying of thirst in the desert for not getting the real thing. It can suck, yeah, but you can get through it without doing something dishonest/hurtful to another person.
(2) Giving up on love: This one I more understand (and I suspect is more the part that people who think they badly want to get laid are actually after). Loneliness can really eat at a person. Maybe it's even more intensified if you're in a loveless marriage, so close to intimacy and yet so far (I don't know from experience, just trying to give credit to the possibility). But also, romance is not the only way to have emotional or physical intimacy (and I'm not even thinking of sex atm when I say "physical"). Friends can be extremely close sometimes and not have it be romantic. Though socializing probably gets in the way of this at times, shoving this idea into people's heads that if they are close and sync up in the right gender or sexual preference combo, then they must be needing to make it romantic. As if this is the ultimate form of adult closeness and everything else is on a sliding scale, with romance as the endpoint.
This kind of socializing, I think, is toxic to people being able to be happy without romance. What they need as a basic human thing, is closeness. What they (tend to be) taught is that for an adult, romance is the ultimate way to do this. So then, they're going to extrapolate from that, that they will never be satisfied until they have a good romance. But romance itself is not a static feeling thing, where you find somebody and feel exactly the same toward each other forever. Feelings can deepen or fade, and it seems to be a consistent thing that the initial "high" early on is not something that lasts and has to be replaced with something more slow-burn affection for things to be maintained.
But if somebody believes the high is what love is and keeps chasing that, they're going to have a harder time "settling down" and building love, not just searching for it. This is not to say all failed relationships can be fixed by "trying harder" or something, just that if someone views it as a magic that has to stay in the air and loses sight of the action part of any kind of relationship, I'm sure that'd increase their temptations to cheat.
Completely agree! "sex as a need" is very deserving of criticism since it's often tied to r**** culture. Also yes friendship is best and we should develop more tenderness and care towards friends, undeniably.
Actually I didn't mean that sex/love were needs I just said they were cool, and that depriving ourselves from it for private property reasons is sad. But I should reaffirm that making other people suffer for it is also really sad, and that yes ultimately we should thrive for a complete relational revolution where exclusivity isn't the dogma
I guess this also ties on the capitalist (and other "structures of power") need for a "docile and growing workforce".