So affairs are 'wrong', but who would want to live in a world where there are no affairs? We excessively police and punish our partners, our friends' partners and our parents, but often hypocritically, when it comes to ourselves and our friends cheating will generally be forgiven. I am not even advocating abolishing the hypocricy. Without it affairs probably wouldn't be exciting and equally, faithful relationships wo…
Yeah, that's crap. Let's translate that philosophy to other "wrong" activities, shall we? "Spending money is more exciting when it's stolen. Saving is much more meaningful if there is the possibility that someone can steal it." "Life is more meaningful when someone is actively trying to kill you. Murder is much less exciting because it's wrong." You see the problem? The notion that actively doing something awful to s…
The reality of my case is (well it's a complicated story) that it may well have gone better for them psychologically if there was a clear betrayal on my part. Maybe mine is an extreme case, and in anycase knowing what I know wouldn't have made me cheat - I would rather be in the right - but then again it's easy to say that ...
Everyone seems to be taking such an absolute position. Which is ridiculous really since it really is culturally relative e.g. in france they are much more permissive of affairs - with certain thrown in social conditions about being discreet - and again it is not to say they are saying it is right - neither am I, just that it is not such a huge bad to deserve all the vitriol - like I'm getting for even discussing the matter.
What is clear is I would never make promises to people with such puritanical attitudes like yours. Clearly it would be a one sided contract since I would be much more forgiving and less entitled and on top of that given the way of hypocricy quite possibly less likely to cheat. Again, if I may argue by analogy, like the anti-gay politicians who are gay, I wonder wether the people who are so anti-affair are infact liable to do so or have done so themselves.
Of course there can be tyranny in a voluntary relationship, because you cannot predict the future and you can be bound (by e.g. caring more about the children, or social pressure) to suffer.
Some people are fools when it comes to relationships. They may know there partner cheated in the past, they may know they have generally sexually permissive attitude and are unreliable with their promises. Yet the outrage is still there nonetheless. You cannot make something into something it is not. I may as well get outraged if my partner doesn't become a millionairre or doesn't look like a supermodel after a certain age.
And just because you can make analogies, doesn't make it right. Somethings are better (for some people) with some danger of a bad outcome. e.g. Extreme sports. Yes, I just don't think you can equate murder or theft to having an affair. Both are actions against a stranger. Now if one partner misspends a large sum of shared money then that is an ambiguous situation which is worth comparing.