Before we even talk about cheating, let’s talk a little about where the whole rules of the relationship game came from. The rules the conventional relationship plays by are man made of course. They aren’t any more effective than the next set of rules. Under the rules of a current relationship, you must be faithful to your partner, you must not be a liar, you must be providing and of course, caring.
The problem is that none of that shi’t means anything. No one is a “liar”. People lie, but they’re not liars. Everyone lies because it’s a big part of communication. Those who lie frequently aren’t “liars” because they don’t do it all the time. Lying is subjective to a situation.
If someone is caught cheating and lies, it’s because they want to avoid consequences. Children do the same to their parents all the time. Children who have more lenient parents tend to lie to them less. The frequency of a person lying is created, it isn’t inherited.
Being faithful is another big one. People make commitments all the time without understanding what they’re getting themselves into. Working a full-time job is one of them. Some people think they can get a 9-5 while still being part of an independent sports team. Commitments are very underrated and most people fall victim to their assumptions and lack of experience.
Relationships are the biggest and worse of all. Most people who enter a relationship don’t go in with the intentions of cheating, especially during the honeymoon phase. The couple doesn’t even know anyone exists outside of them. The cheating comes later on down the line.
If you cannot work on the marriage or the women is a moron, staying married and cheating makes the most sense because divorce is disruptive to the family life and your bank account.
-Al Goldstein
Most people who “cheat”, don’t do so with the intentions of leaving the other person. They simply get bored and want to try something new. This is why when people are caught cheating, they are upset that the other person wants to leave them. They didn’t want to leave the person, but they have developed desires due to the circumstances of their current relationship.
These desires naturally happen over time. Of course, people try to suppress them because they don’t want to break the rules of the commitment they thought they could keep. The more the try to suppress them however, the more unhappy the person becomes. Married couples stop having sex after a certain point because the get use to each other. People who are married don’t lose interest in sex in general, only with each other. It’s like eating the same food everyday. Sure, I love steak and eggs, but give me that everyday and I’ll be throwing up after a month.
It’s not a natural state to be in. The convention relationship IS the cause of cheating. You’re asking someone to suppress desires that came to them naturally. These people (male or female) aren’t schemers who go out of their way to deceive their partner, they’re acting on a desire. They have two choices; be bored and unhappy or fix that itch and get the temporary satisfaction they’ve been desiring.
The conventional relationship is the prime environment to breed the desire to cheat. This is why open relationships work so well. Open relationships play by a different set of rules. Both partners can see whoever they want with the agreement that they still have a life together.
For me working on the marriage and not making the easy choice of cheating was something that I could not do.
–Al Goldstein
An open relationship is definitely hard for most people to get into because of our core values in this society. We are raised with the whole idea of a proper relationship, possession, property and entitlement. Even before we attempt a relationship, people feel like this is what they want in life. WITHOUT even knowing if this is what they really want. They’ve been conditioned to yearn for a lifestyle like this. Once they put their cards on the table, they have no choice but to be subjected to the complications of the set of rules they decided to play by.
The answer isn’t finding the right man or the right woman, it’s about understanding that the rules you have decided to play by are responsible for your behavior. The conventional relationship is filled with holes, the minute we stop blaming each other and realize it’s the environment that’s causing the problem, we’ll be at peace.
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