Comradeship // Freechat

It's a tough but really interesting subject that touches the relationship between the nuclear family and private property. I'll try not to write a whole book so I'll focus on what you need to explore to understand the whole infidelity paradigm.

Firstly, observe how much housing and property is tied to family status. Ultimately, marriage is not a love affair it's an economic one.

Secondly, explore how the reunion of private property, love and sexuality is a historical construct that has and had many alternatives.

Finally, understand how social constructs corners us into absurd dilemmas. Cheating is dishonest, yes we should always say that we want an open relationship before lying to somebody who trusts us, unfortunately, that's not how things present themselves in reality. Your uncle might be an ass, idk, or maybe he knows wanting an open relationship would mean divorce, aka, personal level economic crisis, and that nobody wants this, so cheating is the lesser evil. You might say well just give up on sex/love if you're married, but I don't think we should expect people to renounce that very prevalent aspect of the human life because of some private property shenanigans

Hope that helps seeing a different perspective, I personally got way more involved in questionning love/marriage and family after I experienced living together as a couple. Some stuff you gotta live it in your flesh to understand why people do the things they do

In my ideal society, polyamory would be normalized enough that people who wanted to date multiple people would simply do it openly. The whole cheating business is based on a failure of the current social construction of the family to systemically accommodate and normalize polyamorous relationships.

I think it just sometimes comes down to feeling trapped by circumstances. I'm not saying there is no other choice but sometimes the person does not feel there is another choice or cannot perceive another realistic path.

It may be in this situation that your uncle wanted to go his own way but felt like he couldn't because his family depends on him, as you said, so he was trying to do the right thing while also taking care of his needs. All of the pain and uprooting of the family which that would cause is avoided by staying and stepping out instead, especially if undiscovered. Is it still deceitful and hurtful to your aunt and the family? Of course, that goes without saying, but maybe he felt trapped in a corner. I'm speculating, I don't know your uncle nor the situation beyond what you've shared.

As someone who had partners who cheated and who has very close friends that were shattered by cheating partners, I think the most important thing we can do is accept that this sometimes happens and it's not always because someone in particular is at fault. The worst thing someone can do is get mired in how impossible it is to understand, how it could ever happen to them, unbelievable that this person would do that, how can anyone ever be trusted again, love is not possible, etc. I was there myself for a while and one friend of mine was bitterly for many years, just recently getting out of it, and no one should be stuck there. People need to be able to accept it and let it go. I won't go so far as to say forgive, but it's not a mystery of the universe that most human beings need and want to fuck and the social and legal construct of a relationship or marriage may not hold that need and desire back under certain circumstances. Ultimately, the person cheated on will need to take care of themselves (emotionally, at least) and they will have to be able to let it go to avoid prolonging and maximizing damage.

I also am a fan of poly or open relationships, and I've done that before, but it's still possible to cheat in those circumstances if rules are broken so unsure why people are bringing that up like it resolves the issue. That being said, it would probably help in some situations like these if people could agree to it and understand the love/romance aspect of their partnership is gone. I agree with the adage that you can go from open to closed but you can't go from closed to open, though. It is too difficult on the relationship, in my opinion.

All of this reminds me of the Before Trilogy, including the cheating. I can't recommend that trilogy enough to anyone who is at least over 30 and has had at least one major relationship fail, even better if you're older and had more pain. Same goes for the Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, 2046 trilogy. Just amazing films about humanity in relation.

Sex and love are different.

I've always found it kind of funny that it's called "cheating" specifically. I feel like that word implies so much about how we view love/sex as a "game".

You will find that most people simply do not consider the consequences of their actions, or think things through at all, before doing things.

On top of that neurotypical people tend to be ok with doing morally bad things if they think nobody will know. Where as people with ADHD or ASD etc tend to follow their own moral code regardless of who is watching.

Combine these two things, and inhibition reducing narcotics like alcohol being involved at times and its no wonder these things are common.

Emotional maturity does not have a linear relationship to age. And that does not mean young people think cheating is fine, but rather emotionally immature people do not digest their ability to affect (positively and negatively) other people. And older people typically have a partner and the outcome of that is someone gets hurt. Other people posted great reasons.

There are going to be 1000+ different reasons someone chooses to cheat on their partner.

It’s important to understand the base drive to do it in the first place, and that is the lizard brain drive to propagate our species. I’m looking at this from a males perspective, but it’s impossible to fully turn off this part of our brains. There’s always an underlying subconscious process running that evaluates a member of the opposite sex (in this case, a female) as a prospective mate. You have to remember that this is happening subconsciously. No guy (except creeps like Elon) is fully thinking “I want her to have my baby” because most of us know (without having to remind ourselves) that that’s a ridiculous thing to try and do, and something we don’t necessarily want to do. BUT, that evaluation process and resulting level of sexual attraction is still there. Our brains are so fine tuned to the process it’s why you can determine within seconds of looking at somebody’s physical appearance wether or not you’d want to have sex with them. There are of course other factors that will turn you on or off towards somebody, but that first check is always there because it can be done without interacting with them. Our minds are always looking for the next mate. 99.9% of the time it’s a fleeting thought (“girl. pretty.”) and you don’t dwell on it, but that .1% of the time you can’t overcome the allure to explore a sexual relationship it is when you start the path towards infidelity. Along the path there will be numerous checks, and it will usually fail right off the bat, but there’s always that perfect string that can land you at infidelity.

Another thing to consider is that it’s fully possible for someone to have a sexual encounter with somebody that is not their SO and have no change to their relationship from their perspective. Consider swinger couples. They have their life, their family, and occasionally they go out to a swinger party, have sex with other people, then go home and resume their lives like nothing has changed. We’ve been raised and taught all our lives (either directly or indirectly) that this is abnormal, and that once you find “the one” then that’s it. I would argue that wanting to have multiple sexual partners is the more normal experience most people feel throughout their lives, therefore forcing yourself to abstain once you’ve gotten married goes against our basic instincts. It’s a conscious CHOICE to suppress those feelings, usually out of respect for your partner and your commitment to the relationship. It may be easy for some, but there’s always going to be the others where it’s extremely difficult to always suppress such feelings. It doesn’t necessarily mean they love their partner less than someone who doesn’t cheat. Our brains are all wired a little bit differently and can behave very differently day to day and under different circumstances and environments. Even if you could filter your potential partners on Earth like a search page and distill it down to your ideal mate there would still be tens of millions of people on that list. And you will eventually run into them, and your brain will notice them, and then it’s another game of walking the path that could land you at infidelity. There will inevitably be people that reach it, and there will be any number of different factors and decisions that got them there.

You’re takeaway from this may be that “oh, so anyone who cheats is weak willed” but that’s not necessarily true because it insinuates that they could be stronger if they tried harder. Bud I’d ask you to consider things like addiction. You could look at an alcoholic and ask yourself “why do they do that?” or a nicotine user, or chronic gambler, food addict, sex addict etc. and endlessly wonder why someone would have such a “destructive habit”. The only logical conclusion is that, because of our individual brain chemistry, certain people will be predisposed to addiction while others are not. Addiction also ties into another base brain function, involving dopamine and the brains reward center. The same logic holds true for our drive to procreate/have sex. Some of us will be predisposed to cheating while others not so much.

TL;DR - It a very hard question to answer and varies case by case why someone cheats. The desire to cheat has to do with our brains and how humans are programmed. Ultimately it’s a choice, and we all have to individually weigh the consequences. Nobody is exactly the same, so it’s entirely possible to see someones behavior and not understand it yourself.

The thing that always bothered me about the cheating stuff was that there is an implicit property relation attached to someone's genetalia that people just seem to go along with.

Two consenting people have sex, outrage I have exclusive rights over that.