hearing examples of smaller scale things that (many) allo people consider cheating is the conversational equivalent of having ice cold water dumped on you. like jesus christ.
examples I’ve heard lately:
- thinking of someone else during sex
- being friends with an ex
- hiding your phone/texts from your partner
- spending time one on one with someone else
- liking someone else’s instagram post
I think some people have forgotten that something can be upsetting to them without being cheating
#all of this is true but also?#i don’t think it matters if you think dumb shit is cheating as long as you and your partner are in agreement #like yeah that’s fucking stupid but rules for thee and not for me‚ so#truly who cares if you aren’t forcing it or being unreasonable in each other’s eyes #that said keep that shit like 5‚000 miles away from me at all times ok👍
Exactly, exactly!
But here’s where the problem arises! Most (monogamous, assumed allosexual, assumed alloromantic) people never actually discuss boundaries and what they consider to be cheating when they go into a relationship.
They just go into a relationship with a specific, idealized version of what everyone’s boundaries “should obviously” be and assume they are on the same page as their partner, and then shocked pikachu face and cry ‘cheating’ when it turns out that they’re not, in fact, on the same page of what counts as cheating at all.
Yeah it’s a kinda wild minefield
because also a lot of it is based around people’s idea of what’s “normal,” and people have wildly different ideas of what’s normal based on how they grew up
And SOME of it would be fixed if they talked about it and set boundaries going by what they both wanted. Which works, no matter how weird and unusual the boundaries are… as long as both are okay with it
But, if either one ever stops being okay with the boundaries they set, then there’s still the whole society arguing over what’s normal
And that unavoidably affects how the people in the relationship feel about the ethics of what they do.
Example: Mike Pence (i think. I don’t wanna look it up. Some famous Republican politician) and his wife, supposedly had an agreement that neither one of them can be alone, ever, at any time for any reason, with someone of the “other” sex.
I don’t know how this would even be expected to work… especially since a high ranking politician and his wife would usually have to meet one-on-one with other people pretty frequently, as part of their political and ceremonial duties? But, supposedly, that was their agreement and they expected each other to adhere to it.
Assuming they both fully agreed to this? then, any time one of them broke this rule, the other one would view it as a betrayal of trust, and would be justified in being upset at the broken promise.
Because the only ethics, here, are within what was consensually agreed upon within the relationship.
However, in practice? If this happened and became publicly known, the societal response would be very different from the response to a public figure doing any of the things that are usually considered cheating.
You can talk as much as you want about how the only obligation people have is to their own promises to their partner, and how it doesn’t matter at all what “society” considers “normal”… But the fact is that society mostly doesn’t agree with that, and this IS gonna affect you
In the case of the aforementioned betrayal in a Pence-style marriage – I imagine there would be a lot of doubting whether both parties willingly consented to this arrangement. And a lot of criticism of the unrealistic nature of the expectations.
Basically… it would be mostly a discourse about how unreasonable it was to HAVE this agreement in the first place, rather than about how bad it was that someone broke it.
And I guess the reason I mostly stay the hell out of that kind of discourse? is because I personally feel almost the same way about the whole concept of monogamous marriage.
so, my responses to any discussion about someone cheating would be similar to the roasting of a Mike Pence “cheating” scandal and I know nobody wants to hear that.