" I realized love won't obey our expectations, its mystery is pure and absolute." - Francesca, Bridges of Madison County
Some who cheat cite, "the Devil made me do it," but it would be far more useful to say, "I did it because I'm trapped with very normal needs I cannot possibly get met." They thought they would always be met - the partnership of commitment, the bond of love, and the passion of sex, erroneously assumed to be guaranteed by a legal document: the marriage contract.
The truth is that the only guarantee of our needs being met in a relationship is the slow, careful vetting of another which used to be called courtship. Or what biologists call a "mating sequence." Either way it is described, a conscious attention to this ancient social process has relatively fallen to the wayside in modern western cultures - the very first portion of it, the passion of sexual attraction, never understood as the illogical, irrational, chaotic process it has always, and will always be.
Keeping passion for another cannot be memorialized as a contract, a conscious promise, because this attraction is not a choice.
What if "the Devil" of the saying, "the Devil made me do it," isn't literally out there somewhere in the physical environment to fight, resist, reject, or "defeat," but is rather more "the Devil inside" - a metaphorical feature of our animal instincts we have no conscious choice about, to which some Evolutionary Psychologists attribute just two prime functions:
• To survive (which implies, to kill if necessary, or be killed.)
• To reproduce (not within proper social conventions, or with consideration and ethics, but simply to pass on our genes - not randomly or sloppily, but according to specific masculine and feminine instinctual strategies.)
Males have billions of sex cells over a lifetime and women have hundreds of viable eggs by comparison that could become fertilized and grow as a fetus. It might then make sense why men always seem to get "caught with their pants down," literally, while pursuing woman after woman in secret. It makes sense why women who vest such care, wise judgment, and discrimination in selecting the best possible mate can become indignant at this natural, instinctual difference.
Still, as with the fictional Francesca of Bridges of Madison County, and the real, female author, Sandra Tsing Loh, featured in the recent Atlantic Monthly - http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/divorce - women do in fact, also cheat, perhaps in equal numbers, but in a very different pattern and with a different, underlying, instinctual - and therefore often unconscious - genetic strategy.
This "Devil inside" cannot be "defeated," extinguished, or pretended to not exist - your instincts and drives are inside you, all men, all women, and aren't going anywhere.
Neither is infidelity. As a recent blog comment states, there's not disappointment, but power in this knowledge, and answers to living happy lives regardless of our dark sides.
Whether male or female committing the act, we call it at best, "juvenile" or "adolescent," and at worst, "evil." All of which are accurate if you were to see the aggressive drives of a kindergarten toddler wrenching a toy away from another - resembling in many ways, an adult withholding love from a partner who won't comply with their every wish - or the savage instincts of a death-struggle between two animals that ends in one eating the other - so easily felt in the spirit of the modern human struggle of divorce. You could call it all either juvenile or even evil.
When people cheat, they don't literally attack each other physically, though the trauma on the emotions may feel just as painful, and outright be as thoughtless as the words and actions of a child. In divorce, people don't literally kill each other, though they likely do kill the dreams of another, slaying the image of what the couple could have been, and draining the lifeblood of their work-efforts from their bank accounts.
At the root of such conflicts is the drive to survive at all costs, and to reproduce whatever it takes. If you were to find just one word representing them both in this area of the mind once called by Evolutionary Psychologists, "the Reptilian Brain," that word must certainly be "passion" - such a powerful force of behavior that it is automatically played out by the body, in action - devoid of judgment, impulsive, and ignoring what may very well be a long history of character and civility.
One mistake does not negate a lifetime of cultivating character and maturity any more than one home-run ball thrown by a Major League pitcher keeps him out of the Hall of Fame, or one episode of forgetting to hand your child their lunchbox as they run out the door somehow makes you a globally bad mother.
We are so quick to demand perfection of each other while being so lacking in understanding of the simplest needs and ways of the other gender - which must have been at least partially mastered by every single one of our forebears...
...or we wouldn't be here today.
They didn't know about Evolutionary Psychology, but they must have known passion when they saw it in the eyes of their other, felt it when they provided what the other's instincts needed, and when that other understood their needs in return.
There are passionate, sexy love stories, but also "crimes of passion," not at all romantic. In every case of its use, the word passion keys into - that's right - either the life-and-death struggle to survive, or to the animal drive to mate, to reproduce.
Passion equals instinct. Passion lives exclusively in "the Reptilian Brain."
Let's take the Triune Brain Model of Paul McLean into practical application - where the Reptilian Brain is the center of the instincts, the unconscious, the Mammalian Brain is the center of emotion (and love), and the "Higher Brain" is in the neocortex full of the intellect, wisdom, abstract thought, ethics and boundaries that allow us to truly commit and partner (as well as set humans apart from other higher animal species.)
Because of the emotional bonding of the Mammalian Brained area of the mind, we love and form friendships.
Because of the maturity, ethics, and boundaries of the Higher Brain, we become capable of true commitment and keeping (most) promises.
Yet the Reptilian Brain is the difficult child, the troubling one, the devil in the details of romance.
It is about only lust and desire. It is not love, not partnership or teamwork, or contracts, agreements or promises.
This Reptilian Brain is raw passion only.
It does not steer us to "love, honor and cherish," but to mate - thoughtlessly by its very nature, in poor judgment that is irrelevant to its purposes, and sometimes with great regret which is an insignificant casualty of its war on anything in the path of survival and reproduction.
The impulsiveness of the Reptilian Brain ignores at times and often offends our high character, our mature sense of ourselves, and our healthy pride in being good people, which is how those who do cheat often also describe their own actions as self-traumatizing.
Following one's "Reptilian Brained" passions then has both a light and dark side. When following them to the detriment of others, we certainly hurt them and may even hurt ourselves, our pride in character and ethics. But in not following them, we harm ourselves just the same - and those attached to us - by feeling less alive and happy, less real and fully present, less genuine, and in some cases, no more than an empty shell of "niceness."
Tennessee Williams told us he feared that if his devils were to flee, his angels would leave him too. If so, we'd best be cautioned - in always seeking to prevent or minimize the pain infidelity causes ourselves - that ignoring, shaming, or attempting to extinguish the desire and passion of the other is not the way to steer it back toward us.
Sexual attraction is not logical, is not a choice, not a conscious agreement.
It can't be effectively policed or restricted by mere words and policies any more than wars can. It arises for reasons we are unaware of, and can be just as mysteriously fleeting. It must be enticed, appealed to, and cleverly influenced by our body language, our insinuations and flirtation - not logical argument, promises in a marriage contract we demand be fulfilled, or abet our wish for, or illusion of control.
