Tiger Woods, Jesse James, and a host of politicians and religious icons. It's so easy to identify right and wrong, good and bad, and never realize that the adulterers likely also harm themselves as much as they do others.
What does the adulteress know, though? In the media as sources of not only entertainment, but education, could it be that stories of wayward men so oversaturate, it isn't possible to speak of deep causes and solutions for widespread infidelity?
Maybe the adulteress not only has the answers, but the microphone with which to teach.
She knows that pair-bonded women stray nearly as much - approaching the 50 % of pair-bonded men who cheat. She knows that nobody wins in these stories, not even the cheater. Name-calling, blame and sensationalism offer nothing for anyone to learn from, except as an imperfect and temporary salve for the individual wounded.
She knows that whatever side of cheating an individual is on, there are likely to be pain and unmet needs, desires, and life goals, even long before the first temptations to cheat ever appear.
It may be a very old metaphor, but the puzzle as a symbol for a couple's romance, and lovers as "puzzle pieces" may very well still carry practical value when we look at courtship as an enquiry into compatibility, alignment, and synergy of the capacity to love.
Nobody Wins Until the Puzzle Is Solved
Our common sense is that adultery is wrong, it limits the adulteress in her social bonds, her character growth, self-esteem and self-concept as much as it hurts the sense of trust, masculine identity and self-esteem of her husband.
In the arena of sexual attraction, passion, and sexual betrayal, we are talking about a function of the mind, which operates by principles that are decidedly not logical.
Instead - in this "mating dance," whether smooth and right, or clumsy, stilted, and gone exceedingly wrong - we are talking about animal instincts at work, not higher, loftier features of being human such as ethics or honesty.
Was it mentioned that women cheat on their spouses with an almost equal frequency to that of males?
See these for more:
http://www.authorsden.com/categories/article_top.asp?catid=57&id=28879
http://www.infidelityfacts.com/infidelity-statistics.html
What if there is a pattern to courtship - one which blends both the logical and the instinctual in a set of steps between a woman and a man in romance? And what if a critical mass of steps in this "dance" must be met for a couple to remain loyal in the long term?
Certainly we see mating rituals broken off and abandoned by animals in the wild - one wrong move and mating will not occur. At least for that moment.
Why Don't We Listen to Our Own Intuition?
The same missteps and miscues are seen in the early dating process among humans, - at which time the courtship may or often unlike other animals - may not end. The comments, "That was, uh, fun, thanks," or "Maybe we could do it again some time," or the worst - "It's not you. It's me" - mark a probable cause for the psychological end of the romantic dance. Why do we often backtrack and not heed them?
Something more than just animals, we have a sense of a relationship timeline in our species - that just being casual precedes a friendship bond, which precedes a full committed partnership. As I've heard author and Evolutionary Psychologist Geoffrey Miller say, "At some point, the mating dance went inside the head."
"In the head." Yet, it can be as common for two individuals to continue seeing each other due to the draw of other factors. The physical attractiveness, the friendliness, the charm, the resources, the social network size, and simple physical proximity can facilitate "second chances" and passive continuance of a relationship that our ironically wiser distant cousins in the wild manage to avoid.
Unlike them, we have a workplace we may share, joint bathrooms and bank accounts, shared friends and a love of the same music, and adherence to the same politics and religion. We find ourselves sometimes beyond a certain mark in time with a person these days - the one whom we now are expected to call "girlfriend" or "boyfriend" or "partner," "husband" or "wife" - with incomplete information about who they really are "inside the head."
Yes, even after engagement and marriage. We were too busy, or too caught up in the excitement, or simply not aware of a consistent, step by step process by which men and women have always naturally found their way into each other's loyal and lasting embrance.
Often we also have only half a dance played out in the sexual attraction too, but in a tough dating market and mixed-message culture when it comes to gender role - and with the extent of many courtships amounting to "hooking up" and "hanging out," we might figure the "compatibility data" is as good as it's going to get.
Whose Fault is It?
What if the adulterer and adulteress alike are living "puzzle-pieces" that need to fit another in just the right way, but in lieu of that rare discovery, settle for an imperfect fit, wedged into place, a gap filled by the features of the affair partner.
Of course in individual cases, the individual who breaks trust is at fault, but what about the large groups, and the statistics among the genders themselves?
One of Newton's laws of motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What if there is a principle in courtship by which for every lack of action in the mating dance, there is an equal and opposite reaction?
Conclusion: we need to screen more extensively in our dating, as well as earlier, and from a more informed place when it comes to courtship.
I've heard some women say they were married a number of years, even decades, before finding out their husband had sired children out of state or abroad.
I've also heard more than a handful of men say they were married for more than five years before they found the first vodka bottle under the bed - even though the alcoholism had been there long before they even met.
Whose "fault" was it that they all have secrets, and private mental lives, and that it takes time to get to truly know another person at more than just the physical, sexual chemistry level? That psychological health demands we do have at least some secrecy, solitude, and privacy to preserve a sense of individuality and freedom to determine our own identities and goals?
Sometimes, it's nobody's fault. It's then that the animal world can look exceedingly more efficient and satisfied in their mating than our own. They get to remain mostly physical in their courtship actions, unlike our own, often nebulous, psychological ones.
Whose "fault" was it that we all have unique personality styles, and that living in the real world it can take months or years for the right crisis or challenge to occur that tests our mettle, our character, our discipline, patience, empathy, collaboration and compromise.
Sometimes it's again nobody's fault when swept up in the romantic story's passage of time, the plot points of courtship pass, and only months or years later we awake from a vague intuition into full-blown alarm: our personality style simply is not compatible with that of our partner - long after the tentacles of shared everything have ensnared us in a web of daycare, soccer practice, joint taxes, and a shared, underwater mortgaged home.
My favorite quick look at personality is at www.kwml.com, as food for thought.
More decades ago than can be counted on one hand, women generally had no recourse in ending a failed relationship with a move to a new home, new friends, and a new, smooth transition from married to single. Today, that's just not true anymore, but the assumptions and stigmas seem to persist. If anyone could call Tiger Woods or Jesse James "bad" for being male, it would be that they had the financial means to get out of their relationships ethically, but didn't.
This "badness" isn't really then attributable to a specific gender, but to the lack of boundaries, courage, and self-knowledge - things that aren't unique to one gender or the other.
