Appropriate username is appropriate.
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So he got some too. Must be a good material.
If eating meat is something you canât live without, and something they canât live with, then yes, you should not be married to someone who demands that you donât eat meat. If you find yourself accidentally in such a situation, the responsible thing to do is discuss this prohibition with your partner before you go eat a sausage, presuming all people are reasonable. If your partner is unreasonable, but youâre logistically bound to them for survival in some way, itâs understandable that youâd sneak a sausage, but itâs still going to be in your best interests to disentangle yourself from that relationship - the sausage is really only a sideshow for your dependence on an unhealthy relationship.
Parents model relationship behavior for their children, so yeah, kind of. Youâll also learn things like âitâs important to be sexually compatibleâ or âif your partner feels they canât be honest with you, they might break up with you.â Itâs only modeling, so itâs not exactly a direct pipeline, but itâs a pretty powerful force. And Iâd take any of those lessons over âItâs OK to deceive your partner if you think you need to.â
I donât know your situation (like how dependent you and the kids are on him), but I will say that a lot of people rule out both sexual flexibility and divorce unnecessarily. It can seem completely beyond the pale to suggest that accepting that your partner will occasionally have other (sexual) partners is something that reasonable people can be happy doing. It can also seem unbelievable to suggest that divorce isnât a horrible fate, but a constructive one that builds stronger relationships and better family dynamics. Weâre conditioned to believe that sexual exclusivity is sacrosanct and that marriages are forever unless they âfail,â but neither of these things are true.
I mean, if some wife would rather stay married to their husband than break up over his sleeping around, that suggests that - within certain guidelines (it stays secret, it doesnât affect the family) - the husband basically has permission to sleep around. Thatâs awesome, and the only thing the wife needs to do to turn that sexual encounter from a violation of trust to an honest relationship is have that conversation with him. The communication about what both parties are comfortable with and what theyâre willing to put up with is all that needs to happen to stop it from being a furtive, damaging affair of unknowns and uncertainties and to turn it into an honest and giving partnership where, for instance, the husband doesnât feel like heâs risking his entire family just because he is enchanted by someone on a business trip. He knows the boundaries and the guidelines, and he doesnât need to feel scared or awful and he can have great casual sex and everyoneâs pretty OK with it - heâs not nervous heâs breaking apart something important to him, and sheâs confident that whatever heâs doing, it wonât come back to her (and possibly can negotiate the same flexibility for herself, if thatâs something she wants!).
I know my partner and I talk about this maybe once or twice a year (it kind of comes up in conversation: âOh, that dude was totally flirting with you!â). That kind of honesty is maybe a little more than many couples, but it makes our relationship all the stronger.
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Band name.
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Which could be used to describe both the âcheating on your vegetarianâ and âcheating sexuallyâ situations.
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Well, I probably shouldnât have gone down that road anyway since I have to imagine too many things that arenât true about myself even to make it make sense. If my spouse told me they got laid today Iâd give them a high five. Iâm almost certain they wouldnât do the same, but thatâs fine with me.
Anyway, I think Iâve blathered on about this for far too long. In summary:
- I think sexual infidelity is unique (or among a rare few issues) in itâs power to bring out judgement from strangers and that it seems like all words like âassholeâ and âscumâ are thrown at unknown strangers a lot more surrounding this Ashley Madison thing than I normally see in these forums
- I know what it is like to engage in behaviours where it is important to me not to do them but that I find myself doing anyway and I donât think âassholeâ is a sufficient summary of that issue
- Different people have different skill sets and coping mechanisms and I donât want to assume that a person who does something that seems rotten could necessarily have done something better from where they were, or that their reasons for doing so are âexcusesâ
- I donât think that life or marriage is necessarily going to work out to be all that great for everyone and I donât want to judge other peopleâs failings by a standard that I set for myself
And in not summary (the hidden basis for my point of view):
- I have no idea what trust is or what it means to violate it. Sometimes people behave in the way you think they will, sometimes they behave in other ways. Thatâs that. I donât think my marriage is a failure because of the complete lack of what an ordinary person would describe as âtrust.â
- I donât understand how other people can be so sure about who they are and what they will do. I look at stats that say 15%-20% of people cheat on their partners and figure I have about a 15%-20% chance of doing it. Based on polling, at least some of those people believe that cheating is always wrong. Some significant fraction of people who judge others for cheating will go on to cheat and I donât know how I would know if I was one of them from the present.
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You old-school notches-on-the-bedpost types shouldnât be so judgmental of the techno-kids.
That being said, the sheer numerical glee is a bit squicky.
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Where I might disagree with your summary is that I am not willing to accept being rotten to other people as something forgivable based on âskill setsâ and âcoping mechanisms.â We all have a responsibility to not be awful to each other. If not being awful to others isnât in your skill set, youâve got a responsibility to make it part of your skill set. I accept that itâll happen and that some people will fall prey to it more often, but acknowledging that sometimes fires happen doesnât mean that we donât have a responsibility to reduce and mitigate and prevent them where possible (to mangle a metaphor).
Iâm not really interested in precisely predicting future action, what I want in a relationship is a basis for believing in each other, having that faith that flies in the face of time and statistics. A violation of that trust violates that belief in each other and renders that relationship something Iâd lose faith in.
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Itâs almost always better for the kids to be raised in a miasma of bitter, deceitful desperation.
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How else are they going to learn never to trust anyone else and that love is always a lie? Learn it a home, from their parents, just like we learned it from ours.
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The fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.
Except for kids. My toddlers have always loved gnawing on the things.
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I call mine Zeno; itâs quite paradoxical.
Havenât you already ruined in your bed?
With a clam? With a purse? With the naught, nightly nurse?
Oh! the things weâve ruined, so,
Wondering where mighty Socrates could go.
The sex at least was lots and lots
Which somehow resulted in lots of tots.
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Iâd next say that the idea of âbreaking up their kidâs home lifeâ is kind of a canard. Whatâs going to be more traumatic for some kids: Their parents fighting and sniping and playing passive-aggressive games and sneaking and lying? Or their parents agreeing that they work better apart than together and maybe going through a rough few months and being happier for it on the other side? Whatâs a better example? Whatâs a better home life? (All happy families are alike, amirite?)
clap clap clap
I went through a long internal struggle over this issue. The straw that broke my back on it was a book where the famous researcher on divorce claimed that one should only get divorced in the case where the kids could be physically harmed because divorce so damaged the kids. Better to be miserable in order to keep you kids happy.
I imagined the chain of people who would simmer miserably in their marriages to keep their kids well-adjusted, then their children growing up and doing the same, ad infinitem. It was obviously absurd.
You really canât do anything to ensure your kidâs happiness, only your own.
I wish I could have stayed with her dad for my daughterâs sake, but for my own, remarrying has made me so much happier - I have to believe that it is good for her to see me really happy instead of just pretending to be.
As for my own folks, I wished theyâd divorced ages ago and gotten on with their lives while they could, instead of waiting until they were so old they both felt they had spent too long in misery and had too little left to find another love.
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When I say âweâ, I mean as in âwe the peopleâ. In other words, the government. Thereâs a difference when criminals do something awful, and when societies do something awful as a matter of course.
The concentration of wealth results from bleeding your conquered people, or your colonies, dry. All the wealth ends up in one place, like Rome. Meanwhile, it gets harder to find Romans whoâd rather stand guard over the barbarians in Bumfuck, Egypt than sit at home and enjoy their wealth. Great wealth allows people to live as they like, providing certain historians with this false moralistic correlation: libertinism = decline. Thatâs putting the cart before the horse.
âEnlightenedâ should require no explanation. Education always results in the questioning of old tribal taboos, which is what the Bible, and certain other ancient texts, are full of. It doesnât matter that some people feel more comfortable with these strictures, myths, and proscriptions.
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While this seems to makes sense, its just that its been my experience that staying together just for the kids only works for a short to medium period of time and its usually the parents that get the benefit of believing theyâre maintaining a fiction for their offspring rather than the kids getting the benefit of a loving family, unless of course only one spouse wants out of the relationship and the other is fine with the way things are. Then, and only then can one partner sacrifice themselves for what is ostensibly the greater good.
But thatâs just sad. And the kids are going to find out anyway, I mean, once theyâre out of the home then so is the unhappy spouse right?
If either partner is also staying because of security, then theyâre not just staying for the kids sake.
Iâm not saying two adults canât make this arrangement work, Iâm saying that people who would enter this arrangement have more problems than theyâd care to admit, and that canât be solved by fooling their kids.
Edit: typo
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in my own case there has been no affair on my part or my wifeâs but there is an oddness in part of our relationship that might eventually require an affair. we dated for five years prior to our wedding and she pushed me to have at least one sexual encounter with someone else because i was a virgin when we began seeing each other and she was my only sexual partner while she had enjoyed sexual relationships with a number of men prior to her first marriage and was not monogamous for the first four years of our relationship. that encounter never came up at that time.
over the past 2 decades of our marriage there is an occasional vibe of how i should really have sought that out and that iâve somehow missed something by being exclusively monogamous. iâve not been seeking out an encounter or a relationship with anyone else but at the same time i almost feel more open to the idea of going with it if it happened because it would at least âget it over with,â so to speak. iâd be delighted to hear another take on it.
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So this goes back to my original stance of âliar liar pants on fireâ - this dude in this article did not have sex with over 60 women he met on AM.
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