|
Some excerpts from THE 50-MILE RULE: Your Guide to Infidelity and Extramarital Etiquette...
Since at any given time it's generally true that 'all the good ones are taken', any sexually active adult beyond age 25 would pretty much
have to be an idiot not to realize how slim the chances are of finding someone really cool who's not already married (of course, hope does spring eternal.)
For many people - maybe your spouse - even the intimation of an affair constitutes a heinous crime. Affairs are forbidden fruit - the delights transitory,
the consequences certain to be grisly.
So far as we're concerned, contemplating or even having an affair doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, an immoral person, a horny bastard,
a shitheel, a slut, or any of the other colorful phrases that have been thrown at people who often just want a change of pace or some excitement or
happiness in their lives. It just makes you human.
Of course, few people enter marriage thinking that boredom, if not complete calcification, is going to be the result. However, just as the urge
to pair up is natural, so all too often is the urge to break apart when the initial excitement wears off and reality sets in. Some lucky people never feel
that breakup urge. Others resist it and remain faithful and married, happily or not. Some divorce, perhaps to remarry again (and again and again in
some cases.) Still others take a fourth route. They cheat.
There seems to be within humans an 'instinctive tug' towards infidelity - as opposed to one man/one woman and the sexual fidelity it implies -
but no one really knows what kind of social and reproductive systems 'man, unadorned' (or woman for that matter) would adopt if society were suddenly
stripped of experience, history, environment and culture. Hard as it may be to believe when you're trapped within it, monogamy exists for any number of
reasons, some of them actually good ones.
Guilt is a societal construct designed to keep you in line, a feeling you'll learn to ignore with practice. What really makes an affair right
or wrong is the way you handle your ongoing responsibilities…to your spouse, lovers and children. Treating your family badly is wrong. Treating yourself
to a little extramarital R&R could be oh-so-right. Who decides? You do!
Somehow marriage, initially a simple offspring-for-protection contract, became a sacrament, a marvelous and mysterious vessel into which two people
mix their wishes, fears and dreams, in the fervent hope that the resulting concoction will remain bubbly and sustain them for the next
- gasp - 50 years or more.
Romantic love is in many ways a chemical reaction on a timetable, one prompted by your body's desire to mate and reproduce with a particular person
who has general characteristics that you like - characteristics, by the way, that dozens or hundreds of other people whom you haven't even met, might share.
|
