Cheating is a touchy subject, and most people profess very clear ideas about it. But 95 percent of the time, when we talk about “cheating” in relationships, our use of the word isn’t even appropriate.
If that sounds outrageous, please read on.
“Cheating” means:
- doing something behind someone else’s back…
- with the intention of harming them.
On a poker table, the cheating player is trying to damage the other opponents. In business, people cheat to get an advantage over a competitor.
But what about relationships? Is it often the case that someone does something behind our back, with the intention of harming us?
Yes, people may sometimes cheat on their lovers just to make them suffer. But how common is that? This probably only happens about 5 percent of the time. In most other cases, cheating doesn’t have anything to do with the partner being cheated on — which is a hard truth to digest. Let me illustrate this point.
If I complain that my girlfriend has cheated on me, it really makes it sound like what happened is about me. That she and her other lover are doing whatever they are doing just so they can hurt me.
This puts me both in the role of the victim, and in that of the main character. But most of the times, I’m neither. They’re probably just enjoying themselves, and not thinking about me. I’m not the star.
This is the first uncomfortable truth:
What is happening between my partner and his or her other lover has only got to do with the two of them. It is not about me.
My partner and her lover like each other, and they want to connect intimately. They would do it if I didn’t exist. And they want to do it even though I exist.
Ouch, that hurts. My ego doesn’t like this a single bit.
Now, there is still a narrow passage through which my wounded pride can escape: claiming that my girlfriend should have told me first. That she isn’t being honest with me. That by cheating on me, she has broken an agreement of sexual exclusivity. That we had agreed to be monogamous.
So cheating has to do with breaking an agreement of sexual exclusivity to each other. And yet, most often, we don’t pay much attention to the agreement. We only talk about the people involved.
But what if the problem was with the agreement itself? What if the agreement, and not our partner, was in need of a revision?
Read the full article on the Elephant Journal.
Photo credit: Pedro Ribeiro Simões/Flickr