Hello. So last week I went to a school reunion for the 20th anniversary of my hometown school. I’m not the kind of person who enjoy this kind of social events, but for this time I made an exception. My old friend from that time asked me to go and I thought I would be funny (spoiler alert: it wasn’t funny). After the event and speeches, all my classmates and I went to a restaurant. I sat in front of a girl that I had a bit of a crush on when I was a kid. During the dinner I was mostly in silence, they were talking about gossips, old memories, relationships, comparisons… At some point she talked about a boyfriend she had. She said that she cheated on him like 10 or 20 times, she didn’t know the exact number. The thing is… She was laughing about it, and so the others. “I told him I cheated on him, I don’t know how many times…” She said, like nothing happened. My ex girlfriend told me that she also cheated on his fiancée some time before the wedding. She always said that infidelities are always there, like it is normal… But is it? I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, because I know some other cases. But I don’t understand… There is no sense of morality ot loyalty or empathy?
Cheating is complicated. Yeah some people just will, they are fooling themselves when they say they won’t. Some people find it sexy, they literally want to cheat, they think it’s hot. Others will if the situation gets extreme, people in dead bedroom situations who want to keep their family together and make the calculation (or miscalculation) that cheating is less damaging than divorcing. I worked with old people when I was younger, my bosses were old Spanish people who married for business reasons but had lovers, they did not love each other in a romantic way.
I’d say that as divorce becomes easier to get, marriage more based on love rather than alliance and monogamy less required, there is probably less cheating. But it won’t ever be zero.
If you are asking is cheating universal? No. It’s not.