So, a while ago it came out that my uncle（who’s from outside the family and married in) cheated on my aunt (mom’s sister).
They’re still married. Honestly not sure what they’ll do since he is the one with the job and our family doesn’t have enough to support her and her children.
But I just don’t get it. I get falling out of love or even finding other people besides your spouse attractive, but cheating is just such a layered lasagna of shit.
1.You want to eat your cake and have it too. (There’s an entire community of people who cheat on their spouses called “cake eaters.”). I don’t understand what you get out of that though unless you’re just really lustful (and even I wouldn’t do that and I’m a lustful removed). If you want to break up/divorce that’s fine but you can’t just have emotional/physical relationships without changing anything. Which leads to point 2
2.How little fucking respect do you have for your wife and family? Because the thing is that youre denying your partner any autonomy in the relationship. You dont even respect them enough to even talk about it, or you don’t respect them enough to think they deserve to know about it or will ever find out.
I mean look, there been some stories I’ve heard where I understand, if the relationship is already dead. It still sucks but I can understand if it’s inevitable anyway. But otherwise i just can’t conceptualize how selfish and shit you have to be to do it.
And I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t so common. I mean it doesn’t happen in every relationship but it’s so common basically everyone is paranoid their partner is cheating on them. So I just really don’t get it
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In my ideal society, polyamory would be normalized enough that people who wanted to date multiple people would simply do it openly. The whole cheating business is based on a failure of the current social construction of the family to systemically accommodate and normalize polyamorous relationships.
What would have happened to the couple in the OP though if the husband had asked and the wife said no?
Depends on what the uncle did after that, just like in the current situation. In my ideal society it would be considered essential for people to verify that they align on polyamory before seriously committing to a relationship.
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Emotional maturity does not have a linear relationship to age. And that does not mean young people think cheating is fine, but rather emotionally immature people do not digest their ability to affect (positively and negatively) other people. And older people typically have a partner and the outcome of that is someone gets hurt. Other people posted great reasons.
You will find that most people simply do not consider the consequences of their actions, or think things through at all, before doing things.
On top of that neurotypical people tend to be ok with doing morally bad things if they think nobody will know. Where as people with ADHD or ASD etc tend to follow their own moral code regardless of who is watching.
Combine these two things, and inhibition reducing narcotics like alcohol being involved at times and its no wonder these things are common.
where in the hell did you come up with the generalization that people with adhd are moral in their behaviours than people without an adhd diagnosis?
Im inclined to agree, so many behaviors are attributed to autism when id say its more just people with good moral compasses and who have empathy enough to consider how actions affect others.
Of course, people with autism may be inclined that way, i’ve also met complete reactionary fash who are autistic, its a bit tokenizing.
Morality is learned. Fascists do not see themselves as the villains. In their eyes what they are doing is justified, and moral. Even Hitler would have seen himself as the good guy. Saying someone has a strong morality is not saying they strongly allign with your moral compass. It’s saying they more strictly follow their own moral compass. This is why fascists spend so much time dehumanizing the people they commit violence against. They don’t see it as morally wrong to kill those people because they have convinced themselves, or someone else has convinced them, that those people are inhuman. That its actually a good thing all the violence thats happening.
You can read studies on the differences in neurodivergent morality. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/41/8/1699 I’m not tokenizing i am nuerodivergent myself. This is a, while maybe not fully understood, pretty widely observed behavior difference.
Thanks, reasonable response - sorry if it came off as attacking you, just used to people going the way I felt about it in my post.
You need to first understand that morality is subjective. We are talking about a persons own personal opinions on morality. Their moral compass. A racists moral compass says that racism is okay. Most people would disagree with them on that.
As for where i am getting it. Scientific research. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31489833/ https://neurolaunch.com/autism-moral-rigidity/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691823000719 https://neuroclastic.com/autistic-people-care-too-much-research-says/ Quotes from this one: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/41/8/1699
“ASD participants and healthy control subjects (HCs) decided in public or private whether to incur a personal cost for funding a morally good cause (Good Context) or receive a personal gain for benefiting a morally bad cause (Bad Context). Compared with HC, individuals with ASD were much more likely to reject the opportunity to earn ill gotten money by supporting a bad cause than were HCs. Computational modeling revealed that this resulted from heavily weighing benefits for themselves and the bad cause, suggesting that ASD participants apply a rule of refusing to serve a bad cause because they evaluate the negative consequences of their actions more severely.”
Its not that they are more moral per say it’s that they are more rigid in their morality and less likely to make exceptions to their own personal moral code. A person who cheats usually will know what they are doing is morally wrong (being that if they were the one being cheated on they wouldn’t like it), but they will rationalize an exception for their specific case as to why it is ok for them to cheat. To justify their own actions to themselves. A neurodivergent person is much less likely to do this sort of rationalization. Since they just generally speaking do not make as many exceptions to their own moral code.
There are going to be 1000+ different reasons someone chooses to cheat on their partner.
It’s important to understand the base drive to do it in the first place, and that is the lizard brain drive to propagate our species. I’m looking at this from a males perspective, but it’s impossible to fully turn off this part of our brains. There’s always an underlying subconscious process running that evaluates a member of the opposite sex (in this case, a female) as a prospective mate. You have to remember that this is happening subconsciously. No guy (except creeps like Elon) is fully thinking “I want her to have my baby” because most of us know (without having to remind ourselves) that that’s a ridiculous thing to try and do, and something we don’t necessarily want to do. BUT, that evaluation process and resulting level of sexual attraction is still there. Our brains are so fine tuned to the process it’s why you can determine within seconds of looking at somebody’s physical appearance wether or not you’d want to have sex with them. There are of course other factors that will turn you on or off towards somebody, but that first check is always there because it can be done without interacting with them. Our minds are always looking for the next mate. 99.9% of the time it’s a fleeting thought (“girl. pretty.”) and you don’t dwell on it, but that .1% of the time you can’t overcome the allure to explore a sexual relationship it is when you start the path towards infidelity. Along the path there will be numerous checks, and it will usually fail right off the bat, but there’s always that perfect string that can land you at infidelity.
Another thing to consider is that it’s fully possible for someone to have a sexual encounter with somebody that is not their SO and have no change to their relationship from their perspective. Consider swinger couples. They have their life, their family, and occasionally they go out to a swinger party, have sex with other people, then go home and resume their lives like nothing has changed. We’ve been raised and taught all our lives (either directly or indirectly) that this is abnormal, and that once you find “the one” then that’s it. I would argue that wanting to have multiple sexual partners is the more normal experience most people feel throughout their lives, therefore forcing yourself to abstain once you’ve gotten married goes against our basic instincts. It’s a conscious CHOICE to suppress those feelings, usually out of respect for your partner and your commitment to the relationship. It may be easy for some, but there’s always going to be the others where it’s extremely difficult to always suppress such feelings. It doesn’t necessarily mean they love their partner less than someone who doesn’t cheat. Our brains are all wired a little bit differently and can behave very differently day to day and under different circumstances and environments. Even if you could filter your potential partners on Earth like a search page and distill it down to your ideal mate there would still be tens of millions of people on that list. And you will eventually run into them, and your brain will notice them, and then it’s another game of walking the path that could land you at infidelity. There will inevitably be people that reach it, and there will be any number of different factors and decisions that got them there.
You’re takeaway from this may be that “oh, so anyone who cheats is weak willed” but that’s not necessarily true because it insinuates that they could be stronger if they tried harder. Bud I’d ask you to consider things like addiction. You could look at an alcoholic and ask yourself “why do they do that?” or a nicotine user, or chronic gambler, food addict, sex addict etc. and endlessly wonder why someone would have such a “destructive habit”. The only logical conclusion is that, because of our individual brain chemistry, certain people will be predisposed to addiction while others are not. Addiction also ties into another base brain function, involving dopamine and the brains reward center. The same logic holds true for our drive to procreate/have sex. Some of us will be predisposed to cheating while others not so much.
TL;DR - It a very hard question to answer and varies case by case why someone cheats. The desire to cheat has to do with our brains and how humans are programmed. Ultimately it’s a choice, and we all have to individually weigh the consequences. Nobody is exactly the same, so it’s entirely possible to see someones behavior and not understand it yourself.
