I guess I don’t get why infidelity is a big deal if sex before marriage isn’t

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's the betrayal. Sex before marriage isn't harming and deceiving a spouse you've committed to. (I know some ultra religious folks would say it is, but a hypothetical future person is just not the same as one you've already, specifically chosen and married.)

DP. I can see that.

On the other hand are:

sexless marriages.

When one spouse (of any sex) has desire for regular intercourse, but the other spouse (of any sex) has zero desire, why would there be any issue at all about sexual activity outside the marriage?


In other words: if you don’t want sex with them, why can’t they do it with other people?

If that's the agreement the two spouses reach, then it's totally fine. Because the problem isn't the sex, it's the lying.

[Anonymous]

Agree it's about lying and betrayal, not something "sacred." This is why people get upset by infidelity in non-marital relationships, too.

When I think about how I would respond to my DH having an affair, the sex part is not even what bothers me the most (it does bother me, but it's not the thing I respond strongest to at all). What would bother me would be him creating this life away from me and our kid, lying to us about it, taking time from our family to do it. And if the affair was emotional and involved real affection and love, that would hurt me most of all because I put so much energy into maintaining our love and connection, and building a loving family environment for our child. If my DH went and created this little unit elsewhere, it would take away from what we have. And the lying is just a betrayal of trust. I never lie to my husband.

I agree that it can be "just" a mistake -- I think relationships can come back from infidelity. Especially if you have kids. I just see the benefits of an intact family if you can make it work in a way where the adults really are on board and on the same page, and I'd be willing to work for that even if my DH cheated. But I'd also definitely keep divorce an option because cheating is a "mistake" that really disrespects your relationship and your partner, and if he wasn't willing to do the work to repair that, I would not martyr myself to it to keep the family together, because then we aren't a real family. If I have to do all the work of creating a good family environment, I might as well do that in my own household with joint custody.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know if it’s the same, OP, but I grew up a conservative Catholic, and I struggle to see how birth control is not only fine, but expected in a responsible married woman, but abortion is terrible, and you would never coerce a woman into one. Telling a married woman she should use birth control is fine, but asking her if she is going to keep a pregnancy is evil.

I was always taught that they are both not good for men, women, and society in general for pretty similar reasons. It’s hard to wrap my mind around what seems like an obvious moral contradiction.

Who says it's acceptable to coerce a woman into having an abortion?

I don't understand the moral contradiction you are identifying, or who holds those conflicting views.

I agree. I don’t understand where she sees a contradiction when there isn’t one. She doesn’t make sense.

[Anonymous]

The marriage is sacred, the sex isn’t. When you break your marriage vows, you’ve broken one of the two biggest commitments one can make in life (marriage and parenting). You can have sex with anybody who will consent to have sex with you, but getting married is a public, legally binding, and sometimes religious commitment.

[Anonymous]

We have a lizard part of our brain that can’t handle our partners sleeping with someone else. It’s a punch to the gut that you can’t rationalize away.

The reason to not cheat isn’t because of how cheating makes you feel, it’s about how it makes your partner feel. It feels awful to be cheated on in a very fundamental way.

[Anonymous]

so you equate my husband and i living together and having sex together before marriage, as the same as my husband sleeping around and cheating on me? those sound like opposites to me, what am i missing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:so you equate my husband and i living together and having sex together before marriage, as the same as my husband sleeping around and cheating on me? those sound like opposites to me, what am i missing.

No they are saying you live your h even though he had previous partners.

So if he cheats why is it so hard to bang him again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m kind of with you, OP. My husband and I lived apart for a year a few years into our marriage. It was job related and didn’t have anything to do with our relationship.
If I found out that he slept with another woman during that year, I wouldn’t be thrilled, but I wouldn’t see it as a huge betrayal.

On the other hand, if we were living together and raising kids together, and he just wasn’t showing up for parenting obligations, he was regularly lying to me about where he was, and he wasn’t treating me nicely, then it could easily be marriage ending.

Then just divorce. What was the point of being married if you didn’t mind if he slept around?

There are a lot of reasons to be married. We love each other. We are best friends. We have children together. We were going to be living together again once I closed my practice and got the house sold. Our finances are mingled. We like being part of a family together.

That’s not love

She literally said "we love eachother. we are best friends." at the start of her post.

[Anonymous]

You're framing this weirdly.

Agree. I have no idea what pre-marital sex and infidelity in a marriage have to do with each other. The former is about sex, the latter is about betrayal or breaking a contract.

OP consider that your rigid upbringing and conservative teaching about sex is contributing to a strange false equivalency.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:so you equate my husband and i living together and having sex together before marriage, as the same as my husband sleeping around and cheating on me? those sound like opposites to me, what am i missing.

No they are saying you live your h even though he had previous partners.

So if he cheats why is it so hard to bang him again.

so theyre saying because he had a girlfriend that he slept with before he met me, thats the same as him cheating on me? i still truly dont follow this train of thought.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For most it’s not a mistake it’s the betrayal that follows her in the form of lying and gaslighting.

Scenario 1
Spouse comes home from happy hour comes right up to me with tears in their eyes and says I got carried away, met someone I found so incredibly attractive I could not say no and we slept together, I am so sorry and I will take steps to make sure this never happens again.
That’s a mistake and now I would have all the information before me to make an informed decision on our future.

Scenario 2
Spouse meets someone at happy hour they find incredibly attractive, they sleep together. But this time they withdraw the affection normally meant for me and deposit it elsewhere, they lie to me on a daily basis, our sex life plummets and I don’t know why. Long face-to-face talks, letters and attempts to improve our relationship are met with a stone wall until the day where I click one button too many on the computer and all is revealed.


I will take scenario one any day of the week, scenario two is pretty much unforgivable

Agree with this. Obviously I wouldn't be happy about Scenario 1 but people make mistakes and I wouldn't throw away my family for it.

But yes, the infidelity that tends to destroy people is when the cheater has a whole relationship and falls in love with someone else, but keeps it hidden the whole time. That's the one that cuts really deep. Because you're living a lie and you don't even know it. I have nothing but empathy for people in this situation. I really don't think it's about the sex (though I do think you'd wind up thinking a lot about all the intimacy between your spouse and this other person, including sexual intimacy, and how your spouse chose to build that with someone outside your marriage while staying married to you).

This is also why I don't get open marriage. If other people want to do it, that's fine, I'm not trying to tell anyone else what to do. But I could never do it because it's not about the sex, it's the intimacy. The thought of my spouse building a relationship and a life with someone else "on the side" -- I don't get it. The whole point of our marriage is that we have built this life together. I like that it's exclusive to us because we are both fully and equally invested in it. I just don't understand how that works with open marriages unless it's some kind of triad situation where you are all in love? But most open marriages don't work that way. They work like monogamy but they each have side relationships. I will never quite understand this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The marriage is sacred, the sex isn’t. When you break your marriage vows, you’ve broken one of the two biggest commitments one can make in life (marriage and parenting). You can have sex with anybody who will consent to have sex with you, but getting married is a public, legally binding, and sometimes religious commitment.

+1, which is why it's not cheating if your spouse consents (and some people do consent to their spouse having sex with someone outside the marriage).

But cheating, where your spouse doesn't know and doesn't consent to you becoming intimate with someone else? Is a betrayal of the bond you've sworn to, legally and emotionally.

Like if my husband gambled away our life savings without me knowing, and then I found out, I would feel pretty similar to how I'd feel if he had an affair. I wouldn't be like "well, we did keep our finances separate before marriage so I guess this isn't that big of a deal." The money isn't sacred, the trust is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:so you equate my husband and i living together and having sex together before marriage, as the same as my husband sleeping around and cheating on me? those sound like opposites to me, what am i missing.

No they are saying you live your h even though he had previous partners.

So if he cheats why is it so hard to bang him again.

so theyre saying because he had a girlfriend that he slept with before he met me, thats the same as him cheating on me? i still truly dont follow this train of thought.

These are hard-core religious folks that throw people into "before" and "after" buckets related to sex. Sex is considered so sinful that once you've done it, welp, that's all she wrote. So why not keep doing it and what does it matter, marriage be damned, and you as the partner shouldn't care either because they're already tainted, so to speak.

It doesn't make a lot of sense. See also, the high number of religious types caught up in sex scandals, abuse, and overall power dynamics in sex. It's a believe system heavily rooted in shame and blame.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sex before marriage doesn’t break a vow of fidelity. Cheating does.

This.

Duh, OP. Did your brain fall out?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know if it’s the same, OP, but I grew up a conservative Catholic, and I struggle to see how birth control is not only fine, but expected in a responsible married woman, but abortion is terrible, and you would never coerce a woman into one. Telling a married woman she should use birth control is fine, but asking her if she is going to keep a pregnancy is evil.

I was always taught that they are both not good for men, women, and society in general for pretty similar reasons. It’s hard to wrap my mind around what seems like an obvious moral contradiction.

Telling a woman "you should use birth control" is intrusive, unless youre her doctor and the woman has asked you "how can i prevent pregnancy?"
Asking a woman if she is going to keep a pregnancy is intrusive, unless youre her doctor and the woman has said "im unexpectedly pregnant, what are my next steps?"
Neither is "evil" and neither is "fine" to point blank ask someone. Theyre just both intrusive things to say that fall under the category of "none of your business". No one should be coercing a woman into using or not using birth control, or using or not using abortion services.