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The two most active threads yesterday were the two British Royal Family related threads (Kate photo, Meghan lifestyle brand) that I've already discussed and will skip today. As it happens, I finally lost patience with the need to constantly moderate those threads and locked them both yesterday. So this should be the last we hear of those threads, if not the personalities involved. The next most active thread was titled, "I guess I don’t get why infidelity is a big deal if sex before marriage isn’t" and posted in the "Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)" forum. To be honest, I had quite a bit of trouble understanding all that the original poster was trying to say and I will probably make a shambles of summarizing it. The bottom line is that she (I am assuming the poster is a woman) notes that society has more or less accepted sex before marriage but once a couple is married, sex suddenly becomes "sacred" and has entirely different connotations. She doesn't seem to believe that sex should have elevated importance in this manner. Rather than seeing infidelity as a traumatic betrayal, she views it more as mistake, "a really really bad one, but a mistake nonetheless." Several posters hasten to point out that the issue with infidelity is not so much the sexual acts, but rather the violation of trust. One of the earliest posters to respond explained this viewpoint very well, saying, "The sex isn't the point, the vow of fidelity is the point" and argued that the original poster was "trying to frame infidelity [as] an extension of sex positivity, but what you're looking for is a free love scenario." As with this poster, most of those replying focused on infidelity as breaking a commitment and suggested that they maintained a zero or near-zero tolerance for what is essentially breaking a contract. A few agreed, at least in part, with the original poster. They were less worried about the physical act of sex than the often common impacts of an affair. These include lying, gas lighting, loss of affection, and other negative fallout. As such, they could imagine scenarios that avoided the negative ramifications, resulting in infidelity being forgivable or even, in some cases, acceptable. There were a number of outliers in the thread who had viewpoints that weren't widely shared and, subsequently, also not widely discussed. This included a poster who contended that humans are not meant to be monogamous. That mostly only elicited responses saying that some are and some aren't. Another poster argued that sexless marriages justify infidelity. Posters with this viewpoint are a fixture of the relationship forum and I think most posters simply ignore them now. The few posters that took notice simply said that the sexless poster should either divorce or reach an agreement that infidelity was allowable.