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?
My understanding is that infidelity is very nearly binary in its commonality.
There are groups of people for whom infidelity is normal, it is the norm. They believe that everyone cheats, and in their experience everyone does, because they are cheaters and are friends with cheaters. They believe that fidelity is impossible, and claims to the contrary is just social posturing
Then you have groups of people for whom infidelity is basically unthinkable. That it is the greatest breach of trust possible. It is not just not normal, it is non-existent— you don’t cheat, your partner doesn’t cheat, your friends don’t cheat, no one you know cheats. If someone you know cheats, or someone known by someone you know cheats, it is legitimately horrifying: this is not merely social posturing, it is literally shocking to you, because in your world, cheating simply does not happen. It is horrible.
Cheaters think everyone cheats. Non-cheaters believe no one cheats, or only horrible people cheat. These two groups tend to self sort themselves into groups. Bad things happen when the two groups intermingle, in fact.
What’s also a tragedy is when someone who would naturally be in the non-cheating group ends up, mistakenly, in a cheating group. They will begin to feel like everyone ELSE in the world cheats, while they themselves never would. They keep getting hurt, they keep getting betrayed, and they don’t understand why. They need a better friend group… and let me be clear: non-cheating groups ABSOLUTELY EXIST. Those groups simply don’t interact with cheating groups— they basically don’t even know that the cheating groups exist, and would be horrified to find out. So if you’re caught up in a cheating social circle, getting out is really hard! You need to find people who have literally nothing in common with the people you already know!
It kinda sucks. I don’t know a solution.
Absolutely. I belong to a non cheating group. It's just seems completely unfathomable that it could happen. Most of us are in 15+ year relationships and are friends with everyone. It's not just a "the women are friends with the women, the men are friends with the men" situation. We got a blend of genders all participating in the same hobbies. There would be so much social cost to cheating it would be kind of insane.
Where I work though there's a decent amount of drama in that regard though and I have noticed that one common factor is that the relationships are atomized. They either keep their old friends going in and there's almost zero expectation of their partners integrating into each other's friendships or there's just this expectation that men and women are fundamentally different creatures. That whole men are from Mars women from Venus shtick. From the outside it seems like emotional distance where people look at each other like they aren't targets of empathy - more like they play by a book as if they can just put the right inputs in they will get the desired outputs.
I know this is entirely anedotal and that anybody could theoretically cheat for any number of reasons... It's just something that I noticed about the groups of cheats that I am aware of.
Huh. I don't think I know anyone who cheats so I guess I got lucky. Your post is plausible
From time to time I get a ride from someone at work I have zero interest of becoming friends with. In those rides I get glimpses of a complete different reality where he and his friend group lives. It is horrifying and it completely matches the description of the parent comment.