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But I'M Not Cheating, He Is!
First of all, let's define "cheating". Two people have an agreement, either explicit or implicit, about how their relationship should look. If implicit, the "cheater" knows that the partner would not approve even if they never made any vows on the subject. What that agreement is about is not relevant to this definition.
It could be about sexual infidelity, it could be about emotional infidelity, it could be kink, it could be that they're not allowed to dance with anyone else but each other, or it could be that she's the only one allowed to ride on the back of his motorcycle (seriously, I know a couple like both of the last 2 examples). They could be monogamous, they could be poly, they could be swingers, they could be DADT. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that they have an agreement not to do something with other people or to only do something with each other.
If they agree that one or both of them can go out and get sex as long as the other doesn't have to be aware of it, that's not cheating. If it's like the TV politician characters who say "she knows I have lovers & she looks the other way as long as I don't rub her nose in it", it's not cheating, for this rant. I have other problems with DADT, but that's not what I'm about to discuss.
Cheating, in this rant, is doing something your partner would not want you to do, and does not condone even "discreetly", and you know it, on some level. Saying "well, we never talked about it, and she never actually said I *couldn't* get blowjobs from strangers in bathhouses..." is cheating and you fucking know it.
I take a hard line against cheating. I've heard all the excuses, all the justifications, all the hypothetical "what if his wife is disabled & can't have sex with him, but he stays because he loves her & needs to care for her but he has to get his needs met somewhere" (although the last person who said this to me actually used the word "cripple", because justifying cheating on a disability wasn't bad enough) and "she already broke the marriage contract by withholding sex indefinitely so he's not really breaking his agreements by having a secret girlfriend on the side because she broke the marriage contract first" and "if he leaves, she'll get the kids and he'll never see them again and he'll go bankrupt because he can't afford to maintain two houses & then he'll have to resort to bank robbery to support his 12 children and then he'll get caught & die horribly in a police shootout, which the kids will see on TV and be scarred for life". I *was* a cheater, so don't tell me about the shitty situations people find themselves in that make them justify cheating.
Seriously, I don't want to hear any more excuses. Sometimes people have really shitty situations. And I'm sorry for them. There are a lot of really terrible conditions out there like stoning & mutilation and famine & discrimination, but the solution isn't to retaliate - the solution is to stop the terrible conditions from happening.
Making a relationship agreement with someone, and then breaking it behind their back and continuing to exist in the relationship as if the agreement still stands is *wrong*. It might be the lesser of two wrongs, it might bring the cheater a sliver of happiness in an otherwise horrible existence, but it is still breaking an agreement, no matter how you slice it, and it is not the greater path of courage.
But I'm not actually here to talk about being a cheater. I'm here to rant about being the person a cheater cheats with. There's this fucking irritating trope in the poly community that says "It's not my job to police other people's relationships. He's an adult, he can make his own choices. Who am I to tell him what he should and shouldn't do? If he wants to cheat, that's his choice. I'm not doing anything wrong because *I* didn't make those relationship agreements, so I'm not breaking any."
Bullshit.
There are a lot of selfish attitudes in the poly community, mostly holdovers from The Monogamous Mindset, mostly having to do with Couple Privilege. This is one of the worst. This is all about "me". This is all about what the third person is getting, masked under a pious attitude about "choice", and maybe even under some superficial sympathy for the poor man (or woman, or whoever) who is trapped in such a loveless marriage that he needs to find some happiness somewhere or experiment with something his spouse won't do, and oh how convenient that I'm here to provide it! This is all about ducking responsibility for one's own actions - actions that harm another person, even if it's only their dignity that is harmed.
I've always said that the real test of being poly is not how many people you're fucking, but how you handle your partners fucking someone else. In my opinion, being a caring and compassionate metamour is a required element for being in a poly relationship. No, not being your metamours' BFF, but being *caring and compassionate*, regardless of how well you actually like each other and get along. Courage and integrity are nothing when it's easy - it's when it's difficult that they count. And you cannot stand there and say that you support, choose, or prefer, relationships based on honesty, trust, and communication (y'know, the foundations of polyamory and, for that matter "open" relationships) while simultaneously supporting lying, cheating, dishonesty, and non-consensual relationships.
That wife (for the sake of simplicity, I'm sticking with pronouns specific to the situations I would find myself in if I were the "mistress" in the scenario - which means the cheater is male, his spouse is female, and the cheatee is female.), that wife did not consent to this arrangement. She could not have, since she doesn't know about it. And if she did know about it, she wouldn't. Whether she is being unreasonable or not is completely irrelevant ... SHE DID NOT CONSENT TO THIS ARRANGEMENT. That, by itself, makes my actions, as the mistress, wrong.
Sure, there can be levels of wrong, and there can be multiple wrong parties. Pilfering office supplies is not in the same league as, say, the Holocaust. I wouldn't give anyone the death penalty, or even jail time, for stealing a stapler or using the office copy machine for personal use. That does not erase the fact that willingly and deliberately engaging in a relationship that at least one person does not consent to is WRONG. I'm not making any statement at all on how "wrong" that wrong is, because there are too many variables and nuances and even perceptions, and we're talking about hypotheticals here, not any specific relationship. But a creek is small next to the Pacific Ocean, and if you step in either of them, you're gonna get wet. Wet is wet, whether you like being wet or not.
Now, let's skip past the pragmatic reasons why being the mistress is a bad idea. Let's just move right past the middle-of-the-night phone calls from the angry wife, the death threats, the lawsuits, the fact that, if he's caught, this new love of yours loses everything anyway, the fact that he has to hide you & can't acknowledge you, that you will always be "the dirty little secret", that you will never be able to fully share his life with him (maybe you don't want to, I dunno), that this is a setup pretty much designed for creating unnecessary drama.
Let's forget, for the moment, the time my PLATONIC friend's girlfriend tracked down my parent's phone number and started calling their house while I was there visiting, shrieking into the phone to "stay away from my man you fucking whore!" Let's pretend I never got a call at 3 in the morning, waking me and my then-boyfriend, from my one-time boss's fiancee demanding to know who I was and how her man got my phone number.
Let's dismiss the daily 5 AM phone calls from my then-boyfriend's EX-wife (who thought that giving him a couch to sleep on when he was out of work made him her property) demanding to know where he was, whether he was with me or not, and who only stopped calling when I reported her to the police for harassment & had my phone company block her number back when I had a landline.
Let's brush off the stories I have from 3, count them THREE coworkers and one ex-boyfriend's brother who all had either a girlfriend or an ex-girlfriend actually shoot at them for believing they were cheating (only 1 actually was - 2 of these guys actually married the women AFTER the shooting incident, but that's another rant). And let's especially ignore the young woman who showed up at my house with a stolen pickup truck and her daddy's shotgun to tell me that some guy I barely knew and wasn't interested in was "taken" (also, I grew up in a city in California, not a Kentucky farm town). Let's also ignore the fact that a person willing to cheat *with* me is more likely to excuse cheating *on* me if he feels justified.
Let's just say that we both agree there are some risks involved with being the mistress of a cheating husband.
I want to talk about character and integrity. Sure, the cheater is an adult. Sure, he can make his own choices. Sure, it's not my job to make sure he behaves. But that doesn't then give me license to engage in behaviour that a person who is affected by did not consent to.
As a polyamorous person, I believe that a good relationship requires honesty, consent, and communication. When I am someone's mistress, when I am a cheatee, that relationship is missing all three of those elements. I am engaging in a relationship, willfully and deliberately, that someone did not agree to, and would not agree to it if she knew. I am removing her personal sovereignty to make choices about how her life should look and I am robbing her of her dignity to live the life she chooses.
I am not acting out of compassion or consideration for another human being. That means that I am putting my own desires as priority *to the detriment of others*, which is the very definition of "selfish".
Some people have tried to defend this position by saying the poor guy is in a really bad situation. We feel sorry for him! We *are* being compassionate, because his life is just awful, so we're bringing him some joy. Back to those hypothetical extremes - the wife already broke the marriage contract, the wife is refusing him sex or a particular kind of sex, he loves his wife and doesn't want to hurt her but he can't help his love for you (or his desire for sex and your body will do), so he's doing the best he can in a difficult situation.
Bullshit.
I guarantee that the wife has a different perspective than the one he's selling you. Oh sure, he probably really does believe what he's telling you. Most people, I think, are not outright liars and frauds. I think, most of the time, these guys really do see themselves in difficult positions with no "good" options, only less-worse options. And I'm willing to bet that, most of the time, they're not *completely* wrong.
But I still guarantee that the wife *also* doesn't see herself as the bad guy in the situation. It's pretty much a human trait that we rarely ever see ourselves as "bad guys". Even Saddam Hussein & Osama Bin Laden probably really believed that they were good, honorable men, fighting for truth and justice. Even "bad guys" have people who love them, who see them as good people.
In fact, that's at least one reason why we have The Entrenchment Effect - giving people facts doesn't actually change their opinions, because the cognitive dissonance between their view of themselves as a "good person" and the fact that they were wrong about something makes people dig their heels in and believe even harder against the evidence so that they don't have to see themselves as "not good".
So no matter what sob story you want to tell me that he's sold you on, I know there is another side to that story, and no matter whose side I actually believe, I have some compassion for the wife who is being cheated on. It's really hard for people to put themselves in their metamour's position. That's why we have so many couples willing to use veto power & make rules restricting other people's behaviour. But we have to do it anyway, at least, we do if we want to be honest about being an ethical person.
Which makes all your claims of feeling "sympathy" for the poor cheater fall flat. Maybe the wife really is a horrible, evil bitch. But putting her into a relationship that she did not agree to, or violating her existing relationship agreements does not make you the white knight in the story. It makes you *both* bad guys. Maybe you're less of a bad guy than she is, but you just put someone in a relationship that they did not consent to and could not give informed consent to even if she was willing. We're supposed to arrest people for that.
But, even worse, maybe she's not a horrible, evil bitch. Maybe she's the kind of wife that the husband really loves, but who just doesn't share his interest in a particular kind of sex, so he has to go explore elsewhere. That's what a lot of poly people say to justify their complicity in a cheating partnership. Mono people will justify cheating with someone by the "the wife is a horrible person who trapped him" line, but poly people seem to be OK with the "his wife is actually a good person and he loves her, she just won't have sex with him and won't agree to an open marriage, so he has to get his needs met somehow."
Seriously? You really want to justify participation in a relationship that breaks the agreements of a woman who is good & kind & loving & worth keeping? She's wonderful enough that he doesn't want to leave her and *this* is the thanks she gets for being such a great wife? You have turned her life into a lie. She is not in the relationship she thinks she's in and YOU contributed to that. You have removed from this wonderful woman the right to make her own choice about her own relationships. You talk about his right to "choose", but what about hers? Is the freedom of choice only reserved for people who choose what happens to benefit you?
I care very deeply about not hurting that wife. I care that she is having her relationship agreement broken. As someone said in a Facebook thread recently, "Relationships are like webs, you can't just tug on one string and pretend you aren't affecting the others. And I'm not saying anything beyond that about what to do or not to do, just that I'm uncomfortable with the idea that 'ultimately it's their choice, not mine'. Because you are making a choice to get involved in the situation."
My involvement with a cheater affects his wife. I am complicit in breaking an agreement. I am agreeing to violate someone else's boundaries. We do not have to have made the agreement ourselves to be able to violate an agreement. I never "agreed" never to trespass on private property, yet climbing the fence with a "No Trespassing" sign on it puts me in violation.
In fact, we don't even have to have done an illegal act to be an accomplice or an accomplice after the fact, in the eyes of the law, as long as we know about it and don't try to stop it or report it to the authorities. We have a social contract that says "I won't do these things to you and you don't do these things to me" and that's how we all get along. I try not to do the sorts of things that I don't want people to do to me (like violate their agency), because I know how much it would hurt me, so I have empathy for the other people and I don't want to hurt them.
I don't have to try and "police" the husband's relationship agreements for him. He is a grown-up and he can make his own choices. But so am I. And I choose not to violate another human being's right to "choose" her own relationship. I choose not to participate in a relationship that removes the right of choice from someone else. I choose not to willingly infringe upon another's personal sovereignty or dignity. And I choose not to perform actions that lead a person into a non-consensual relationship.
I do not respect anyone who defends the position that it is ever morally or ethically "right" to do any of those things. The lesser of two wrongs is still wrong, not right. It just means that the situation is complicated and there may be no "right" answer. But if there is no "right" answer, that means that the cheating is still wrong. That some people might benefit (such as "bringing joy into a person stuck in a loveless marriage") does not overwrite that other people do not. That some people have complicated and difficult lives and I feel sympathy for them does not require participating in activities that harm someone else.
And if the defender is also polyamorous, is also a community leader or activist or "celebrity" espousing the values of polyamory as a valid and, especially as an "ethical" relationship choice, not only do I not respect that person, I also think she's a hypocrite. Since I've already heard all the defenses, continuing to defend that position only makes the defender look worse in my eyes.
If you want to talk about compassion & ethics, I'll start listening when that compassion & ethical behaviour gets extended to the metamours. As someone who *is* a metamour, I try not to treat my metamours with any less compassion than I expect in return. I may not always succeed, but that is the standard to which I hold myself. And violating their relationship agreements is not compassionate nor ethical.
It could be about sexual infidelity, it could be about emotional infidelity, it could be kink, it could be that they're not allowed to dance with anyone else but each other, or it could be that she's the only one allowed to ride on the back of his motorcycle (seriously, I know a couple like both of the last 2 examples). They could be monogamous, they could be poly, they could be swingers, they could be DADT. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that they have an agreement not to do something with other people or to only do something with each other.
If they agree that one or both of them can go out and get sex as long as the other doesn't have to be aware of it, that's not cheating. If it's like the TV politician characters who say "she knows I have lovers & she looks the other way as long as I don't rub her nose in it", it's not cheating, for this rant. I have other problems with DADT, but that's not what I'm about to discuss.
Cheating, in this rant, is doing something your partner would not want you to do, and does not condone even "discreetly", and you know it, on some level. Saying "well, we never talked about it, and she never actually said I *couldn't* get blowjobs from strangers in bathhouses..." is cheating and you fucking know it.
I take a hard line against cheating. I've heard all the excuses, all the justifications, all the hypothetical "what if his wife is disabled & can't have sex with him, but he stays because he loves her & needs to care for her but he has to get his needs met somewhere" (although the last person who said this to me actually used the word "cripple", because justifying cheating on a disability wasn't bad enough) and "she already broke the marriage contract by withholding sex indefinitely so he's not really breaking his agreements by having a secret girlfriend on the side because she broke the marriage contract first" and "if he leaves, she'll get the kids and he'll never see them again and he'll go bankrupt because he can't afford to maintain two houses & then he'll have to resort to bank robbery to support his 12 children and then he'll get caught & die horribly in a police shootout, which the kids will see on TV and be scarred for life". I *was* a cheater, so don't tell me about the shitty situations people find themselves in that make them justify cheating.
Seriously, I don't want to hear any more excuses. Sometimes people have really shitty situations. And I'm sorry for them. There are a lot of really terrible conditions out there like stoning & mutilation and famine & discrimination, but the solution isn't to retaliate - the solution is to stop the terrible conditions from happening.
Making a relationship agreement with someone, and then breaking it behind their back and continuing to exist in the relationship as if the agreement still stands is *wrong*. It might be the lesser of two wrongs, it might bring the cheater a sliver of happiness in an otherwise horrible existence, but it is still breaking an agreement, no matter how you slice it, and it is not the greater path of courage.
But I'm not actually here to talk about being a cheater. I'm here to rant about being the person a cheater cheats with. There's this fucking irritating trope in the poly community that says "It's not my job to police other people's relationships. He's an adult, he can make his own choices. Who am I to tell him what he should and shouldn't do? If he wants to cheat, that's his choice. I'm not doing anything wrong because *I* didn't make those relationship agreements, so I'm not breaking any."
Bullshit.
There are a lot of selfish attitudes in the poly community, mostly holdovers from The Monogamous Mindset, mostly having to do with Couple Privilege. This is one of the worst. This is all about "me". This is all about what the third person is getting, masked under a pious attitude about "choice", and maybe even under some superficial sympathy for the poor man (or woman, or whoever) who is trapped in such a loveless marriage that he needs to find some happiness somewhere or experiment with something his spouse won't do, and oh how convenient that I'm here to provide it! This is all about ducking responsibility for one's own actions - actions that harm another person, even if it's only their dignity that is harmed.
I've always said that the real test of being poly is not how many people you're fucking, but how you handle your partners fucking someone else. In my opinion, being a caring and compassionate metamour is a required element for being in a poly relationship. No, not being your metamours' BFF, but being *caring and compassionate*, regardless of how well you actually like each other and get along. Courage and integrity are nothing when it's easy - it's when it's difficult that they count. And you cannot stand there and say that you support, choose, or prefer, relationships based on honesty, trust, and communication (y'know, the foundations of polyamory and, for that matter "open" relationships) while simultaneously supporting lying, cheating, dishonesty, and non-consensual relationships.That wife (for the sake of simplicity, I'm sticking with pronouns specific to the situations I would find myself in if I were the "mistress" in the scenario - which means the cheater is male, his spouse is female, and the cheatee is female.), that wife did not consent to this arrangement. She could not have, since she doesn't know about it. And if she did know about it, she wouldn't. Whether she is being unreasonable or not is completely irrelevant ... SHE DID NOT CONSENT TO THIS ARRANGEMENT. That, by itself, makes my actions, as the mistress, wrong.
Sure, there can be levels of wrong, and there can be multiple wrong parties. Pilfering office supplies is not in the same league as, say, the Holocaust. I wouldn't give anyone the death penalty, or even jail time, for stealing a stapler or using the office copy machine for personal use. That does not erase the fact that willingly and deliberately engaging in a relationship that at least one person does not consent to is WRONG. I'm not making any statement at all on how "wrong" that wrong is, because there are too many variables and nuances and even perceptions, and we're talking about hypotheticals here, not any specific relationship. But a creek is small next to the Pacific Ocean, and if you step in either of them, you're gonna get wet. Wet is wet, whether you like being wet or not.
Now, let's skip past the pragmatic reasons why being the mistress is a bad idea. Let's just move right past the middle-of-the-night phone calls from the angry wife, the death threats, the lawsuits, the fact that, if he's caught, this new love of yours loses everything anyway, the fact that he has to hide you & can't acknowledge you, that you will always be "the dirty little secret", that you will never be able to fully share his life with him (maybe you don't want to, I dunno), that this is a setup pretty much designed for creating unnecessary drama.
Let's forget, for the moment, the time my PLATONIC friend's girlfriend tracked down my parent's phone number and started calling their house while I was there visiting, shrieking into the phone to "stay away from my man you fucking whore!" Let's pretend I never got a call at 3 in the morning, waking me and my then-boyfriend, from my one-time boss's fiancee demanding to know who I was and how her man got my phone number.
Let's dismiss the daily 5 AM phone calls from my then-boyfriend's EX-wife (who thought that giving him a couch to sleep on when he was out of work made him her property) demanding to know where he was, whether he was with me or not, and who only stopped calling when I reported her to the police for harassment & had my phone company block her number back when I had a landline.
Let's brush off the stories I have from 3, count them THREE coworkers and one ex-boyfriend's brother who all had either a girlfriend or an ex-girlfriend actually shoot at them for believing they were cheating (only 1 actually was - 2 of these guys actually married the women AFTER the shooting incident, but that's another rant). And let's especially ignore the young woman who showed up at my house with a stolen pickup truck and her daddy's shotgun to tell me that some guy I barely knew and wasn't interested in was "taken" (also, I grew up in a city in California, not a Kentucky farm town). Let's also ignore the fact that a person willing to cheat *with* me is more likely to excuse cheating *on* me if he feels justified.
Let's just say that we both agree there are some risks involved with being the mistress of a cheating husband.
I want to talk about character and integrity. Sure, the cheater is an adult. Sure, he can make his own choices. Sure, it's not my job to make sure he behaves. But that doesn't then give me license to engage in behaviour that a person who is affected by did not consent to.
As a polyamorous person, I believe that a good relationship requires honesty, consent, and communication. When I am someone's mistress, when I am a cheatee, that relationship is missing all three of those elements. I am engaging in a relationship, willfully and deliberately, that someone did not agree to, and would not agree to it if she knew. I am removing her personal sovereignty to make choices about how her life should look and I am robbing her of her dignity to live the life she chooses.
I am not acting out of compassion or consideration for another human being. That means that I am putting my own desires as priority *to the detriment of others*, which is the very definition of "selfish".
Some people have tried to defend this position by saying the poor guy is in a really bad situation. We feel sorry for him! We *are* being compassionate, because his life is just awful, so we're bringing him some joy. Back to those hypothetical extremes - the wife already broke the marriage contract, the wife is refusing him sex or a particular kind of sex, he loves his wife and doesn't want to hurt her but he can't help his love for you (or his desire for sex and your body will do), so he's doing the best he can in a difficult situation.
Bullshit.
I guarantee that the wife has a different perspective than the one he's selling you. Oh sure, he probably really does believe what he's telling you. Most people, I think, are not outright liars and frauds. I think, most of the time, these guys really do see themselves in difficult positions with no "good" options, only less-worse options. And I'm willing to bet that, most of the time, they're not *completely* wrong.
But I still guarantee that the wife *also* doesn't see herself as the bad guy in the situation. It's pretty much a human trait that we rarely ever see ourselves as "bad guys". Even Saddam Hussein & Osama Bin Laden probably really believed that they were good, honorable men, fighting for truth and justice. Even "bad guys" have people who love them, who see them as good people.
In fact, that's at least one reason why we have The Entrenchment Effect - giving people facts doesn't actually change their opinions, because the cognitive dissonance between their view of themselves as a "good person" and the fact that they were wrong about something makes people dig their heels in and believe even harder against the evidence so that they don't have to see themselves as "not good".
So no matter what sob story you want to tell me that he's sold you on, I know there is another side to that story, and no matter whose side I actually believe, I have some compassion for the wife who is being cheated on. It's really hard for people to put themselves in their metamour's position. That's why we have so many couples willing to use veto power & make rules restricting other people's behaviour. But we have to do it anyway, at least, we do if we want to be honest about being an ethical person.
Which makes all your claims of feeling "sympathy" for the poor cheater fall flat. Maybe the wife really is a horrible, evil bitch. But putting her into a relationship that she did not agree to, or violating her existing relationship agreements does not make you the white knight in the story. It makes you *both* bad guys. Maybe you're less of a bad guy than she is, but you just put someone in a relationship that they did not consent to and could not give informed consent to even if she was willing. We're supposed to arrest people for that.
But, even worse, maybe she's not a horrible, evil bitch. Maybe she's the kind of wife that the husband really loves, but who just doesn't share his interest in a particular kind of sex, so he has to go explore elsewhere. That's what a lot of poly people say to justify their complicity in a cheating partnership. Mono people will justify cheating with someone by the "the wife is a horrible person who trapped him" line, but poly people seem to be OK with the "his wife is actually a good person and he loves her, she just won't have sex with him and won't agree to an open marriage, so he has to get his needs met somehow."
Seriously? You really want to justify participation in a relationship that breaks the agreements of a woman who is good & kind & loving & worth keeping? She's wonderful enough that he doesn't want to leave her and *this* is the thanks she gets for being such a great wife? You have turned her life into a lie. She is not in the relationship she thinks she's in and YOU contributed to that. You have removed from this wonderful woman the right to make her own choice about her own relationships. You talk about his right to "choose", but what about hers? Is the freedom of choice only reserved for people who choose what happens to benefit you?
I care very deeply about not hurting that wife. I care that she is having her relationship agreement broken. As someone said in a Facebook thread recently, "Relationships are like webs, you can't just tug on one string and pretend you aren't affecting the others. And I'm not saying anything beyond that about what to do or not to do, just that I'm uncomfortable with the idea that 'ultimately it's their choice, not mine'. Because you are making a choice to get involved in the situation."
My involvement with a cheater affects his wife. I am complicit in breaking an agreement. I am agreeing to violate someone else's boundaries. We do not have to have made the agreement ourselves to be able to violate an agreement. I never "agreed" never to trespass on private property, yet climbing the fence with a "No Trespassing" sign on it puts me in violation.
In fact, we don't even have to have done an illegal act to be an accomplice or an accomplice after the fact, in the eyes of the law, as long as we know about it and don't try to stop it or report it to the authorities. We have a social contract that says "I won't do these things to you and you don't do these things to me" and that's how we all get along. I try not to do the sorts of things that I don't want people to do to me (like violate their agency), because I know how much it would hurt me, so I have empathy for the other people and I don't want to hurt them.
I don't have to try and "police" the husband's relationship agreements for him. He is a grown-up and he can make his own choices. But so am I. And I choose not to violate another human being's right to "choose" her own relationship. I choose not to participate in a relationship that removes the right of choice from someone else. I choose not to willingly infringe upon another's personal sovereignty or dignity. And I choose not to perform actions that lead a person into a non-consensual relationship.
I do not respect anyone who defends the position that it is ever morally or ethically "right" to do any of those things. The lesser of two wrongs is still wrong, not right. It just means that the situation is complicated and there may be no "right" answer. But if there is no "right" answer, that means that the cheating is still wrong. That some people might benefit (such as "bringing joy into a person stuck in a loveless marriage") does not overwrite that other people do not. That some people have complicated and difficult lives and I feel sympathy for them does not require participating in activities that harm someone else.
And if the defender is also polyamorous, is also a community leader or activist or "celebrity" espousing the values of polyamory as a valid and, especially as an "ethical" relationship choice, not only do I not respect that person, I also think she's a hypocrite. Since I've already heard all the defenses, continuing to defend that position only makes the defender look worse in my eyes.
If you want to talk about compassion & ethics, I'll start listening when that compassion & ethical behaviour gets extended to the metamours. As someone who *is* a metamour, I try not to treat my metamours with any less compassion than I expect in return. I may not always succeed, but that is the standard to which I hold myself. And violating their relationship agreements is not compassionate nor ethical.
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At that point we were communicating by letter since it was after I moved to Florida. You know how difficult it is to convey enough in print. This was at least two decades ago, and yet I still harbor a mistrust of her ethics because of it.
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Her defense is that it is not possible to break someone else's agreements and she holds to that position. This means that I couldn't trust her for anything, because unless I made her sign a legal agreement, she has free reign, in her mind, to do it if she wants to, since she never agreed not to.
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Also, an accomplice is as guilty as their partner who commits a crime. That's the law. It's also morally right - if you are aware of a wrong but you do or help do it anyway, you are just as guilty. Priests who cover up rape of children are as guilty of the crimes as those they protect. There's a comparison she wouldn't like... I hope!
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I can have sympathy for a person in a tough spot, because life is rarely a white-hat/black-hat spaghetti western. We all do things that are "wrong", and with the convoluted mess that is our legal system, I don't think it's even possible to never have broken a law. But my sympathy or understanding of a situation doesn't change it from being an action that was wrong - it wronged someone, and without some dire circumstances like "someone will die if I don't inconvenience someone else", saying "it's not MY job to police HIS relationship" just makes the other person untrustworthy, because who knows what other actions they'd be willing to take on the basis that it isn't their technical responsibility?
I really liked Tim Minchin's Pope song, especially for the line "If you cover for another mother fucker who's a kiddie fucker, fuck you, you're no better than the motherfucking rapist."
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The "well it's not MY relationship agreement" line just strikes me as selfish and uncaring, which, again, is contrary to the very fundamental points of being poly.
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I cannot trust someone who is willing to violate their agreements or facilitate someone else violating agreements of their own. I also could not remain in a loose don't ask don't tell relationship because it was too close to some of these points.. while I know at one level that all the relationship parts were _okay_ - and people were sincerely _okay_ with the arrangement - the fact that I couldn't openly enquire to each person, individually, to be reassured.. meant that it was not okay with me.
I also, honestly, have a hard time trusting former cheaters. It would never have been okay in my ethics to have cheated, by any justification. So, I don't understand how people were once able to justify those heinous actions for themselves.. nor understand the transformation that could allow them to behave ethically now?
While I understand that people can choose to be someone else and behave differently I have a hard time understanding that it was okay to them at some time and still see them as a trustworthy being now. What has really changed? Perhaps you could help me to understand that as I get to know you better.
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The problem is that it's hard to explain what's different without ending up, at least sounding like I'm justifying myself for when I used to cheat. And I just can't do that. I was wrong. Period. I can maybe try to tell you what was going through my head at the time, but 1) I was a teenager and 2) it's really just the standard cognitive dissonance that pretty much everyone goes through over something.
The entire reason I became poly in the first place was so that I wouldn't cheat or contribute to cheating anymore. I had decided I could no longer accept myself as a cheater so I swore off "relationships" and settled for casual sex, until the night I went on a date with a man who said I could have both freedom and commitment. I adopted polyamory in that single night.
I could go through the list of boyfriends I had when I was a teenager and tell you all the stupid things I did as a kid, but that would be a whole other post, and a long one at that. But I never once, even at the time, believed I was doing something "right". I always knew it was wrong and I did it anyway. My guilt drove me to give up committed relationships (as I didn't know I had any other option) rather than cheat again, because I didn't seem capable of abstaining. I just kept falling in love with new people before falling out of love with the old people. I had no relationship models for anything other than "meet in high school, get married, finish college, have kids, buy a house in the suburbs". I never knew anything other than that, even in books or movies, and I had no concept for having relationships any other way. But I was clearly not made for that sort of relationship.
I don't know how to explain how strongly I feel about this now, that I just can't bring myself to go back on my word. It has become a part of my identity that I am a person who does not do that. In fact, I continue to be told that I need to learn how to not be so brutally honest about my relationships, because apparently too many details makes some people uncomfortable. I've actually broken up with partners because they didn't want as many details as I wanted to share.
I can say that it has been more than 15 years since I cheated on anyone and that I wasn't yet legally allowed to drink alcohol. I think many people were very different people as children and things we rationalize to ourselves as kids do not necessarily even make sense to us as adults.
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(Anonymous) 2012-06-01 01:14 pm (UTC)(link)Ugh.
Seems she sought out poly guys because so many of them took the attitude you describe here.
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There is a reason why monos fear us. Well, there are many, but this one, unfortunately, has more truth to it than I am happy about. As far as I'm concerned, if I want anyone to respect my right to have relationships that I want to have, then I have to extend that respect back. I may not understand their choices, or even like them, but if they wish to be in a monogamous relationship, I have to respect that choice, or my demands for equal rights have no weight.
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(Anonymous) 2012-06-02 12:43 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
Also, sorry to hear about the above situation. It sucks, and I hate finding out after the fact like that.
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(Anonymous) 2012-06-13 07:18 pm (UTC)(link)Here's the real irony... she was demanding I give up my other partners & be with her exclusively because she "couldn't handle poly."
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On cheating (or collaborating with a cheater)
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I'm working hard on that tremendous character flaw.
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Standing up and cheering
(Anonymous) 2012-06-11 12:45 am (UTC)(link)Your article was posted on a poly forum in a thread about cheating. I'm a 'mono,' surprised by being invited into the poly world by a friend. I've done a lot of reading trying to make sense out of this new world I never expected. I have been impressed with the honesty and integrity with which my friend lives, regardless of the fact that he's living a lifestyle far outside my very traditional, conservative norm. I have often been impressed, likewise, with the honesty and integriy of those on the board.
However, I wonder if the irony goes over the heads of those who post defending being involved with a cheater, that they're also discussing, in another thread, 'poly's image problem.' Joreth, your post here is one that will elevate the image of the polyamorous lifestyle. Thank you for being a shining light for honor and doing the right thing.
Re: Standing up and cheering
It's very sad - if we don't like it when we get accused of being immoral, then we shouldn't behave immorally. That shouldn't be such a difficult concept to grasp.
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What about children? I feel that anything you have said applies to children. Children are affected by their parents' relationships, there is an unspoken agreement between children and parents that they won't have anyone outside the marriage, if and wen they learn about it they can go crazy, and knowing they have been lied to for years can be traumatising for them, and make them feel they have been living a lie, that they are a mockery, etc.
Does that mean one should never date someone whose children have not been told about the exact relationship? Or does it not apply to children, and if not, why? I mean, all the ideas you are talking about, about betrayal, respect, etc, they're obviously not about the sex or sexual exclusivity, they're about integrity, and not putting people in relationships they did not consent to. Children are in the relationships they parents are in (if they still live with them). Yes, it's indirect, but the exact same can be said of spouses. So, is it also unequivocally wrong do date a parent whose kid doesn't know? What are your thoughts on the issue?
I am not dating a cheater and have no plans in doing so, but I might date someone who has children, at some point down the line, and I am unsure how comfortable I am with it after reading your article.
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A child's relationship with his parent is, IMO, not dependent upon his parent's sex life unless his parent's sex life is directly impacting the child. For most children, we are completely unaware of the sex lives of our parents, and would probably be a bit uncomfortable, if not outright disturbed, if we were to learn certain details.
The relationship between child and parent is different than the relationship between consenting adults - first of all, the children aren't consenting from the very beginning, but second of all, they are not in a partnership (unless you stretch the definition of the term "partnership" to mean "other relationships that are not actually partners, such as those in authority and those they have authority over"), they are in a relationship with a very unequal distribution of power. If one wants to make the argument that romantic relationships can also be made up of two people where one has authority over the other - well, I'm not talking about those types of relationships and that would require a whole other journal entry for the complexity involved. I'm talking about just plain old polyamory - y'know, open, honest, ethical, and consensual multi-partner relationships. And cheating violates all of those principles regardless of any other justification one might come up with to excuse the cheating. So I'm bitching about the hypocrisy of people embracing a philosophy that explicitly includes those values while condoning cheating on the excuse of "it's not MY agreement we're breaking, so I'm not being bad".
What I might be concerned about regarding dating a parent is the idea that I would be forever a secret. Some might try to justify that position by taking my argument above that children don't need to know about their parents' sex lives and extending it to keeping a partner in the closet permanently. I'm not prepared to address that particular argument at that time, as it's another long & convoluted issue.
But, personally, I feel that my relationships suffer from secrecy, so I would not agree to date someone who is a parent if there was no hope of ever being introduced to the kids as "someone special" if the relationship turned in that direction. I know plenty of polys who are out to their kids and there aren't any problems there specific to having "anyone outside the marriage". There might be personality clashes or the same kinds of things that happen to single parents who marry/date, but nothing specific to poly.
But concern about a child's reaction to being lied to, especially long-term, is reason, IMO, for considering being open to one's children (in age-appropriate terms). So, while it's is appropriate, IMO, to not tell the children the details of the parents' sex lives and to not introduce partners early on in a relationship *as* partners, I also suggest that permanent secrecy is probably a bad idea in the long run, both for the health of the adult relationship and for the health of the relationship between the parent(s) and children specifically for dealing with those trust concerns you raise. In my opinion, the solution to avoiding traumatizing the children from learning about their parents' sex lives, going crazy, knowing they've been lied to for years, making them feel that they have been living a lie and are a mockery, etc., is not to avoid dating parents, but to avoid lying to the children in the first place.
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However, if starting a relationship with someone who is polyamorous but has always kept it from their kids because it's "none of their business", well as you said about not wanting to be hidden forever, I would have similar concerns. I guess it would depend on the specific situation but by the time I enter the picture, not lying to the children for years might not be an option if they have already been lied to for years.
Anyways, I certainly agree that the type of relationship is very different and wasn't saying they were the same thing, I simply started thinking about the issue after reading your article.