Carpe Lanam - Seize the Wool

No knitting here.

I was pointed to this blog post today.  In short, it talks about how pretty much everybody these days knows someone who has been cheated on by their partner, or has been cheated on themselves, and has had their heart broken when they were expecting to be in a committed, monogamous relationship.  And it sucks.

It seems that in the dating world, there are are only three types of people (with a few exceptions, of course): 1. People who innocently expect a monogamous relationship and are blind to the possibility that their partner would ever want to stray.  These are people who invariably wind up hurt at some point.  2.  People who want to stray, and who never seriously intend to stay committed, because if they seriously intended to not cheat, then they simply wouldn’t – it’s really not that hard to not stick your dick in someone else, as that involves quite a lot of activity.  Those are the people who invariably hurt others.  And 3. People who are clingy, possessive, distrustful, paranoid, and desperate, those who want a monogamous relationship but cannot trust that in this day, their partner won’t up and cheat on them.  These are the people who both end up hurt because they invite people to mistreat them, AND hurt others, the ones who truly deserve to be trusted, who prove that they’re trustworthy, who intend nothing but good.

Prior to meeting each other, both my husband and I were in long-term relationships with people (he was married, I was not) who ended up cheating on us, lying about it, being confronted about it, denying it, shown the proof about it, still denying it, lying about it, finally admitting it and trying to justify it, then winding up breaking off the relationship with us when we sought to try to mend the relationship and whatever was wrong that led them to cheat.  We are both serious monogamists, and we are serious about making our relationship work. Does it mean there will never be anyone else who seems interesting, ever?  No, but it does mean that we believe we will still love each other, and that we made a promise to always stay together, and we intend to keep that promise, and we also promise that if there’s anything at all wrong, we will work extremely hard to fix whatever’s wrong, rather than giving up and “quitting” the marriage.  As things are, anytime we have a disagreement, we can’t just let it fester – we work through it, don’t just argue about the issue, and figure out what’s really wrong, what’s causing us to argue or causing there to be an issue, and we work on THAT.  We’ve learned a lot about each other, and we don’t tend to have repeat arguments.

And we both firmly believe we’ll stay together.

But how many couples do?  Not many.  The divorce statistics are staggering.  And if someone were to do statistics on how long people stay in relationships, or how many partners people have in their lives, or how many partners people have as compared to how many committed relationships they have… I’m sure those results would be equally disgusting.  There’s nothing wrong with going on a date or two with someone to see if you like one another, there’s not even really anything wrong with doing what you like so long as you’re both unattached with no one relying on you (and that includes kids) or expecting your affections to be theirs alone.

But when you’re actually in a relationship with someone, the expectation is generally exclusivity.  It shouldn’t have to be spelled out.  That’s actually the excuse my ex used as his defense – he said we never explicitly said, in our 8 years of involvement, that we were going to be exclusive.  I kinda figured it was assumed to be the case.  Most people assume that.  Except the people who just want an excuse to cheat.

People suck.  But there are some people who do have solid morals, and who can trust.  And while those people are out there, I believe there is still hope for our future generations, and hope for the rest of our race.