Too true. The kids (if you have good genes and actually bred smart, intuitive kids) know when the marriage isn't going well.
Now financial issues, that may be more of a gray area but it still comes down to keep your legs closed/dick in your pants.
And Klast --either answer with an answer or decline to answer, please.
Why did I do it? It's hard for me to put it in a way that doesn't make me look like a total asshole. I was hoping that a few more people would have copped to it so we could have a more wide ranging discussion about the subject. But the threat keeps getting derailed.
Anyway. Taking a good hard look at myself I would have to say it was because my willpower failed. It's not a good reason, but there is never a "Good Reason" In those situations I had the means and the opportunity and the motive. We were attracted to each other. We were alone with each other for a long period of time. In the first 3 instances I was young and dumb. But we are all dumb when we are young. we think that consequences apply a little less to us than to the rest of the world. I'm sure that if you talk to anyone in their mid thirties or older they will have stories of stupid things they did in their teens and early twenties that they would not do now.
In the last instance I was in my late twenties and was starting to be wiser and know better than to do dumb things. I was single, but she was not. We had been friends for years. We had even dated briefly a few years earlier. I justified it by thinking that it was her choice to cheat. That I was not the one doing anything wrong. But I was friends with her girlfriend. And it broke her heart when she found out she had been cheated on. She called me in tears and berated me and called me an asshole for doing that to her. And she was right.
Now I'm in my late thirties. I'm Married. These things count for a lot. I have a more developed sense of consequences and a greater commitment. And yet I know that the potential still lurks within me. I still find myself attracted to other women. I have not plans to ever cheat again, but I also know that to keep that commitment I need to make sure i don't get in to situations where my willpower might fail me again. That means not getting drunk with other women I'm attracted to when there is no one else around, etc. Because I know my willpower is not perfect when I have been drinking. I quit smoking 2 years ago, but I smoked on the 4th of July when I got drunk at a party. I have been dieting for a year, but I crack and eat food I shouldn't every few weeks. Some nights I stay up too late when I have to work in the morning. Sometimes I speed when I know I already got 3 speeding tickets in the last few years.
Sometimes I do things that are not in my own best self interest. There is no good excuse for it.
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
Klast Brell wrote:
Sometimes I do things that are not in my own best self interest. There is no good excuse for it.
That right there is the reason you cheat. You only see it from your eyes, what's in your best interest. You can't see it from theirs. I guess you haven't developed a strong sense of empathy yet.
For as wise as you think you are becoming, you can't recognize the self-absorbed narcissism in yourself.
Correction Mr. President, I DID build this, and please give Lurker a hug, we wouldn't want to damage his self-esteem.
Ok Klast I'll bite. I wasn't faithful. I have my reasons, and at the time retaliation wasn't one of them, however when your husband tells you on the phone one day when you're 19 and pregnant (and separated) that he "i have to go and fuck my girlfriend, don't' call again" and said girl tells a friend of yours, (not knowing that she IS a friend of yours) that she's sleeping with this totally hot, 19 year old married guy... well lets say it sticks with you for awhile. Then when your husband is deployed and some slut you've sorta known calls you up out of the blue and tells you "i feel so guilty i just needed to tell you... those times when your husband came over to fix my car ? I fucked him... at my house, while you were at home..." that kinda tends to stick with you as well. I never mentioned the latter to him, or didn't intend to until I ended up in tears one very late night over something totally unrelated while he as home on R&R from Iraq.
He didn't push me to it, but he did push me away repeatedly. Partly I got married way too young to someone who was way too young, and we had kids. We grew up together, with someone else who was growing up. I had certain expectations of marriage... like him not being on the phone when i was pushing with our daughter, and that he'd come inside to eat dinner with me and the kids and not be working on someones car... for no money... every night. And I know he was just downstairs, but i was upstairs. I spent more hours in the garage, and the shop then i spent at home, just so he'd look at me, and talk to me, and spend some time with me. and when i asked him to come home, and he didn't... he wonders why i played EQ when i had friends, people who i could talk to, who were nice to me, whom i confided in.
Thats a whole long story i suppose but it's not the point. I admitted my affairs, and instead of talking about it, screaming about it, trying to work it out, or insisting on a divorce... he ignored it. He wanted to pretend nothing happened, and I needed more then that. I was too hurt to do anything more then leave, to realize that i'd never have a life WITH him, but i'd be living a life that he was in and I wanted more. Karma's a bitch of course, because the person I cared about cheated on me, knocked up someone else and married her because of the pregnancy, and the next guy i married (while the marriage was a mistake, for sure, thats not the point either) he was sleeping with someone else the whole time, and didn't even have the balls to admit it, even when i walked in on them, caught him red handed... and almost caught him more then a few other times.
The only person i ever did cheat on was my husband. Maybe thats not fair since I dated so few people either before or after him, but lets say lesson learned. I didn't cheat on him for sexual gratification, i cheated on him because i needed someone to want me, to need me and instead of being responsible enough to leave and stay gone, i made mistakes. I don't regret my mistakes because it would serve no point at this time in my life, and I don't hate him, but he hasn't let it go. I think on all levels he blames his entire current life (including his second deployment and his new wife and the fact he's now back at home living with his parents) on me and my choices... but everything is a 2 way street. We could have worked through things, but neither of us would have trusted each other again. I forgave, when i knew it was wrong, when he was wrong, i forgave and I tried to forget, but trust isn't rebuilt overnight.
Edwards has his own reasons, but yes when you tout yourself as a moral, upstanding citizen and your entire life is built on a certain image then you should WANT certain things in your life to measure up to that image. If you don't love your wife, then leave her, don't sleep around on her, don't hire some hooker, and don't think that discreet is ok.
The point is I'm no angel, but I learned my lessons, and I'd tell anyone who was thinking about cheating that they were wrong. however I've also opened myself up in subsequent relationships and admitted my wrongdoings. And no one had to know, i never had to tell the next guys why my marriage broke up, cause doesn't that give them cause to suspect me right off the bat ? Check up on me all you want, i have nothing to hide, but i guess thats the way all people should live their lives. Either fess up to your dirty secrets, or don't have any.
Klast Brell wrote:
Sometimes I do things that are not in my own best self interest. There is no good excuse for it.
That right there is the reason you cheat. You only see it from your eyes, what's in your best interest. You can't see it from theirs. I guess you haven't developed a strong sense of empathy yet.
For as wise as you think you are becoming, you can't recognize the self-absorbed narcissism in yourself.
What a perfect combination of failing to understand what you quoted, and being a dick. Is there a prize for that?
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
Klast, just out of curiosity, why are you married? It seems to me that if you have to go to the trouble of avoiding women in certain situations, you don't believe very heavily in the whole monogamy thing to begin with.
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Taxious:
Oh I do believe in monogamy. But I also know I'm not perfect. I have my flaws and I do what I can to prevent them.
So how about you Tax? Are you chucking stones in glass houses? Of have you been perfectly faithful in every relationship you ever had?
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
I've been completely faithful in every relationship I've been in, including ones with girls.
I realize this all comes off as sanctimonious, but what is so hard about being honest? If you have told someone that you will be faithful to them, don't screw other people. If you start feeling the temptation to sleep with other people, break it off with your partner and indulge all you want. I am young and have a lot to learn, but I do know not to treat others like shit.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
You clearly have no idea what infidelity means to another person. If you did, and you were even half-human, if you ever had to go through it, you'd never be tempted to do to another person what was done to you.
Correction Mr. President, I DID build this, and please give Lurker a hug, we wouldn't want to damage his self-esteem.
I think loyalty to another person in a relationship is more about respect and character. If you don't truly respect that person, I think it's easier to cheat on them. If you are a very narcissistic or selfish person, you are going to be more prone to cheating. I see that in a lot relationships where sleeping around is involved. The other person just doesn't truly respect the other or they are too narcissistic and selfish to ever put someone else before themselves. I don't buy into people being weak or helpless to it, I think it's a moral choice that we make just like anything else. There are some lines you won't cross because it's wrong. Like finding someone's wallet with a lot of cash in it, some people in a moment of weakness would keep the cash. I'm not a saint, but I'm someone that has turned in the wallet. How I think about it is this - how do I know that losing this cash isn't going to really affect or hurt them. I don't want that on my conscience.
If Catholicism has it's negatives, one positive is that you feel guilty about how your actions affect others. At least that is something I came away from it with.
You clearly have no idea what infidelity means to another person. If you did, and you were even half-human, if you ever had to go through it, you'd never be tempted to do to another person what was done to you.
Embar Angylwrath wrote: Here's the dirt on me. I think when I was 18-19 or so I had a girlfriend of a few months and slept with someone else.
I'll take hypocrites for $100 Alex.
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
I fully admit that when I did that, I was full of myself, narcissistic, self-absorbed and shallow.
But I learned from what I did. That's the differernce between you and me. I did it once, and I own it, and make no excuses. You, however, have established a pattern, and blame it on will-power, which is bullshit.
Correction Mr. President, I DID build this, and please give Lurker a hug, we wouldn't want to damage his self-esteem.
I am young and have a lot to learn, but I do know not to treat others like shit.
Thank you.
Being young isn't an excuse for cheating. Tax is young, I'm young, others are young and know better.
Why did I do it? It's hard for me to put it in a way that doesn't make me look like a total asshole.
There is no way to put it that doesn't make you look like a total asshole. It's an asshole thing to do. One of the worst things you can do to a partner who thinks the relationship is supposed to be monogamous. I don't know why people try to soften the blow. It's not how the information is presented (other than being caught red-handed) it's the act itself that gets to people. When people try to soften the information, (to me) it feels like they don't fully grasp what they did.
my willpower failed. It's not a good reason, but there is never a "Good Reason" In those situations I had the means and the opportunity and the motive. We were attracted to each other. We were alone with each other for a long period of time.
I'm not looking for a "Good Reason" because there is none. I'm looking for true reasons and reasons that make sense... or at least reasons where the person realizes exactly what they were doing.
Being alone and being attracted doesn't make sense to me. I've been so many places 2am, 3am, 4am with guy friends and guy acquaintances who were attracted to me, and I attracted to them. Alone. Something easily could have happened, but it never does when I'm in a relationship. I don't see why it's so hard to resist. I look at the other guy and I think about the current person I'm with, what I love about them and what I miss about them that the person in front of me lacks.
One thing I will say about cheating spouses--not specifically Edwards--is that there seems to be an awful lot of "dropping the ball" between married couples. Of married female friends who find out their husband was cheating, I usually want to ask them: "When's the last time you had good sex?" "When's the last time you had a conversation that didn't end with you being a hellacious bitch?" I'm not trying to suggest it's the other partner's fault when a spouse cheats, but it's often a two way street. Of some interest to me is the double standard applied to men versus women who cheat: if a man does it, he's a horrible bastard but if a woman does it, she's often "driven to do it" by her "uncaring husband". Blah.
Either you are going out of your way to be a stereotypical guy, or you really buy into that shit. If a man is too big of a pussy to have a, "let's have some good sex again, or I walk" conversation with his wife, then maybe he wouldn't be going around sniffing for something else. It's simple, if he wants to get sex and isn't getting it at home AND his wife is a hellacious bitch then how about he get a big fat separation before he goes fucking his secretary? Is he too retarded to make that choice? Or too big of a coward to say, "honey, I'm done unless we get some serious sex therapy here."
If a woman does it, she's equally as moronic. I see no better or worse here depending on the gender. If you can't talk to your spouse about sex, if you argue all the time and don't get past it, get a goddamned divorce, and keep your pants on until you are legally separated. Most guys that I know that CLAIM to be "driven to having an affair" gasp at the thought of actually bringing it up to their wives, or can't leave "because of the kids." Bullshit. All of it. Same for women.
If a guy had balls, he would just say, "yes I fucked someone else while I was married. I was an inconsiderate asshole." Not, "Oh, poor me, my wife never puts out and I'm too big of a pussy to actually try and fix the problem or move on."
I'm not suggesting I agree with what happens, I am only writing what I have seen happen to other relationships. Why people are so adament about the fidelity part of the vows and think it's acceptable to completely blow off everything else, and then are suprised they are cheated on astounds me.
I agree that the "for the kids" excuse is bullshit. Showing children you, as a parent, have the strength to leave a deteriorating relationship is far better than staying and teaching them it's OK to be miserable, or worse, make them feel responsible for it as "the kid".
Thanks Alu, I can see where my writing leads one way instead of the other.
I can't find statistics per state at the moment for why people get divorced, but something interesting I did find, as with most other behavior that warrents a Nelson laugh (fucking children, wide-stances, spousal abuse, etc) the divorce rate in general is higher in the Bible Belt.
From this article, which is a defense of the phrase "Massachusetts liberal":
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that "the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
How to explain these differences? The following factors provide a partial answer:
More couples in the South enter their first marriage at a younger age.
Average household incomes are lower in the South.
Southern states have a lower percentage of Roman Catholics, "a denomination that does not recognize divorce." Barna's study showed that 21 percent of Catholics had been divorced, compared with 29 percent of Baptists.
Education. Massachusetts has about the highest rate of education in the country, with 85 percent completing high school. For Texas the rate is 76 percent. One third of Massachusetts residents have completed college, compared with 23 percent of Texans, and the other Northeast states are right behind Massachusetts.
This ties into a problem I have with abstience only education. I suspect in some households where infidelity occurs, there is simply no discussion of sex other than missionary, lights off, with your socks on sex. Again, it's anecdotal, but we know that some of the main reasons people get divorced are money problems and "other conflict", which, depending on the length of the marrage usually means you fight all the time and have problems communicating, or for longer relationships, you grew apart and no longer experience the same kinds of intimacy, which sex is arguably a part of.
This "wait until your married" garbage is only going to make things like adultry worse, when what conservatives should be pushing is that sex should be experienced with intimacy.
Klast Brell wrote:I justified it by thinking that it was her choice to cheat. That I was not the one doing anything wrong. But I was friends with her girlfriend.
Girl just needed a nice hard cock... whats so wrong with that?
Taxious wrote:Klast, just out of curiosity, why are you married? It seems to me that if you have to go to the trouble of avoiding women in certain situations, you don't believe very heavily in the whole monogamy thing to begin with.
Nonsense. That's like saying if I have to go to the trouble of avoiding the candy aisle in the store, that I don't believe very heavily in the whole dieting thing.
Well, it’s the Super-Monroe Doctrine: “Get off our oil, people who dress funny!” - M. Bouffant
"You're a bad captain, Zarde. People like you only learn by being touched, and hard. And you will greatly disapprove of where these men put their hands." - M. Vanderbeam.
Taxious wrote:Klast, just out of curiosity, why are you married? It seems to me that if you have to go to the trouble of avoiding women in certain situations, you don't believe very heavily in the whole monogamy thing to begin with.
Nonsense. That's like saying if I have to go to the trouble of avoiding the candy aisle in the store, that I don't believe very heavily in the whole dieting thing.
It appears you don't get it either, Partha.
If you're on a diet, and you "cheat" on that diet, the only person you're fucking over is the person that has 100% say in whether or not they want to get fucked over. In essences, you agree with yourself to fuck yourself over. There's a communication of the choice before hand, and an agreement. A choice was considered, and made by all invovled parties (a party of one).
In infidelity, one person betrays and fucks over another person, without the knowledge or consent of the other person. If you think it's as easy as choosing candy, I wonder what the result would have been had Klast, or anyone else who committed adultery, had the balls to ask their partner if it was ok to engage in the behaviour they were about to engage in. Would it have been as easy to ask their partner if they could have a cnady bar? Is it that easy Partha? To you, is infidelity reduced to the same level and consequence of choosing a Snickers over a piece of celery? Idiot.
Correction Mr. President, I DID build this, and please give Lurker a hug, we wouldn't want to damage his self-esteem.
