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?
If you are really interested in learning more about infidelity I would suggest you read / listen to Dan Savages’s columns / podcast. Unsurprisingly there are a lot of different calls and discussions about fidelity and monogamy. I would also suggest you read Ester Perel groundbreaking novel The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity
To answer your question directly infidelities are fairly common because monogamy is difficult and society typically puts a lot of stress and pressure on monogamy that makes it even more difficult. The foremost is the idea that monogamy as a default setting and that one person can be everything for one person sexually, emotionally etc… So we have a situation where two people are assuming that their partner will be the only person they can be attracted to, the one person that can fulfill all their emotional needs and will have to be a perfect roommate / life mate. This coupled with the idea that you have to be perfect at monogamy or you are a complete failure at it. So you have a hard situation and hard expectations so people slip and some people who slip on something small (a micro-cheating which is a ridiculous concept) they go all the way. All these expectations are common in “Straight-land” while those in “queer-land” have a different set of expectation that work better for everyone.
We should all make monogamy an regular opt-in conversation for relationships (I would suggest ~6 months in when you go exclusive and then at most every 5 years). Moreover, we should understand our monogamist partner finds other people attractive and chooses to not pursue anything not that they don’t find anyone else attractive. Finally, we should understand a our partner needs friends, hobbies and confidant who are not us to rely on. Until that happens “cheating” will likely remain something that happens fairly regularity