Laughing at the hypocrisy

There was a great article about a polyamorous triad in the Boston Globe back on January 3, 2010 titled Love’s New Frontier, and of course the requisite comments from the morality police with nothing more to do all day than post to news sites.   All but one, spouting their own stories of perfect marriages and monogamy and how their God will strike everyone dead who doesn’t believe as they personally believe.

I’m beyond fighting them right now.  I’m well into laughing at them.  Big, ruckus belly laughs.

See, they’re hypocrites.  Or maybe they just have their head buried so far in their own piousness or religious books that they don’t even see what is going on around them, or acknowledge or justify in some sick manner their own behavior.

Is this unusual?  No.  We all know public figures – celebrities, politicians, athletes, etc. –  who talk monogamy and family values and paint a Norman Rockwell vision of their perfect life with their perfect spouse and children, yet they don’t don’t walk the talk they feed us.

Estimates of how many people cheat are all over the board, from 30% of women and 40% of men, to upward of 60% for both.  In a 2007 MSNBC poll: Many cheat for a thrill, more stay true for love, nearly 50% of over 70,000 respondents admit to having cheated during their life and 22% had cheated on their current partner.  I emphasis “admit” because even in anonymous online polls many still don’t tell the truth or don’t admit to themselves that they were cheating because of whatever reasoning they conjure up.

By looking at these statistics we can speculate that at least 50% of all relationships experience cheating by at least one member of the couple.

So when I read these sanctimonious comments to articles on polyamory, swinging and other alternative relationship styles I have to laugh out loud, because I know that at least half of the people writing them either think their partner has been 100% faithful or are not admitting that they themselves have not been faithful, but put-up the front of being so and judging others.

People’s hypocrisy knows no limits.

Pondering the Monogamist Mindset

Again recently I have had to sit back and think to myself why many monogamists think as they do.  Try to understand what make them tick and what makes them think I am weird or “wrong” and their way is normal or “right”.  What happened to make me ruminate like this was a woman.  Yes, the thing that makes many men think for a moment, touch themselves, then turn-on SPEED Network to watch monster trucks.  But what really got me today was a woman I know who is a single mom of three, works two jobs and who I’ve been good friends with for months now, told me that I “need to take a step back because all this was just getting to weird.”

Now she knows that I’m in an open relationship.  We’ve also talked of our mutual attraction and that as other women have said:  she’d love to have a relationship with me, but she’d just be putting time into someone else’s husband.  Which I can respect if getting married is the be-all-end-all of her existence right now.   So all this is nothing of a surprise.

So what spurred that response from her?  Lucretia MacEvil invited her to dinner, with her children, since her middle daughter is the same age as our youngest daughter and they would probably get along fabulously.  To her, this just seemed too strange.  The wife of a man who she’s attracted to is inviting her to break bread with her, not kill her.  She really couldn’t wrap her brain around that.  In fact she even said to me: “Doesn’t that just seem a bit strange to you?  To normal people it is.”

What seems strange to me though, is that for over a year she was dating a married man who was cheating on his wife, and one of her children is the result of that relationship.  Of course, he never left his wife and has no contact with her, or his child today.

So dating a married man who is cheating on his wife is not weird, however dating a married man who is honest with his wife and who’s wife would like to meet her and feed her and get to know her because her husband likes her, is weird.

Dating a cheating husband: Good

Dating a husband in an open and honest relationship: Bad

As mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve seen this with men, too.  Many men want to have something with Lucretia, however they don’t want to meet me, her husband.

Fucking a married, cheating woman: Good

Fucking a married woman with her husband’s permission and knowledge: Just fucking freaky

So to many monogamists cheating is “normal” whereas honesty is not.  Or at least that is how it seems.  Cheating is expected, if not acceptable, but an honest open relationship is not.  It’s okay to have sex with other people besides your spouse as long as your spouse doesn’t know about it, but it’s just wrong to do it if your spouse knows about it and consents willingly to it.  Of course they will tell you that’s not the case, that they don’t approve of it, but the numbers that do it (by all reasonable estimates 50% to 70% of all marriages experience cheating) show that their actions in no way support their words.

Just another reason why it’s very difficult, if not downright impossible to make a monogamist into a polyamorist.