Posts Tagged ‘cheating’

Cheating

Monday, March 19th, 2012 | Thoughts

I had an interesting experience at this month’s Wendy House.

A girl, who as far as I could tell, nobody knew, joined our circle on the dance floor and began dancing with us. More specifically, she seemed to be dancing and making eyes at, me. I thought I was just imagining it at first, but two of my friends later independently joked to me “I think you’ve pulled”, so I wasn’t the only one thinking that.

I’m in a long term relationship so I couldn’t do anything. Or could I?

I could have totally misread the situation – maybe she was just being friendly, maybe she was friends with someone in our circle, maybe she was even friends with me and I didn’t recognise her (because that did happen last month, sorry Charlotte!). But she apparently walked off as soon as I went to get a drink so I’m just going to asume I was correct, as the exact truth is irrelevant to this blog post.

In these situations, you have to do the maths. Well, you don’t have to, you could just reject the idea out of a blind policy that you’re in a relationship and that is the end of that, but if that is your line of thinking, how do you actually know that you want to be in the relationship and are not just sticking with it out of blind faith? It’s a rhetorical question; you don’t.

So I did the maths. On the pros list – if I did make a move and she was into me, we could go off and have a bit of a dance, a hug and a kiss. That’s always good. On the cons side, I would have broken the trust of the person I love most in the world and potentially ruined a hopefully lifelong relationship.

Obviously, the cons outweigh the pros. It never scares me to do the maths because I always know that is is going to come down on that side – Elina is always going to win, unless our relationship hat deteriorated into a state where neither of us wanted to be in it, and that certainly isn’t on the horizon (I hope lol…).

But the problem with this method of thought process is just that – it involves a lot of thinking. You have to make a rational decision and reject the instant gratification in favour of the greater long-term payoff.

Both engaging rational thought on the subject and being able to restrain myself for the long-term payoff are not something that I personally particularly struggle with. But I can’t imagine that is the same for everyone.

Compound on that the fact that most people are severely intoxicated when they commit such acts of infidelity and suddenly you’re on very rocky grounds for decision making.

I wrote about a similar issue back in December when I commented that the lack of protection used during one night stands is not acceptable, but is perhaps understandable.

The chances are that a lot of people don’t put quite so much rational thought into their actions or have the self-control to wait for the long-term payoff. As a result, is it any wonder that some people do end up making silly decisions and cheat on their partner? Not acceptable, but perhaps understandable.