#ControversialTakes: Making a case for infidelity : Arguments for Cheating - Part 1

Before I even begin writing I suspect the reader may already be attributing certain motives to me (whether consciously or subconsciously) writing this essay. I extend neither blame nor judgment to them for doing so. I'd be doing much the same, perhaps worse, if someone turned up challenging a core personal belief of mine that not only is closely intertwined with my sense of morality (of what is right and what is wrong) but also has behind itself the weight of centuries of societal backing. To this concern I beseech the reader for a few moments to dispassionately indulge in the ideas that I will present in the following passages and hold back the impulse to label me a degenerate or worse an agent for mass social upheaval. My aim has been simply to reexamine certain unchallenged positions, that appear to be universally held, without any motivated reasoning. I let my inquiry into views on infidelity lead me where it may and reached uncomfortable frontiers that so far I have been unable to annex to the lands of formerly held belief - that infidelity is unacceptably wrong. Allow me to proceed now with my case that in fact the opposite is true and has always been true.
Infidelity or the act of disloyalty to one's partner has been unanimously condemned and for all of history too it would seem. Religious texts have echoed and led the anti-infidelity stances of each other and those informed by these texts have upheld their teachings. Even in modern times with the rise of atheism and the gradual fading away of fundamentalism and orthodox adherence to religious teachings, the reflexive disgust to cheating remains. The notion is after all still popularly portrayed in films, stories and songs as the cardinal sin one could commit against another person bar maybe rape or murder. When one is bombarded with the same message from all sides and corners they will with very few exceptions end up adopting and internalizing the message. Here I layer the first wave of my attack, that this stance on being unfaithful therefore is not one that has been arrived at through any rational or careful means of inquiry, but rather one that has been implanted into minds through societal norms of the past that have persisted through to the present. If you were to ask few random persons, why they believed that cheating is always wrong you'll probably be first met with a gasp and stare of sheer disbelief. The question itself is so stupefying to most that they need a few moments to recover from the initial shock before verbally responding. Once they do you'd probably hear something like 'Cheating is wrong because its wrong' implying it were obviously and self-evidently wrong. That's not at all how it appears to me, let me tell you, but what we can reasonably conclude from this reaction and non-answer is that this is then indeed a subject they have not thought about before. If they had, the question wouldn't have struck them so senseless and they would instead have coherent answers rolling off their tounges. If you then push them for a better response, once they have had a chance to recompose themselves, you'll probably recieve an anecdote where a person cheated on them or someone they knew and how this incident crushed them emotionally or led them to developing trust issues. I wholeheartedly sympathize with this claim. Getting cheated on can indeed be an extremely painful and a distrssing experience to go through. For once you may say that pop culture descriptions of what it's like to cheated on are fairly on the nose. Having your heart torn out of your chest and having the floor disappear from underneath you plunging you into the deepest, darkest of chasms from which there maybe no escape may seem like a hyperbolic account of how it feels but nonetheless is strangely accurate. Here it would be fair to raise the question then that why is it that being cheated on triggers these feelings? There are numerous things at play here, but at its essence an act of being unfaithful signals to your partner that they are inadequate in all sorts of ways and this in turn can land a crushing blow on their sense of self and self-confidence. Then there are additional objections that are layered on top such as cheating being analogous to a betrayal of trust and that the unfaithful person in a relationship places their partner in jeopardy of sexually transmitted diseases.
So far I have laid out the case presented by most people for decrying being unfaithful. My next task - in the following part in this pair of essays - will be to demonstrate that this case does not hold up to reason. I hope that you'll join me in the finale of my quest to rethink infidelity.

[Continued in Part 2...]