#ControversialTakes: Making a case for infidelity: Arguments for Cheating - Part 2

The first in this two part series saw us lay out the central case for why most find cheating so objectionable. This part will see if this case holds to scrutiny. To summarize the objections put forth: the feelings of inadequacy that will inevitably be forced upon your partner and how this may exacerbate their mental health, the irredeemable sin of breaching the faith your partner has in you, the prospect of diseases and if you're religious the incompatibility of cheating with holy scripture. Let's deal with them one at a time.
What does it mean to make your partner feel inadequate? And why are these feelings of inadequacy triggered? A relationship or a marriage entails (unless in an open one) a promise to exclusivity - both physically and emotionally. In other words the people to a relationship will turn to no one else than each other to gratify their physical and emotional needs. Now there may be something that may be going through the back of your mind: Is such a promise ever reasonable? The oath to exclusivity presupposes that your partner is and will always be capable of perfectly meeting your physical and emotional needs and therefore the occasion of you having to get your needs met elsewhere i.e beyond the confines of your relationship will never arise. This is essentially what you and your partner sell each other on (weather you consciously recognize it or don't) when entering into an relationship demarcated by exclusivity. It is needless to say that this implicit guarantee to perfectly gratify your partner sexually and emotionally for the rest of their time with you is patently and utterly derisory and delusional. It is a guarantee to be hyper-adequate; a claim to be greater than the sum of your own parts. It is an impossible claim to be able to meet with perfection your partner's emotional needs because it presupposes you to be perfectly attuned to their emotions. It is an impossible claim to be able to meet with perfection your partner's sexual needs because it presupposes you are privy to and the most competent person they'll ever meet to gratify with perfection the full range of their sexual fantasies. When it eventually and inevitably dawns upon them that they have been sold on a grotesque untruth - when they find from you no emotional resonance to the degree they seek, when they find themselves sexually underwhelmed - they can only be called rational to seek to have their needs met elsewhere. If it is interpreted as a signal that their partner was deficient or inadequate then yes - they indeed were inadequate and fell terribly short of filling shoes too large for them. And so the wiser alternative to blaming them for cheating would be to accept the reality check and rid yourself of those self-delusions you've entertained so far. Confronting one's own flaws and limitations can be an excruciating process, but if one seeks personal growth then it would be counterproductive to overestimate our own capabilities and denounce those holding up a mirror to our face. Is it truly the case your partner 'cheated' so to speak or is it that you have been cheating yourself this whole time and are now incapable of confronting the truth? The notion of being unfaithful being wrong for this reason is therefore demonstrably hollow and to claim that your partner made a mockery of your faith in them is essentially saying you trusted them to not revolt once they realised they had been sold on a terrible lie and that they did so is a worse reflection on them than it is on you.
Now we turn to the claim that infidelity is unacceptable as it puts your partner at risk of STD's. This objection is rather quickly refuted as a closer look reveals that the objection is not with the act of cheating per se but with the prospect of sexually transmitted diseases. In other words the person making this argument would have no axe ro grind with cheating if extra marital sex is engaged in with people who are not infected and therefore no danger can come from this to the person being cheated on. Finally, what about the religious person preaching from their divinely inspired scripture citing it's injunctions against infidelity? One note of interest concerning these divine injunctions is they overwhelmingly condemn women more then men about being disloyal to one's partner. If in the 21st century we accept the basic premise of feminism is to pay the same amount of consideration to both genders' interests we would be obligated to not treat standards which marginalize the interests of one gender in favor of the other with any seriousness. If you don't accept feminism then the burden of proof that the God of your religion indeed exists and that his words be taken seriously lies on you.
P.S. - Upon going over some of my arguments with a friend they came over to my side of the argument after some expected initial resistance. However they had one retort that I'd like to quickly address. It is this that even though it may be so that there is no fault with the act of cheating, it would still be preferable to file for divorce instead. To this I respond as simply as while this may indeed be the case, it still does nothing to disrupt the case I have made for infidelity because it already concedes that there is nothing morally wrong with the action and instead only tries to wriggle away from the central point of the argument by talking of what may be more preferable.
In the end I'd just like to conclude by saying I hope I have managed at the least to give the reader something to ruminate on and gotten them to consider things they hadn't before.