My mother was always very liberal about my reading. She let me read whatever I wanted to read as I was growing up. Sometimes I went to buy my books. Other times I looked at her shelves and read whatever I wanted. That’s how I remember the book, Beloved Infidel, written by a lady (whose name I cannot remember) who became the girlfriend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, while his wife, Zelda, was in the sanitarium. He loved his wife, yes, but he also loved his girlfriend. I read that book when I was around 13. It became my introduction to the puzzle called infidelity.
There are many points of view on infidelity. Wives hate it but it continues to hound many marriages. There is a wife then later she discovers her husband has another woman with whom he also has children. It upsets her but what can she do about it? Some women decide to visit and live with grown-up children abroad. They get away from their offensive husbands without saying anything. They hardly return. Some women just suffer because they have no other source of income except their husbands. They just manage a modus vivendi — in other words, wife tells husband so long as you do what I want you to do when I want you to do it, you may do whatever you want with yourself in between.
Or there are a few women — I among them — who find the whole infidelity issue unacceptable. “If you expect me to take your infidelity with grace, will you take my infidelity with as much grace?” We ask. Of course the answer is no, never. The arguments brought out are those of religion. Thou shalt not commit adultery. But, the wife points out, you did. You committed adultery and you expect me to forgive you? Well, I am a man. We are weaker. You are a woman. You are stronger. You are my wife. I love you. Then she asks, why do you treat me like forgettable furniture? Why do you take me for granted? What has become of us?
You marry in a romantic state. When a marriage grows stale, romance has gone out the window. Maybe you love but you are no longer in love. It is the addition of that simple preposition in to the word love that adds the magic. We are in love with full physical hormonal backup in the beginning and it lasts for two years max, according to an old cover story on love done by Time magazine many, many years ago. After that the affection hormone kicks in and we are still fond of each other. But after four years, we wear out our hormonal support. This happens to men and women. Suddenly we are on our own. We need to do things to keep each other stimulated. That’s the way our bodies work.
When I think back to my twenties and compare it to today’s twenties, there is a change. For one thing people are in no rush to get married, often wait until the woman gets pregnant before they decide to marry. This indicates behavioral change. Young people are more sexually active now. They don’t have to get married to access sex. Also there is a higher rate now of annulments, thanks to the New Family Code, meaning they don’t have to follow the old Catholic rule about being married to one man now and forever. Most important of all, women now play by different rules. They have stopped listening to men who tell them I can be unfaithful because I’m a man but you have to be faithful because you’re a woman.
Now in all of society’s classes more women work so financial dependence on a mate is changing. Even among the very poor more men stay home and cook while their wives go out and work. Do you think the rules have not changed? Of course they have. Even the terms have changed. We can be unfaithful to each other and if that makes us unhappy, well, goodbye, on to the next adventure. Soon someone gets tired, usually the woman. She decides to live alone like I do and find happiness in her life from other sources, not from relationships.
I come to this point of view because I watch society with an open mind. I watch TV, where there is so much infidelity in the plots one wonders who invented the rule that’s so continuously broken. In the Philippines, before the Spanish came, women called the shots and everyone was happy. I think we need to re-examine the whole notion of infidelity. How do we do that without reexamining the whole notion of marriage? And how do we do that without examining deeply the notion of personal choice? Is it too much work?
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