what is promiscuous

Yeh. I was going to come back to this thread to tell something more personal regarding why I feel the way I felt (and no, its not (primarily) about any relationship I was in myself).

But considering the absoluteness in which some posters here have phrased their judgements, not only on themselves but on others, too, I don't really think anymore that I'm willing to put myself out there. Food for thought, perhaps.

I agree, Lola. Time has a way of making us eat our words. My values were once black and white. Now they are becoming more gray, because I am continually having to face situations with complications I never foresaw. I have always thought ahead, but it turns out that many decisions are not as simple as I expected them to be.

I do have values, and sometimes I agonize over them. I always do what I think is right and best, but I still pay for it. Sometimes dearly. And even though I believe I chose the right way, I wonder whether my life would have been better if had gone the other way.

So I am not as quick to condemn others for violating my own values anymore. I have learned that life has consequences, and no one can say whether the consequences of another person's decisions will be harder or easier for them to live with.

Lola, if you'll look back to the beginning of the thread, and read the following 3 or 4 pages, people were asked to offer their opinions on a topic. Now the topic's slid a bit, but what people are offering are still their opinions and feelings. That is how I've attempted to phrase my posts, and how I read the other posts as well.

Life and relationships and emotions are not an exact science. We all have to learn what matters to us, and to what degree we can tolerate variations in those things.

At this stage in my life, I do not have a lot of tolerance for people who are unfaithful to their marital partner. I do not wish to be involved in a relationship with someone who has been unfaithful to their spouse. That is clearly a limitation for me, but ability to trust is important to me.

I'll be glad to get back to talk of promiscuity but wish to express some of my point of view on the adultery discussion.

I might summarize my point of view as agreeing, in concept, with many of the more adamant posters here -

I think that if one's marriage isn't working, that needs to be worked on, dealt with, and one stays or leaves, and doesn't cheat during however long the meantime is.

However, I don't put this view in quite the moral absolute terms I am hearing here. I would even trust someone again, if warily at first. I have, in fact. While my marriage did break apart, a long time later, it wasn't because there was any second episode of 'adultery/cheating' on my husband's part - he too had come to agree with the work things out or leave point of view. We were happy a good long time between early 'cheating' and the breakup for other reasons.

I type adultery and cheating with accents to highlight the onus of Sin that they carry. Some fair amount of the time one or the other partner may be promiscuous in action and the second spouse the pure victim, but I think that often things are more complex than that. While I agree working things out before having sex outside the marriage is a good idea, I don't necessarily think the person doing it is an unalloyed skunk. I think many cultures leave room for some outside of marriage activity, most often being more understanding of the man doing it, but sometimes both sexes. Of course, many cultures stone women for it too.
I think a lot of cultures see marriage as a social institution rather than the continuous love affair that I and many have had in mind for it.

I don't think we own each other. It is possible to still love someone and stray, and for that straying to also be love, not lust alone. I agree that in marriage we owe, but not because we are owned by our spouse, or are owned by our vows, whatever legal or religious binding they have. We owe because of respect and love.

I am not arguing that people in this discussion who would leave before cheating are wrong. You are certainly not wrong for yourselves. Still, I think marriage is not a static enclosed state of equal unvarying intensity among billions.

This is a fascinating discussion and I think all participants have been forthright and clear but civil and restrained in stating their positions on what can often be an emotional subject.

I think ossobuco has raised an important point. The idea that sexual fidelity is crucial to a marriage is generally found among societies in which blood descent is considered important, generally through the male line. If this is not the case, then both males and females are give a much wider latitude, although not complete freedom, of sexual expression. This discussion is interesting in that despite the modern diminution of descent as a crucial element in personal or social identity, many here have argued for sexual fidelity as the crucial criteria for maintaining a marriage, rather than economic or social considerations. This is common in, but unique to, modern western culture.

Hmmm.

I used the steal a car and mug an old lady things purposely... they are very firm in my belief system, but who knows, there might be some situation that would create a need for one of those things to happen.

I really like what Osso said. (Geez, I say that a lot, don't I?)

I joined this part of the discussion to agree with how eoe separated the issues of staying with one person forever, and deceiving that person. I, personally, can't get my mind around deception being the better option. Isn't the deception found out at some point? Isn't the damage worse then, than if it were dealt with at the outset?

I have a friend who is vegetarian. We have talked about it a lot, I have fretted a bit about my carniverous ways, he has said hey, it's not a judgement, it's just what I think is the right thing to do. I think that sometimes strongly-held convictions are seen as judgements, when they are just strongly-held convictions.

Hello, all. I have this smooth, lovely stone here. It's marked "Throw me first." How ironic that Montana should be taken to task.

Goodnight, from Florida

well, soz, i for one wasnt talking about your posts when i said something about the judgementalness on this thread.

i think one can quite easily discern convictions that are stated on "what i would do" from judgements about what other people do.

being honest is always the best policy for everyone involved

I don't take Montana to task.

Sexforlust isn't my idea of the worst thing people can do, and if you look back on the thread you'll see I mentioned going there myself, some time ago. It was a circumscribed period, thank goodness, since that is a tough way to live over a long time, a lonely thing bred out of loneliness.

I also had an affair with a married man and thirty years later I am not one bit sorry. Ask me about the moon landing sometime... oh, well, no, don't. I talked to him about a year ago, when trying to find another person's address, and he said that was the happiest he has been in his life. Well, sure, sweet talk, but not for a purpose, we are many miles away in entirely different lives.

Yes, that was before my own marriage and I was faithful in it.

The nuance I am especially sympathetic to the non-affairing spouse about is that quotidian married life inevitably loses certain, well, voracious, qualities and settles down in various ways.
An affair of love or lust includes, usually, some level of escapade, even with possible semisordidness. There is the new enchantment, while the spouse is the same old. But this has been true for centuries, no?

The appeal of home, hearth, family has strengths. And sometimes the very strength of it is what frightens or bores the person straying.

I have a good long time friend..
I met her in college. She was in Embryology lab class with me. I sat next to her on purpose when I came to class because she looked nice and everybody else in the room except one other woman across the desk was a guy. Probably another 40 guys. (1961).

She had done modelling and was and still is very stylish in a restrained elegant way. Eventually, one guy rode the med school elevator up and down for four hours until she stepped on and he said something nice and probably funny, knowing them, to her and they went for coffee and in time got married. He cheated with his secretary while she was pregnant with the first child. She stayed/let him stay, and then he did it again during the second pregancy. Another of his secretaries, who needed help. His wife didn't need help, she had it all together, she says he said. That time she filed.

In the meantime, I know her heart really went out to her first boyfriend, who even now comes up in the occasional conversation, as who she ever reallllly loved. But he of course had other... (see, the unobtainable???)

My friend has since married again and loves her husband dearly. But..... as dearly as she does, not with that first fervor for the first boyfriend.
But I think that fervor is at least in part because mature life relationships haven't surpassed that.

Love is strange, as the song goes. My friend's first and straying husband was clearly confused, he loved the ideal, the woman he met on the elevator, but he was also drawn to the person he could "help". I am not saying he was good in all this, he was a prototype ****, but it was perhaps almost set up for this to happen, from resentments borne of personal history that neither when marrying understood.. It happened in a harsh way, horrible to the family. I still have a photo of them together at a party I had, my first "adult" party at my first apartment, with her in her eighth month.

Well, I am hanging out another person's life, and why, I guess to mention the most amazing to me 'adultery' I can think of objectively, and to say that even there I can see the human yearning behind the shitty behavior.
I think the husband in my friend's situation behaved horrendously, WAS a skunk. Let's just say I understand almost everybody more as I age.

Doubt it. I once had a girlfriend who cheated on me and, embarassed, panicked and desperate to explain herself, talked this way and that to come up with reasons why she did what she'd done. One of 'em being (and I'm sure she wished she never said that, too), that the way he had made her feel with the sex, "she'd never felt like that" with me.

I did not need to know that. If she was going to leave me over the guy, she could have left me without adding insult to injury like that - and if she wasn't going to leave me, saying that wasn't going to help anything.

Not that I haven't been both in her position and in that other guy's position on this particular little thing (which taught me that we can pretty much all end up one person's dream lover and another person's unfulfilling frustration) - but some things are just better left unsaid.

I think - but thats taking it one step further again - that could even go for entire affairs. If an affair makes someone discover (s)he doesn't fit with you and needs to move on, wouldn't it (sometimes) be better to just be told that, instead of also finding out that (s)he's been betraying you?

Or - different context. I once heard this anecdote - I think it was a reverend who told it. An old man was dying of cancer. His wife, also nearing the end of her life, will survive him for a few years more. He went to the reverend for last counselling and confessed that, though he considered their life to have otherwise been happy, he had regularly visited a specific prostitute for over twenty years (remember, this is Holland, she would have been in the redlight district around the corner). Should he now tell his wife, on his deathbed, to "clean the books"?

The reverend answered provocatively. "Would you consider clearing your conscience worth the grief you would do to her?"

Just examples - 's not always that simple.

I don't have much use for the term 'promiscuity', having found in most cases that the speaker was a personality type less worth knowing than the subject. Not to mention that these values are cultural inheritances far more than they are anything like universal moral truths.

For example, the Anglican church is presently on the verge of a serious split on the subject of homosexuality. The strongest (most certain) voices speaking against ordainment or sanctification of homosexual relationships are coming out of the church in Africa. Yet, at the same time, testing for HIV there has allowed other non-related research (on DNA) which has turned up the interesting tidbit that (something like - I'm working from memory) one of four children born is not related to the husband. Other cultures are equally different from us in such matters as well, eg Polynesian and Micronesian to name just two.

None of us wants our partners to betray us intimately, nor to find ourselves in a relationship we thought was truthful but hasn't actually been so. And that is what many of you are talking about above, understandably. But a broader anthropological, sociological or psychological look is going to tell us that it will happen, that it has great variety in instance, and that judgemental responses are often founded in cultural baggage or in our own insecurities. What of married couples who agree to have other partners? Immoral? Pathological?

What of, say, Shirley Valentine? Should she, undivorced, not have slept with the Greek fisherman? Would it have been ok the day after a divorce, but not the day earlier? Would her rather oppressive husband have been better served by her staying in the relationship, or if she had 'told him' she was unhappy first? How could she even know how unhappy she was without first extricating herself in the manner she did?

eoe...sorry, but I think the ease in which you discount complexity is fascile.

Just when you think you're out, they pull you back in.

All I can say at this point is I speak from my own experience, which is all that any of us can do anyway. I draw the line at getting involved with married men. I made this decision many, many years ago, long before being approached. It was something that I felt was simply not cool, from one woman to another, and it didn't matter whether I knew the woman or not.
State your opinion. There's no beef here about that. But don't start backstroking and throwing out excuses when asked point blank about personal business that you offer up for discussion. That's where I got frustrated with Miss Montana.
It has been a VERY good discussion, Lola.

Perhaps because the "everything" in question apparently concerned stuff like horniness, loneliness and material benefits - no offence, but all still relatively matters of expediency. Relatively easy wins for the conscience, I'd say. I'm just going on what you write here, but perhaps the conscience would have had a more difficult time if you'd been in love with the guy.

Montana made clear that for her, it was purely about sex. Since I share her and Phoenix's opinion that it is the person who took the vows of marriage who is responsible for keeping them, I don't have a problem with that, either. But most women who have an affair with a married man (and some men who have an affair with a married woman) do so because they are in love. They want to be with this person, more than anything in their life - they see it as their future - and this person tells them, often, that his/her marriage is practically over, (s)he's deeply unhappy in it, it's him/her (s)he really loves, etc.

Bad deal? Hell yeh, most of the time. Better warn your friend that (s)he'll most likely end up unhappy at the end of the affair? Sure. It's generally not smart to start an affair with a married person. After all, who guarantees you that (s)he won't treat you just like (s)he treats his/her spouse now? All that. But is (s)he really being immoral - unforgivably so, even? And is it really up to him/her to save the marriage of the person (s)he loves, if that person him/herself so obviously doesn't consider it worth it?

Course - the best thing to do - ideally - is not have any affair yet, and tell the guy/gal that you'll still be there once (s)he gets the divorce. But as Blatham so cutely points out with the Shirley Valentine parallel, even some "good" break-ups just wouldnt have happened without the catalyst affair. Yeh, "people are messy", and it sucks. But if your friend is Shirley Valentine, why would you want to "beat her over the head" about it? Would you really want to throw the first stone?

Who's Shirley Valentine?