Infidelity

Infidelity can destroy relationships and break up marriages, but people still continue to have affairs despite this. Some say that affairs are necessary and can highlight problems in a relationship, but why can’t problems be talked through instead of one partner cheating on the other, often itself causing irreparable damage; maybe because affairs have some kind of sordid appeal?

I guess it depends on how you define infidelity. Can infidelity only happen in serious relationships where the couple is married? What if one of the partners gives the other permission to cheat or how about one of the partners falls in love with someone else, should they not follow their heart if they are already seeing someone? This shows that infidelity is not a black and white issue, there are many forms of this and people’s personal opinions are what make it cheating.

In recent years there has been a rise in the amount of internet dating websites, but not all are single people looking for love, sites such as iwantanaffair.net and secretaffair.co.uk are for people who are married or in long term relationships who are looking to cheat on their partner. These sites encourage people whose relationships have lost their “spark” to seek out others for a “no strings attached” relationship, rather than repair what’s missing in their own. Many people would condemn infidelity, but these sites wouldn’t exist if there was no demand for them, so there are obviously a lot of people who are seeking out an affair.

There is also a gender difference when thinking about infidelity, men seem to be the ones who are accepted in society as being the ones who cheat. Women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan have articles with articles such as How to keep him from cheating and Is he cheating? whereas men’s magazines don’t seem to have the same emphasis on their girlfriends/wives fidelity, the articles on cheating are more about why women cheat rather than catching them. It seems as though men are looking to prevent infidelity, whereas women cannot and so must look to catching their man. Statistically men are more likely to cheat, one website said that 50% of married men had kissed another person whilst they were married, but only a third of women have; this is quite a big gap. Maybe this goes back to the issues of sexual inequality between men and women; it’s okay for men to sleep around with a lot of different women, but if a woman was to have sex with a lot of guys she would be labelled a slut. Perhaps this is the reason that it is deemed more socially acceptable for men to cheat rather than women.

References
www.iwantanaffair.net
www.secretaffair.co.uk
www.cosmopolitan.com
www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/relationships/How-to-Keep-Him-From-Cheating
www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/guys/Is-he-cheating?
http://uk.askmen.com/top_10/dating_150/181_dating_list.html