Ryan ChartrandI have a confession to make: I cheated in this week’s column.
I don’t mean plagiarism (which is punishable by death for English majors). But I did borrow just a skosh of inspiration from “Sex and the City” to get this one going -specifically, from “The Cheating Curve” (season two, episode six).
Not to make excuses or anything, but – the unstable (fictional) love lives of the “S&tC” characters provide a gold mine of riveting material for Carrie’s column. I figured she could share the wealth and spare a little for mine.
What’s the cheating curve? “The theory that someone’s definition of cheating is in direct proportion to how much she herself wants to cheat” (from dating-columnist reference book “Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell”).
That is, the extent to which you are prone to cheating on your significant other is directly related to what you consider to be cheating by your significant other.
Let’s say you wouldn’t accuse your significant other of infidelity if he/she kissed someone else. According to the cheating curve, that makes you more likely to do the same thing, and kiss someone else.
But kissing may not be a big deal for some people.
Cheating curve theory says this: by saying it’s OK for your partner to do something generally considered cheating – like sleeping with someone else – it indicates you’re also likely to sleep with someone else.
Of course, sex may not be a big deal for some people. According to the cheating curve, there is a one-to-one ratio between one’s personal ideas of limitations and freedom in a relationship and one’s own potential behavior.
As a fictional theory proposed by a character who isn’t exactly monogamous, I don’t know how much water it holds. But it brings up an interesting idea:
Cheating is in the eye of the beholder.
Definitions of infidelity vary widely. Anything from flirting to kissing to dancing to sex can be considered cheating by different people, depending on any number of demographic variables, from culture to age to gender.
Self-help relationship “manuals” and GQ/Cosmo magazine articles have popularized the notion that there’s a difference between the genders on the subject of infidelity.
According to psychological studies of heterosexual relationships, men become more upset when their partners are sexually unfaithful, and women become more upset when their partners are emotionally invested in someone else.
Evolutionary psychology gives us a tidy, biological, offspring-centered explanation.
Women (and their kids) benefit from the protection and resources of a committed, long-term partner. Commitment is an emotional tie; thus, women are more wary of threats to the emotional bond between themselves and their partners.
Men are more concerned about protecting their paternity. They want to make sure their resources are benefiting their biological offspring (and the persistence of their genes in the pool), and not someone else’s.
But human relationships can’t be reduced to evolutionary terms. Men can be just as upset about emotional infidelities as women can be about sexual ones (sorry, but you can’t use the Darwin lingo for excuses). No science can tell you what is or isn’t considered cheating if you feel your relationship is being threatened.
In a relationship, both parties must compromise on the definitions of the limitations and freedoms. It may sound contractual, but it’s up to you and your partner to establish the terms of your relationship.
If you feel that your partner has been unfaithful – or if you’ve both acknowledged for a fact that cheating took place – the only way to keep the relationship from going under is to address the issue.
“Trust is key” is trite, but true. In the case of cheating, someone’s trust has been injured or lost. If rebuilding the relationship is even an option, trust must be repaired and restored – which means it will take some work.
The larger, brooding, green-eyed monster under the issue of cheating is jealousy.
A little good-natured jealousy can be healthy for a relationship (example: my obsession with Michael Bubl‚ keeps my boyfriend on his toes). It can communicate to your partner that he/she is valuable to you, and that you want to keep him/her close.
But there’s a reason why jealousy is called a monster: too much of it has the potential to eat away at a relationship. Example: your boyfriend gets upset every time you have a conversation with another guy, even though you’ve tried to assure him the guy’s just a friend.
That kind of jealous insecurity can put the same amount of strain (if not more) on a relationship as cheating itself can. A healthy relationship is a site of security and commitment for both parties – and both parties must work to maintain that.
For all the inspiration and insight to be drawn from “S&tC,” I’ll admit it is a limited resource (but a fruitful one – six whole seasons of relationship-topic goodness!).
But we all get ideas about relationships from lots of places: books, TV shows, movies, and real-life models from the people in our lives. (So I guess I didn’t cheat, after all!)
We borrow some ideas and discard others. In doing so, we see that in relationships, much is relative. What works in one may work wonders in another – only the two people in it can say.
Sarah Carbonel is an English and psychology junior and Mustang Daily dating columnist.