The L-Word — 1/13/11

Happy 2011, readers. May the new year bring a new start and new opportunities to love. It seems to be a January tradition to make lists: lists of new year’s resolutions, lists of the top 10 of everything from 2010, lists of what was “in” in 2010 compared to what is now “in” in 2011. I read a list from the last category in a newspaper from my hometown and it proclaimed that monogamy is out and affairs are in. I was a little surprised because at least in the community I grew up in, monogamy is almost sacred.

I remember hearing in high school how so-and-so slept with someone else and now his partner was crushed — cheating was the juiciest gossip and garnered near universal contempt for the cheating boyfriend or girlfriend. Whenever I hear the word “cheating,” my first reaction is to seek out the culprit with a death glare, but that residual instinct from high school no longer fits with my views.

Yes, if you promise your heart (and usually your body) to someone, and you promise it will be only that someone forever and ever, it is a terrible betrayal to share either your heart (romantically) or your body with someone else. Even the phrase “someone else” calls to mind shrieking string instruments of doom. But isn’t it a little foolish to promise something as fickle as your heart or body to just one person, forever?

If you read this column regularly, you know what a hopeless romantic I am. I believe 187 percent in the greatness of love. I love love. And I still believe you can love someone forever. My personal revelation about the foolishness of forced monogamy has nothing to do with less faith in love and more to do with my faith in people’s ability to grow. As we grow — and as young adults we grow a lot — we need different things, and the likelihood that one person possesses everything we need is … unlikely. I think we get what we need from a combination of friends, family, a romantic partner and solo endeavors, but at least for me, there are some things I want to get mostly from my partner (whether or not I should actually expect all of those things from my partner). The few times I have cheated, I now see a strong link between what I got out of my “affair” and what I had grown to feel was missing in my relationship, and the few times I have been cheated on, conversations with my partner showed something similar.

I made my peace (mostly) both with cheating on past partners and being cheated on when I recognized those moments of infidelity as points where what I wanted, what my partner wanted and what the relationship wanted diverged. I don’t think we control what we want, and neither party is at fault when one partner wants something different from the other, but it comes down to expressing ourselves. Sometimes it takes an act of infidelity to bring the underlying relationship issues to light, but if we see that we are dissatisfied (and maybe even why) and we cheat instead of communicating, I think that’s where we go wrong. Chalk it up to the vulnerability of expressing your deepest desires to someone, or even human weakness, but unless you just want an open relationship (which is completely fine as long as your partner is on the same page), repeatedly cheating on romantic partners shows some serious thinking needs to be done about why we can’t openly communicate our needs, or why we let relationships degrade to that level of discontent.