I’ve tried to write about this issue before. What issue, you ask? The issue that is raised — or several related ones, actually — when people make the statement that infidelity and all its related behaviors “are abuse.”
To me, the problem comes when folks offer no qualifiers or any other information besides that.
I see it a lot. I frown upon it. Oh, but then comes the blowback.
The good part about writing is, you can always write another piece. We writers are human, and as such, imperfect in the discipline. If we should discover that a piece did not transfer to the reading audience what we had hoped, why, we can try, try again!
By the way, this leads to my first point: If our piece does not confer to the reading audience what we had hoped, whose fault is that, and what are the ramifications of that?
Sort of like when I write and fail to make myself clear: I want to go back and do a better job.
After all, say I decide to write at a college level for an audience that reads at third grade level, and then I am upset when I am misunderstood. Should I blame the reader? No, I need to know who I am writing for, and if I am not making myself clear, I need to go back and do a better job. Which I myself am hereby attempting to do.
The reason this is important when discussing cheating is there is a pretty large segment of the reading audience who treat cheating with extreme prejudice already.
These people don’t want to know, nor do they care, that individual instances of cheating run a huge gamut. From the quintessential narcissist with no empathy who is just running around using his (or her) spouse and the other woman (or man) …
… to the people who’ve grown up hopelessly hamstrung by a difficult childhood or problematic learning in the childhood home and now find themselves in a painful marriage, are terrified of divorce, yet don’t know what else to do …
… to the caregiving cheater with a sick/Alzheimers spouse who cannot be a spouse anymore.
Tell the folks who don’t want to know all this that “Cheating is abuse!” and they just nod their heads and get even, even more judgmental.
That’s not going to help them or anyone else when it turns out that someone they’ve known for decades is now in a third-party situation … or it turns out their child is in one … or someone at work is in one … or they themselves are in one.
We’ve got a lot of this rigid judgment rampant in society already, and what good does it do? What we need is more understanding and less judgment.
Who does all this judgment help? When we read that “Cheating is abuse!” and that is all that is said, which direction does that push people towards?
This segment of the reading audience is ignorant of many issues surrounding infidelity. I see the simple “Cheating is abuse!” statement, nothing else said, as supporting these people in ignorance, intimating to them that there’s no need to look any deeper when we find out someone’s been unfaithful.
And it would appear that a lot of people agree with this statement, with the reasoning that the cheating hurts others and that’s all we need to know.
I don’t agree with this statement. “Other people were hurt” is not all we need to know.