Cheats, Cheatees and Cheaticians.

The last two aren’t real people, however hard I try to make them so. But they are necessary for any discussion (or musing) on infidelity. The cheat is self-explanatory. The Cheatee is the person that is done wrong by the Cheat. The cheatician is the technician that permits an act of cheating to occur (i.e. the third, often wanted and unwanted, party in a relationship), and in personal experience, the most important one...

I was once one of those ‘black or white’ people (not literally speaking, of course). I was in a committed relationship or I wasn’t. I was going to fail my exams or I wasn’t. I was going to be in trouble, or I wasn’t. Things were simple. Then, cheating was wrong. That was it. That was the end all be all. Somehow along the way, things changed. They morphed into shades of grey, and I started to see rainbows as spectra, rather than a collection of 7 distinct colours. I still told myself that I was either in a relationship or I wasn’t. Truth be told, in as much as I hadn’t yet cheated on anyone, I wasn’t acting committed. That previously clear line was now blurred and squiggly. My exams got harder, a pass wasn’t 98%, it was 0.1% above the pass mark. I started weaselling my way in and out of trouble with people that mattered, another line whose existence depended on the weather. I was no longer affronted when my friends rehashed stories of their partners’ infidelity. I was clear in my head: if you took him/her back it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. You might be condoning their behaviour, even sanctioning it, but I didn’t feel it was inherently wrong. My teenage idealism was gone.

Then I got a boyfriend; a summer bunny, but a boyfriend nonetheless. He was lovely. He did all those things that make you and your friends collectively swoon. Things were going swimmingly, until he invited me for a barbeque (nyama choma, a Kenyan staple). I had been out with a few friends, and I thought his friends could use some positive female energy, so I carried them along. We got there, and alas! His baby’s mummy was there, sat between him and his best friend. *Enter B, stage right, looking confused, trying to exit, stage left*

We were introduced, hands were shaken, hugs exchanged. All that jazz. Then I spotted the hand holding (hers), the attention to ordering of food (hers) and the ignoring of jokes (mine) by said boy. I gasped. Loudly. One friend turned and looked me. Her brain had reached the same conclusion. I was the cheatician. I think. I didn’t know. Oddly enough, I was more embarrassed than hurt. It took me a few days to accept that we had both been wrong, and that ‘he’s attempt at openness’ didn’t make it right. He had been good to me (a bit too good, in hindsight) so it was a rather difficult conclusion to arrive at, and I know many of my friends have similarly struggled.

So when did I blur the lines between right and wrong?! When I stopped going to church regularly? When I decided to be more tolerant of opposing views? When I started hanging out with the ‘liberal’ ones? When I realised I am my parents’ child, not my parents?! Is that HOW it happened? I don’t know. All I know is that I had no clear lines. I have since regained a few of them, but they are few. I am not an excessively moral person (no high horses/grounds etc), but being the cheatician did convince me that infidelity is pants/rubbish/wrong- whatever you want to call it. If all cheaticians realised this, maybe cheats would have no one to play with, cheatees would be spared unnecessary hurt and the world would go back to distinct colours. An exercise in naivety perhaps, but I honestly don’t know what else will restore fidelity to our relationships. Maybe what we need is a little idealism and less of the indifference. 

After all, ‘Nothing is so fatal to religion (or life or love) as indifference, which is, at least, half infidelity (Edmund Burke)’.

Ps...mid week post is to say merci to the new followers! Comment...share...insult (but not excessively so :-D)