The Secret Lives of Wives

Before continuing, I'd like to address what I think will eventually come up the more I start talking about women in society and relationships: that I "have a problem" with women. To be official, I have no more of a problem with female privilege or femaleness in general than most women do with male privilege or maleness in general. I like women, I love women, and enjoy or deal with (or not, sometimes) everything that comes with this, just like everyone else. I come from the perspective that when they drilled it into our heads that girls and boys are equal (not the same, but equal) and that I tried to live to live to that. I really, truly believed this. The practical reality isn't true, and I am re-learning that lesson almost daily. You could almost call it one of the Big Lies they teach you. It's Big for me, anyway. (Rose should write an entry about Big Lies, come to think of it.) The details of this are for another entry entirely, but that's where I am coming from.

Here's the subheader of the first part: "Why they stray: With the work place and the Internet, overscheduled lives and inattentive husbands—it's no wonder more American women are looking for comfort in the arms of another man" First of all, is it just me, or does this sound like a bunch of excuses? I know that they are supposedly being presented as logical reasons for behaviour, but from my point of view (and mine only) those "reasons", no matter what they are, were absolutely, positively unacceptable if they were uttered by men. That's probably why T-shirts like this are gaining popularity among the early-to-mid twenty-somethings. (What kind of a statement would a men's tee that said "DUMP HER" send?)

Nowhere in this series of articles do the authors mention polyamory; we aren't talking about a lifestyle here, or at least not yet. We are discussing women who are doing what men have done for a long time and feeling not so bad about it. It all started when we let them work outside the home, I tells ya. But seriously, though, women are more able to get along fine if a marriage ends, especially since women often do quite well after a divorce claming things such as pain and suffering, emotional distress and so on. There are as many tales of men being taken to the cleaners after a messy divorce as there are women who ended up totally screwed, at least in the last 25 years. (I find those stats that say that women almost always end up less well off and that men skip all the way to the bank after a divorce more than a little misleading.)

It seems to me that even though men are tolerated in their cheating ways more than women apparently are, all of the emphasis in my formative years on men cheating and how terrible they are as human beings got to me. To me, since women rarely cheated (or so some would have us believe), it would be better if men would approach relationships (and the problems within them) the way women do. But now, women are starting to abandon that "female way" of tolerating and not cheating, the high road. Instead they are embracing the "male way".

But women are more cautious than men are when they want to cheat. In the past, the legal and social penalties for cheating were quite severe if you were a woman; she could lose everything. Women had nowhere to meet men anyway, so if they were in a bad situation, or rather, unsatisfying position marriage-wise, they were stuck with it. But the Internet has solved many of those problems. Women can be behind a computer monitor where they can safely seek out the connection that they lack at home. When sufficient trust is built up, they can go out with confidence and get what they are looking for in real life. Women are not as "kept" as they once were, and are far more independent than ever, so it isn't unusual for a woman to go out with friends without her husband, even friends of the opposite gender.

Lorraine Ali of Newsweek says that in her interviews, women cheat because they are not getting something at home. I'd like to know why men cheat. I wonder if anyone has seriously asked this question recently. I wonder if it is for the same reason. I bet it isn't, except that where women cheat to get something they once had with their husbands, men cheat to get something they've never had, such as someone who accepts their desire to go out certain places, do certain sexual practices, or simply relate to them in a way they’ve always wanted but never gotten. Or even it’s something as simple and selfish as no-strings fun (or no-strings affection, depending on how you see it). I can understand trying to change something at home, not having the message sink in, and then getting frustrated and turning elsewhere. Many men that catch their women take it as their responsibility that their women aren't happy. But I would make this comparison: women that cheat are like women that kill: it is always assumed that it wasn’t her fault, that some external thing or bad person (a man, usually) drove her to do it. Clearly she wasn’t getting something at home, it’s probably his fault. She wasn’t in her right mind, blah, blah, blah. The fact is that these days, women cheat because they can. Or at least the reasons for cheating aren't any different or better than those for men.

More some other time. There are three other parts to dissect, after all.