Why do people cheat?

Why do people cheat? The human impetus for infidelity and arguments against monogamy are robust, tending to surface every few years in something of a flurry of scientific discovery. They mainly seem to suggest that deception is baked right into our DNA: men are biologically programmed to stray, all the way from the hunter-gatherer days when effective distribution of sperm was of paramount anthropological significance.

This widely propagated scientific inference has assumed legitimacy and offered an easy out, infuriating women everywhere. Because the thing is, of course, that men and women have always cheated. The plausible cliché is that when passion turns into prosaicness, when mind-numbing mundanity invades desire, cheating seems the only way to recreate the mystery and butterflies of first lust, and stave off the fear of death. But can forgiveness be a foregone conclusion?

Don Draper, TV's hottest serial cheater

In How To Think More About Sex, best-selling author Alain de Botton talks about ‘how tempting and exhilarating adultery can be… how profoundly

thrilling.’ He confronts the insane” ambitions and seemingly inexorable disappointment of modern marriage, and our foolish insistence that emotional, physical and domestic fulfillment all come from one person.

He writes, ‘In a well-judged marriage, spouses should not blame each other for occasional infidelities; instead they should feel proud that they have, for the most part, managed to remain committed to their union.’

There is also a tradition of adultery we have to blame — the Tamil practice ofchinna veedu (literally translated to mean small house), mirrored in Latin America as la casa chica, is just one example of the quasi-acceptance into society of the mistress; it was seen as a sign of prosperity (and undeniable virility) that a man could manage and satisfy a second household.

Elsewhere, the French, who have historically celebrated the complications of love, have the cinq à sept, those twilight hours between 5 and 7pm that a man surrenders to his mistress. The other woman Mistress. It’s a word that dredges up associations both parochial and demeaning. But the object of affection of the adulterous spouse, long considered a home-wrecker, is having a lightbulb moment.

The other woman has, ultimately, become the everywoman. She no longer wants the man to leave his family or change her life (or his). She is

financially independent, confident to the point of proud, and doesn’t have time for the drama. In a strange irony of circularity, women in this sense are returning to the fold of the sisterhood.

Women aren’t ruining other women— they are instead indulging in a faux-Mormon sister-wife alternate reality (with the tiny difference that one of

them is usually ignorant of it). Think Vera Farmiga in Up In The Air—the cheating woman typically has her own family or career to worry about, her

own children to raise, and her own spouse to keep in the dark.

 

For these are not open marriages, not alternative lifestyles; these are prickly principles in decidedly closed modern relationships. Relationships—

marriages, more often than not—that women are staying in. The wife, another liberated woman in a culture that no longer entirely condemns her

choices, will in all likelihood cite infidelity as a deal-breaker, but will she make the break?

 

The paps have thrown cautious light on the marriages of convenience and endless reserves of forgiveness that thrive in the world of Bollywood’s reigning stars. After all, the venerable practice of marrying for money, security or the sake of a beard is alive and well, especially in India; staying together for the kids, the diamond s or to prevent the sheer hassle of divorce are all reasons that are, after all, as valid as love.

 

In a talk called 'Why We Love, Why We Cheat', anthropologist at Rutgers University (and chief scientific advisor at internet dating behemoth Match.com) Dr Helen Fisher, said: “We are returning to an ancient form of marriage: equality... The 21st-century is going to be the century of what

is called the ‘symmetrical’ marriage or the ‘pure’ marriage or the ‘companionate’ marriage. This is a marriage between equals.”

 

With equal emotional, social and financial power comes equal irresponsibility and discontent. And so, weighed down by responsibility and commitment, forced to evolve into a state of civilisation, perhaps infidelity is no more than our rebellious rage against the machine. Perhaps we see it as the last great adventure left to us, the last bastion of freedom.

 

Perhaps, in the end, cheating is no more than a way for us to declare to the world that we are still alive.