Probably Is The Whole Point
Probably Is The Whole Point
Four of you stopped on one word last week. Not in the post itself, but in the link underneath it, in the title of the last thing I wrote, where I said that Master and I will probably never cheat. One of you wrote it back to me in capitals. One of you gave it six question marks. One of you put it in French quotation marks, which I enjoyed more than I should have.
I know what you were asking. You read that word and you thought there was a door left open somewhere, and that I was quietly keeping room for myself.
I was not. That word is doing the most honest work in the whole sentence, and I would not take it out for anything.
What you are actually saying when you say never
When somebody tells you they would never cheat, listen to what they are really claiming, because they are telling you the chance is zero. Not small. Not unlikely. Zero.
And there is no zero, not for me, not for you, not for the couple you know who look untouchable. Every person who has ever done it was, the day before, somebody who would never do that. Most of them believed it completely. Some of them had said it out loud, to the person they were about to do it to.
Think about how many people have said I will never cheat on you and meant every word. They got married. They had the kids. They built the whole life. And somewhere in the middle of that ordinary life it happened anyway.
"Never is not a promise. It is a prediction, and people are terrible at predicting themselves." — Marian
The numbers, and why they are worse than they look
About one in five married men and one in eight married women say they have had sex with someone who was not their spouse [1]. And it does not happen mostly in the messy early years, which is what I would have guessed. It climbs through the middle ones, through exactly the stretch where everybody assumes they are past it because they are settled [2].
But here is what I keep thinking about. There is a study of nearly five thousand married women that asked this question two ways. When a person sat across from them and asked, about one percent said yes. When the survey let them type it into a computer instead, alone, with nobody watching, it was six percent [3].
And that is not a lifetime number. That is one year. Six times the answer, for the same question, depending only on who was in the room.
So whatever the real number is, it is higher than the one on the page. People will not say it out loud to a stranger who is writing it down and will never see them again. I think it is fair to assume they are not saying it to themselves either.
Most of it is not done by cheaters
This is the part I think people get wrong, and it is why the whole cheater and non-cheater thing bothers me so much.
We talk about cheaters as though they are a type of person, and that if you can just avoid marrying one then you are safe. That is not how it goes. Most of it is not done by somebody running a secret second life. It is done by completely ordinary people inside a very specific set of circumstances, and the circumstances are nearly always the same ones.
You are away from home. You have had more to drink than you meant to. Somebody has been paying attention to you for a while now, and being paid attention to is lovely, and you are tired, and it is late.
Nothing on that list is a character flaw. That is just a Tuesday.
And then there is the part nobody wants to define. Somebody kisses you, and for one second you do not move, and then you stop it. Is that cheating? You did not start it and you did end it, but there was a second in there where you did not. I have heard people argue both sides of that with complete confidence, and honestly I think the confidence is the tell. It is a grey area, and grey areas do not survive a word like never.
These are human failures. They happen to people who meant the promise when they made it.
Ours is lower, and that is a different thing to claim
What I wrote in the last post is that we did not build this on willpower. We built it so that the situations above almost never happen to us in the first place. We are together. Not in a controlling way, in a boring logistical way. There are very few evenings where one of us is somewhere the other has never been, with people the other has never met, three drinks in.
That is not virtue, and I want to be clear about it, because it would be so easy to dress it up as something nicer than it is. We are not better than the couple this happened to. We just arranged our life so the dice get rolled far less often.
"We did not remove the temptation. We removed the room where it happens." — Marian
Lower is a real thing to claim. Zero is not.
So, probably
I said probably because I meant probably. Because I have actually thought about it, and because the alternative is standing here promising you something about the future that nobody has ever been in a position to promise.
If that makes it less romantic, I would rather have it that way. I would much rather be with someone who says the chance is small and has built a life that keeps it small, than with someone who says the chance is nothing and has built a life that tests it every weekend.
Six question marks was fair. That is my answer.
[1] Wendy Wang, "Who Cheats More? The Demographics of Infidelity in America," Institute for Family Studies, 10 January 2018, using General Social Survey data. 20% of men and 13% of women. https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-cheats-more-the-demographics-of-cheating-in-america
[2] Same source: among ever-married adults aged 18 to 29 the rates are nearly level (women 11%, men 10%), then they diverge and rise, and "infidelity for both men and women increases during the middle ages."
[3] Mark A. Whisman and Douglas K. Snyder, "Sexual infidelity in a national survey of American women: differences in prevalence and correlates as a function of method of assessment," Journal of Family Psychology 21, no. 2 (2007): 147-154. DOI 10.1037/0893-3200.21.2.147. A population-based sample of 4,884 married women. From the abstract: "Annual prevalence of infidelity was much smaller on the basis of the face-to-face interview (1.08%) than on the computer-assisted self-interview (6.13%)." These are ANNUAL figures, not lifetime ones. The abstract does not name the survey the sample was drawn from.