Who's your Daddy?

[Ghoulish Delight]

The thing about extra marital sex is that it isn't really even about the sexual taboo part of it. The devastating part is the complete break in trust and faith. The fact is, each spouse made a lifelong promise to the other, and one of them broke that promise. That's a difficult thing to get past, especially if it results in someone developing a whole new emotional relationship under false pretexts (i.e., bringing up someone else's child think they are your own). Now they've invested great amounts of time and emotional energy in something that's the result of a substantial breach in trust.

So the question of sexual taboo, as I see it, doesn't even come into play when thinking about post-infidelity reactions.

Where the question of sexual taboo comes into play is in attempting to prevent this kind of loss of trust to begin with. If we as a society were more open about sexuality, and more aware that the "ideal" of monogamy isn't ideal for everyone, a lot of this can be avoided. I am not, of course, decrying monogamy, just the fervent way in which our society insists that it's the only healthy answer. So what you end up with is people who have no capacity to handle a monogamous relationship being forced into them, and that leads to the lies necessary to cover up the resulting breaches of trust.

Of course, that far from covers all cases of infidelity. I'm not trying to imply that everyone who cheats is a swinger at heart, or that anyone who's been a swinger would definitely cheat if they entered a monogamous relationship. There are countless reasons people cheat. But certainly the freedom to feel like you can be honest about one's needs and desires would only reduce the amount of deceipt that takes place.