What I really find weird about this is that it’s still somehow more acceptable to cheat then then to outright state that you are unhappy with your SO (or maybe just your sex life) and go on a break. I mean there’s 2 levels of evil in cheating: 1) The fact that you are not honoring your original promise of exclusivity to another person and 2) The fact that you don’t even respect them enough to tell them that.
The main big-time benefit of a monogamous relationship (now that economics plays barely any role) is that you have this other person upon which you can rely over the long term. There are precious few things left in modern life that are that reliable. The “family clan” seized to exist as a reliable structure of support a while ago (how exactly this happened is also interesting and maybe worth another thread). People change jobs far more often now, and also move around far more often. It is incredibly hard to have some sort of long-term social and emotional support, and it is increasingly the case that people get desperately lonely because they ignored this problem. So long-term monogamous relationships, IMO, have real and practical benefits that make them worthwhile.
The hard part about monogamy is that human beings (some more then others) get bored easily and crave new experiences. Societies which are less developed economically don’t really notice this I think because, simply put, they are too busy working to meet their basic survival needs. Getting bored is a symptom of an affluent economy and thus it manifests itself much more often in the west then elsewhere. So now you have this problem, and it’s obviously very common (even people who don’t actually cheat almost certainly have some desire to do so after, say, 30 years of marriage). Fulfilling this desire can sometimes be a non-issue if both parties happen to experience it at the same time, but of course, even in those cases that doesn’t happen, because (for lack of a better explanation), it is culturally unacceptable. Yet, by cheating, the trust-bond I describe above is completely demolished.
The culturally acceptable way to deal with this problem of ‘novelty seeking’ is to 1) Deny that it exists (I’m going to go ahead and assume we can thank our long history of state/religion-enforced monogamy for this) and then 2) Do it any way, destroying the idea of long-term relationships in the process.
I think this is an absolutely terrible ‘social norm’ that causes observable damage. Cheating is seen as an ‘indiscretion’ – a small lapse in judgement that we are all prone to. It is generally speakable an easily forgivable offensive (probably because it’s easy to see one’s self in a cheater’s shoes, even if we never act on it). Yet, someone who breaks-up with their <wife|husband> by stating outright that they are no longer happy with the relationship (for whatever reason) is seen as a horrible person and is not so easily forgiven. Someone who stays married but sleeps around with their partner’s consent is an even bigger pariah.
Even if you could begrudgingly accept that your partner can sleep with other people, the social pressure against this is enormous. There are few embarrassments worse then having this sort of thing become public knowledge.
And yet, all of these are much better solutions then the current norms, because they do not necessarily destroy the long-term trust of a relationship. They actually deal with the problem. They won’t always succeed of course and envy is arguably an even more difficult emotion to overcome then novelty seeking, but at least it actually deals with the problem at hand in a somewhat more realistic manner.