Monogamy

Before I had any idea what a real relationship was like I always wondered how you could cheat on someone if you really loved them. I saw it all around me, every time someone would stray they would say “I only love you”, “I still love you”, or “I took them back because they love me”. It’s not that I ever thought of sex as love, I’ve had sex with far more people than I’ve ever loved, I know the difference, but rather it was that I couldn’t understand completely deceiving the person who was supposed to be everything to you, going outside of the known emotional boundaries you both had set. But really, it’s little more than any other incident of the numerous betrayals or lies every relationship swarms with and it was jut my conservative catholic upbringing screaming in the back of my head that this lie was somehow worse than all others.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity breeds contempt weren’t just said without reason, they were felt. Nothing ruins a relationship like “love”, love means this person bears all to you, all their nasty inner workings, their dark history and expects you to see them the same way and vice versa. Love is boring, it’s doing the same things everyday with the same person, that’s why people go on vacations together and come back “more in love then ever” or separated, they either remember what doing new things together is like or realize there’s more out there for them.

Cheating seems to be a betrayal of the whole point of being in a relationship, which seems to be keeping each other away from other people. What a strange ideal, what a cruel goal. Much to my chagrin I suffer from jealousy just as everyone else. I can’t reason myself out of it, Like so many hack musicians, I can’t tell my feelings how to feel. With all my evolutionary advances I can’t control the rage at the thought of someone else taking what is only ”mine”. “Mine” is the problem, when you have few things you value, that are only “mine”; the costs of losing them go up. Being poor keeps people afraid, afraid to think new things, afraid to stray from the already paved road to success, and afraid to lose what they already have. Going back to the days when we lived in caves and on plains and protected our mates because in was safer in a family and children took so long to become adults. Most of us share the hardship of surviving with our ancient relatives but those who don’t have an easier time losing things or people because if that happens they still have others, they can still survive. Swingers are usually pretty comfortable in the other aspects of their life, professionally, physically, financially.

To overcome this wired in understanding is surely an innovation of the mind, to tell your feelings what to feel, to reason with emotion. This is not something that comes easily; this is altering the way we think, giving up everything we were thought, beyond that, feel. I can see the logic, I can understand it, but how do you work a feeling a certain way? Can you just talk yourself into it if you talk loud enough for long enough? Do you have to completely alter everything in your life to make up for this new thought process? Is it a complete life change?