Salutations, my curious congregation, today we're going to be talking about people having affairs--don't worry my spouse and I are not those people! I'm coming at this from the perspective of fiction and what does and doesn't qualify as cheating. It kind of astonished me to realize that the line is in some pretty vastly different places for different people.
TWs: Unfaithfulness and some irreverence about that. I might also be talking about *gasp* sex. And concepts like what goes into polyamory. Yes, I know, your delicate sensibilities. Please take them back to your good Christian blog and refrain from bursting into flames in mine <3
I'm just going to get right into it today. The word 'cheating' probably evokes a lot of images, including someone trying to drop the dice on a certain number or counting cards. We're talking about the sense of someone cheating on a lover, of course, but I'm going to posit the idea that actually, in most of the cases I've read, it couldn't possibly be.
Robin, you are probably saying, that sounds like some mental gymnastics, but hear me out, I have a point to make.
When you cheat at a game that means you're breaking the rules, right? You are pretty much not supposed to say 'Look! A Distraction!' and steal your opponent's chess pieces while they've turned away. Except the rules never explicitly stated that you couldn't count cards. So there's two ways to cheat; the letter of the rules and the spirit of them.
So by this logic, cheating on a lover is breaking the rules of the relationship. And by most metrics that includes sleeping with someone else without having the conversation with your lover first that you want to sleep with someone else, but almost everything else is a big grey area.
I keep hearing people talk about 'being emotionally unfaithful'. And like man that is a weird concept to me. Because first of all people don't control the way they feel, emotions just happen and you control how you respond to them. And second of all, holy snap, you cannot be absolutely everything to another person and trying to be is a, going to leave that person emotionally malnourished because there are always going to be needs they have that you can't meet, and b, going to seriously overtax you.
Going to point at Morganville first because I finished reading it recently and it has a pretty good example in it. Protagonist Girl Claire's boyfriend Shane throughout the entire series has a problem with the relationship she has with Vampire Mentor Myrnin. And like, okay, that's not for no reason at all, Myrnin clearly does have feelings for her, and I guess her feelings for him exist? But only in the most nebulous sense, we never linger on that long enough for him to seem like a serious threat to breaking them up.
The thing is, Claire's a supergenius and Shane works at a taco stand. He's kind of a dumb ass and in no way is ever going to nourish her mind, which is one of the most central things about her. And meanwhile he's over here getting mad that she goes off to study group with her vampire boss.
Which is one, stupid, and two, not something they ever talked about and agreed was against the rules.
You see where I'm going with this?
Most people wouldn't consider going to work and learning from their teacher to be cheating or anywhere close to an affair. By 'regular people standards' acting like it is is completely unreasonable. (Okay so Myrnin did kiss her at one point but it was seriously blink and you miss it, I had to go back and reread the chapter to make sure it actually happened that's how small a deal this was and that is not the point even remotely.)
So why bring this up? Because if you're going to cheat, that means the game has rules. And for whatever reason, fictional romances almost never show the characters sitting down and talking about what those rules are.
And that might be life reflecting in fiction. Most couples I know don't sit down and talk about the rules. And honestly even if you're the most vanilla pairing to ever exist, talking about the rules is pretty important because there's still murk there to get lost in.
Is watching porn cheating? If not, then is it cheating if you get fixated on one particular actor over all the others? Is it cheating to obsess over a celebrity? Is it cheating if your partner has an online friend they flirt with that literally lives in another country and they have no intention of ever meeting them in real life? Is it cheating if they RP and their character has a romance with another person's character?
If you said yes to that last one please go talk to a professional about the fragility of your ego.
The point is, you and your partner might not have the same expectations. And the answer is not 'beg forgiveness instead of asking permission', the answer is 'talk about this to see if your expectations are even compatible because a big enough rift is going to be a deal breaker whether you realize this right now or not'.
If you never have that conversation, then there aren't rules. And if there aren't rules, how can you possibly cheat?
There are a lot of situations in books where one character will get super bent out of shape with another about something they did because they cheated when there really was no conversation at any point that suggested the behavior was cheating in the first place. And it's almost always written for cheap drama.
You know what's real conflict? Having the conversation and finding out your expectations don't match. You want your characters to fight, show one of them thinking that public nudity (like even at a bath house or something) is indecent and crossing a line and a betrayal of their trust and the other one thinking that is an absolutely ridiculous restriction to try to put on them. These are fundamental differences that are going to cause fraying and take a lot of work to get past.
And you get that sweet sweet tension in the mean time. In a way that doesn't involve one character holding the idiot ball because he saw his sweetie kiss her cousin on the cheek (dear god if I never see this happen again it will be far too soon!)
That's it. That's the blog. It'll be November by the time this goes up so happy NaNoWriMo and fingers crossed that I hit 12k by this point because the goal is 90k words this year!
Fortune Favors,
Robin the Red
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