April 7th, 2008
When Does the Cheating Spouse Get Justified for Her Actions?
Cheating is certainly not the way to go in any relationship, and it certainly isn’t the right thing to do. But according to an article, if you are a middle-aged woman who is trying to cope with a dry or unexciting marriage, then you may as well be having an affair; and if you are not giving it some serious thought, or if you do not have one already, then your behavior is unnatural.
The article mentions the case of a woman who, once her children were old enough, left her marriage and filed for divorce, and then started online dating through a special website. The article, however, qualifies that it is not praising infidelity – rather, it is seeing infidelity as natural when a marriage is dried out, and when a woman is forced to compromise her happiness in favor of security and obligation. The website itself, RSVP, has quite a number of older women looking for a second chance at love after having lived through bad marriages.
Other women in the article are truly having affairs and not filing for divorce. One is annoyed with her husband’s couch potato lifestyle, and went out to have an affair, which ended disastrously. Another woman was disappointed in her husband, and, with separate rooms from each other, she decided to revive her sex life, but with someone else. Another woman has dumped her boyfriend, leaving his cynicism behind to take up with another man. What this shows, the article says, is that women need intimacy and romance, not sex.
The article contends that women have their own mid-life crisis, in which they finally find that the children are able to fend for themselves, but they, as women, have not yet grown fully or experienced their life to the fullest. Of course, not all women are the same: there are those who are in fulfilling and happy marriages, and there are women who age well, finding ways to mend their marriages or cope with potentially dry and boring lives. And still, there is another group of women that will resort to dealing with the situation by escaping into different hobbies, such as plastic surgery, parties with friends, gossiping, and the like. The insights in the article, therefore, should not be thought of as applicable to all women.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics about half of the marriages in 2001 ended in divorce – an alarming number that is not necessarily reflective of any signs of cheating, but one that is frightening all the same.