rosie1300

On Infidelity

By Rosie N. Kar

Recently, the Times of India reported on the rise of infidelity occurring in India’s cosmopolitan areas.  The article interviewed institutional specialists, relationship experts, therapists, and PR spokespeople for police to get their opinions on how and why there has been an increase.  While the scope of the piece was limited to urban, bustling areas, let’s be real: cheating can occur anytime, anywhere, within any location, whether in a city, suburbia, or rural enclave.

Reasons cited for infidelity included sexual dissatisfaction, monetary inequality, the thrill of experiencing something new, and emotional distance between partners.  The piece claims that there has been a decrease in reported divorces, but a marked increase in cheating.  Comments in the article refer to arranged marriages, and the incompatibility of partners, chosen by parents, and forced into matrimony.  The piece did not delve into the dangers of affairs; the sexually transmitted infections that can emerge, the violence that may erupt within families, and the impact on mental health.  Within the South Asian community, religious and cultural ideologies are rapt with tales of non-monogamous affairs.  One need only look at the writings of Mughal imperial courts to learn about kings and queens, siring heirs to thrones with partners outside of their respective marriages.  Sage Valmiki’s epic Ramayana tells of King Dasharatha and his three wives, Kaushalya, Sumithra, and Kaikeyi.  The Mahabharata has the tale of Draupadi, the princess, who was given the task of finding a partner via swayamvara. This was a revered and time honored practice where young Indian women, upon reaching a certain age, had a smorgasbord of suitors, from which a partner had to be chosen.  Draupadi was wooed by the princely warrior Arjuna, who- being a good Desi mummy’s boy- agreed to share her with his four brothers.  The earliest Punjabi immigrants into the West coast of the United States were not allowed to bring their wives with them from India due to xenophobic, racist citizenship laws, so they married Mexican-American women.  Anti-Asian sentiment remained intact for over a century; this discourse extended to women of Asian origin. White Americans deemed all Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and South Asian women as hypersexual prostitutes, and men of Asian origin were forbidden to marry white women, due to fears of miscegenation and “racial pollution.” Political figures have long held the public eye with media picking up on tales of their extramarital affairs, sordid accounts of sexual exploits, dalliances with sex workers, with disgraced “good wives” standing beside them. 

But have we been socially conditioned to accept monogamy?  Biologically speaking, animals are programmed to reproduce with as many suitable partners as possible, in order to sustain populations.  Is the desire to experience intimacy with many partners, whether emotional, physical, and everything in between, simply natural? I have been dating since I was 16, and over the course of my relationships, I have been cheated on.  Finding other people’s numbers in a partner’s pocket, being the unintended recipient of a suggestive text message, observing strange behavior- all of these things can be the cause of much heartbreak and despair, leading to depression and insecurity. In a way, finding out my partner was a lying cheater was a relief, because it served as a reason to end the relationship, which was headed in a sour direction anyway. My discovery of his cheating saved me future heartbreak.  In my enormous group of friends, my friends have cheated on their partners, and their partners have cheated on them. Within my married circle of friends, the question of infidelity is not publicly discussed; this might be because almost all of my friends are newlyweds, still basking in the glow of their honeymoons.  Cheating clauses are fairly common in prenuptial agreements; if one person breaks the clause, then certain terms in the contract are rendered null and void.

There are ways to work through infidelity: to speak about things, desires, and needs, with our partners; to generate trust and keep open the lines of communication; to own up to mistakes; and to forgive.  One option might be exploring alternative lifestyles.

ABC Nightline did a special on swingers, with statistics claiming that half of the United States’ married population has admitted to cheating on their spouses, and that over the last decade, infidelity among married men and women under 30 years of age had increased by 45%, and 30%, respectively.  Sites like AdultFriendFinder and Ashley Madison (whose tagline reads: “Life is Short. Have an Affair”) are online spaces for consenting adults to create accounts, and meet willing partners.  Swingers often attend parties, exclusive events where one or both in the marriage partake in consensual affairs, with other married couples.  

 Infidelity should not be pathologized, nor should it be blamed as something “exclusive” to Western/white populations, as Desi culture so famously does. The reasons behind infidelity are manifold, and complex. We must be careful about passing judgment when it comes to discussing infidelity. We do not know everyone’s stories.

colinmarshall

Vital stats:
Format: interview-conversations about “the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl”
Episode duration: 12m-1h20m
Frequency: weekly

Suburbia sucks, and ever-rising energy prices will soon destroy it. There you have the collected ideas, in caricature, of self-styled public intellectual James Howard Kunstler. For twenty years, he’s worked the city-planning, architecture, transit and urbanism/New Urbanism beats, territory where self-styled public intellectuals have been known to tread. Perhaps you’ve read the work of activist-journalist Jane Jacobs, to whom Kunstler often gets compared. When her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities grew famous and influential, the caricature of her ideas developed as follows: modernist urban planning (i.e., freeways and function separation) sucks, and if you let it happen, it will soon destroy you. These caricatures fail to convey the depth and nuance of Jacobs and Kunstler’s writing, as caricatures do. Alas, it seems that public intellectuals, especially self-styled ones, pay the price of caricaturization to find purchase in the zeitgeist.

If you wish to know more about precisely why Kunstler thinks suburbia sucks, allow me to suggest The KunstlerCast [iTunes] [RSS]. Taking a more unusual form than it might at first seem, the podcast presents a weekly conversation — more formal than a two-sided gab session, but looser than an interview — between Kunstler and co-host Duncan Crary. Aside from the occasional field trip to real streets and malls and such, each episode has Crary asking Kunstler for his thoughts on a certain subject, be it a city he’s recently visited like, say, Portland [MP3]; the work of another urbanist like, say, Jane Jacobs [MP3]; or even the very definition terms as basic as “urban” [MP3]. This may sound a tad technical or academic, but Kunstler, neither an academic nor a technician, seems constitutionally unsuited to letting conversations go dry. The man comes armed with judgments, often swift and harsh, about which cities he finds livable, which cities he finds hellish, and which cities he feels certain that energy crises will simply sweep away.

colinmarshall

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with comedian, writer, and comedy writer Todd Levin, who's written for Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, Conan, and the Onion News Network. They discuss using comedy performers as tools; the advantages of being a cipher; deliberately bewildering the audience, listening for reactions beyond laughter, and in the process becoming a connoisseur of silence; the comparative humorous possibilities of Tetley and Bigelow tea bag package copy; the inevitable and healthy decision to stop reading internet feedback on one's work; Conan O'Brien's coxcomb of hair; New York's inherent masochism, and Los Angeles' bus stops full of people who look just about to surrender; the pleasures of New York's crosstown buses and the agonies of its garbage trains; Los Angeles' lack of an excuse for shuffling around in flip-flops; his heightened suspicion of venues that aggressively promise good times, and what aggressive promises of laughter can do to comedy; the ultimately fruitless technique of reliable joke insertion, which reveals an anxiety to hold an audience's attention and in so doing loses that attention; that particular Conan O'Brien brand of delivering silliness and lasting memories at once; and the haunting question of telling which of your actions indicate maturity, and which indicate complacency.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed here or on iTunes here.

(Photo: Lisa Whiteman)