German has as many variants of "sie" as English does "you", you know.;)
But in conversation, you usually use the informal "du" and the plural "sie". In formal texts, the context usually provides enough information to make the meaning clear, so it's only a problem in conversation.
Yes, but that is not what causes the hurt. It's an additional argument, and it can be avoided using condoms, which pretty much drops the chances of contracting an STD during sex to contracting something from the toilet seat.
And again, that is not the reason the wife feels hurt.
Another bunch of greedmongers who don't get it. Look, you can either sell me out to the ad companies, or take my money to provide me with a service. You can not do both. Sooner or later, the interests of the parties involved will clash, and we know that it's seldom the customer who comes out on top.
You ignore the much more interesting question of how the priest came into that position of power where he could kill tribe members for something as inconsequential as that.
It's not about hiding. Not in the sense of intentionally concealing something that others ought to know.
Having blinds on your bedroom windows is not hiding.
Heck, wearing clothes is not hiding, even in hot summer.
Privacy is simply wearing clothes. There are people that you show yourself naked, there are places (sauna, etc.) where you show yourself naked. But in general in public, you wear clothes. Likewise, not posting pictures of last nights sexual adventure online has nothing to do with hiding and everything to do with not shoving your john into everyone's face.
Oh, and a little bit with respect towards other people who were involved.
Not really. It's not limited to the online world. Camera surveillance is a very good real-world example. 20 years ago, the people who argued "if you have nothing to hide..." were the close-minded nutcases. Today, the ones who say "even if it helps solve a few petty crimes, that's not worth throwing away our civil rights" are the ones who get looked at funny.
Thanks for reminding me why I still come to/. after all these years. That comment just blew my mind. You put into words exactly what I feel, but I'd need a page for every paragraph you wrote.
Yes, that does make sense. One could argue precautions, commitment that goes beyond sex, etc. etc. - but the most simple and secure position to take would be faithfulness.
I would also add that an unrealistic (biology, psychology) mutual commitment creates a strong bondage and requires considerable trust, which again is a good foundation for a long-lasting partnership.
I'm not into justifying my own behaviour, I talk about that with my partner, not with guys on/.
But I am seriously interested in the rational argument.
In my example of the business trip, the actual sex does not hurt anyone. Well, depending on what kind of fetish you're into... err, I disgres.
What does hurt is telling your wife. But what exactly is it that hurts? That is my question on rational analysis. Also, you can apply game theory and come up with the rational choice being not telling. At least that's what a payoff matrix comes to.
True, the vows are not in the bible, but the ten commandments are.
As is the instruction on what to do with adulterers. Funny, I don't see people following through on that. So please don't start arguing with content of the bible, unless you're willing to either take all of it, or admit that even the most devout christians are picking and choosing. In which case you lose the strength of the argument, because if you are allowed to pick "no adultery" and leave out "stoning of homosexuals" then please explain why someone else can't make the opposite choice?
Bible says, don't commit adultery.
It also says that if you just conquered an enemy tribe, you shall kill all the men and children and then rape the women. I guess that doesn't count as adultery.;-)
So you may not have said in your vows you wouldn't cheat, but by being Christian you shouldn't be cheating, so forgive the spouse for expecting that....
No, perfectly ok. My argument isn't that cheating is fine. My argument is that it's an implicit agreement, based not on anything you actually promised, but on the context in which the promise was made. On that point, we don't really have a disagreement, I just considered it vital to point it out since the OP that I replied to was so insisting on words and promises and vows.
Most of what you are going on about is something that the two individuals should discuss BEFORE getting married.
Bingo!:-)
If you haven't talked this over,
I don't remember using first person singular in my posting. Then again, I don't have divorce lawyers chasing me on Facebook either, so why are we talking about me?
Cheating is not about ethics or morals or religion. It's not even about sex. Its about your commitment (or lack thereof) to your spouse,
So it says that if I put my penis in a vagina that is not attached to my wife, that somehow magically influences my commitment to my wife - but at the same time, it's not about sex?
Sorry, that is very hard to parse.
So what exactly is commitment? And how exactly does it get impaired by sleeping with someone else? I'm not trolling. It simply doesn't make sense unless you see a causal connection that is not automatically a given. Imagine the borderline case of a simple one-night-stand during a business trip. Nobody was deprived of time with you, there are no romantic implications, no danger of you leaving your wife or family - and still you'd argue that this affects the commitment? Why? Aside from hurt feelings, can you provide a rational argument?
And if you are not smart enough to find an acceptable outlet for your biological urges, I would have to say that's pretty stupid.
You really should follow the hint I posted in the other reply. There are scientists on this planet who have devoted their entire lives to this topic, and I find it a bit difficult to throw their judgement away in favor of a random comment on/.
The current state of knowledge indicates that humans actually do have a system for cheating built-in. There are good biological reasons (gene diversity) that may have created the selection process for this. But there appears to be more to it than just that. The very common "he couldn't keep his penis in his pants" accusation is almost certainly very short of the truth. It's not a matter of pure sex-drive. Again, I don't feel like summarizing several books. If you're interested, I posted the reference.
Ok, if the bible is an implied part of the marriage contract, then I shall proceed to take all married couples to court for not following through on a lot, and I mean a whole freaking LOT of other stuff that's in the bible.
Like putting witches to death. Stoning homosexuals. Killing everyone who dares to work on a sunday.
Or are we at the "pick and choose" game again, when it comes to the bible? As in "yes, it is the holy book, the word of the unfailable god himself, but we don't really use all the parts..." ?
And before it comes - all the adultery stuff is part of the old testament. You know, the one that also contains all the killing for ridiculous offenses. And the parts where you're instructed to put entire populations to the sword. Except for the young women which though shalt rape. The new testament actually says something on adultery. Interpretation open, but one way to read it would be a hippie approach of "dude, we're all doing it, so what?" - which is pretty strongly supported by statistics. Throughout their lives, the vast majority of us humans cheat at least once. If we'd really kill everyone that does, we'd have a highly effective technique for population control on our hands.
Who knows, the Bible isn't really worth anything really to a Christian marriage....
The traditional marriage vow does not contain a reference to the bible, the ten commandments or anything like that. In case you are particularily dense, it's the phrase with the "in good days and in bad days" and the "till death do us part".
So, in fact, if you want to play it legal, the partner filing for divorce is actually the one who is breaking the vow.
Yes, adultery is a sin that you should be stoned to death for on the market place by the rest of the village, according to the bible. Which is precisely the point I was making: It is not an explicit word, vow, promise, whatever that was given. It is an implicit content of the cultural background.
If the spouses agree to an open marriage, then sex with other partners is not cheating.
Which is why I left that out of my argument, yes.
In marriage, there are a number of rules, some traditional (the vows), some legal (pre-nups, adultery, alienation of affection), but most of the rules are agreed upon by the spouses (you take out the trash, and I do the laundry).
And my argument is that a lot of the rules are never made explicit. Adultery is not a legal concept in most of the civilized world anymore, and it is not part of most marriage vows, at least not the traditionals. It is part of the cultural context since it's been only comparatively recently that free sex has become openly acceptable (don't think medieval people didn't cheat as much or more).
The "cheating" part is regularily implicit. Which leads to interesting cases of differences in interpretation if intercourse didn't happen, but the partner feels cheated anyways.
I respectfully disagree. The simple answer is "Keep Your Word", or even more simply "Don't Be an Asshole".
If it is "keep your word", then in most marriages, cheating would be a non-issue since exactly that never happened - an explicit word (or sentence) to the effect of "I won't cheat on you".
That's the problem I was trying to point out. That we have unwritten and sometimes unspoken rules, too. And "be faithful to a promise that you never really made, but that is implicit in relations of this kind in your specific culture" is a lot less simple than "keep your word".
Well unless you have in-person contact with your lover in your day to day life, that can be a little hard -- how else will you arrange meetings and whatnot? The communication will need to happen at some point.
Are you fishing for tips or are you wrong on/. ?
Web-Mail account, registered solely for this purpose. Browser in privacy mode when you access it. You don't need crypto to keep something hidden, you need crypto if you want to keep something secret that you can't hide.
For the experts, or those with much to lose, there are lots of other options, but unless your spouse is a geek, they're overkill.
Disclosure: I worked on some of this stuff many years ago. Our target audience were civil rights activists who in many countries likewise need to communicate with at least plausible deniability. A geeky UN-affiliated NGO built systems where the local military police could confiscate their computers and find absolutely nothing incriminating.
It may violate your ethics, moral guidelines, religion or what-have-you. But it is not stupid. On the contrary, successful cheating does require considerable mental ressources, especially if you want to keep the affair going (and secret) for a long time.
It is also a built-in drive, the same way that hunger and thirst are. Look up Helen E. Fisher and read a few of her books, she is the foremost authority on the biology that drives lust, love and attachment. Here's a great TED talk of hers on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html
Cheaters who get caught and don't change their behavior cause divorces.
Uh, no. In the same sense that you post above.
People who file for divorce cause divorces.
If you promised someone your fidelity, and if you have broken that promise, look in the mirror to see whom to blame.
As a matter of fact, even the traditional christian marriage vow does not contain faithfulness. Look it up.
Now if your vow actually did contain these words then yes. In which case it is breaking your word that is causing all the trouble, and that could be on sex, but also on a lot of other things.
So on the traditional marriage, one could say that breaking an unspoken expectation of one party is what caused the breakup. Yes, it is a very common expectation. You'd be surprised at the small percentage of people who actually voiced it.
And then, of course, we could go down the road of "it wasn't the cheating, it was the finding out about it that caused the divorce", because there are tons and tons of marriages where one partner cheats or cheated that are still perfectly intact, because the other one doesn't know.
What all that leads up to is very simply: There are no simple answers. Relationships and their involved commitments and emotions are too complicated and interrelated for simple answers. What makes one, breaks another. What one partner sees as the root cause, the other sees as the reaction to something else.
Though Jesus would probably feel terrified. Mohammed, not so. After all, he personally started this thing of spreading his religion by the sword. In fact, for all the faults of early christians, they didn't do that until the romans and the muslims had shown the church that it's a damn efficient way.
5000 years isn't really a lot for evolution. Look at the cretins around you who are trying to tell you their imaginary friend will roast your imaginary "soul" in imaginary hell for all of eternity after you die and your brain has become compost. I don't mind the charlatans as much as the apes who really believe such nonsense, with the same conviction that you and I and every healthy being believes that there is something we call "sun" and it provides light and warmth.
It is a most curious fact of psychology how someone can hold on to a belief in the total absence of any evidence whatsoever, and even in the presence of evidence to the contrary, with the same strength as in a fact you could verify. How such a thing could evolve, as it is obviously contrary to survival, is going to be a very interesting story if we ever find it out.
However, apparently humans were strongly selected for this flaw, so there must be some so-far undiscovered advantage or relation to an advantage (as in, you can't get the other thing without getting this fault). So to rid ourselves of this curse called religion, we will have to find out what that is, if we still need it, and if not - do some genetic manipulation or selective breeding. Or we can wait until we evolve away from it, but if history is any lesson, the religious meme would rather kill off the entire host population then let go.
So, what is 5000 years when it comes to stuff that is part of the genetic makeup? The brain is grown, what we do with it is more flexible, but as always, no matter what magic you play with the software, the limitations of the hardware are always there.
Slashdot Mirror
German has as many variants of "sie" as English does "you", you know. ;)
But in conversation, you usually use the informal "du" and the plural "sie". In formal texts, the context usually provides enough information to make the meaning clear, so it's only a problem in conversation.
Yes, but that is not what causes the hurt. It's an additional argument, and it can be avoided using condoms, which pretty much drops the chances of contracting an STD during sex to contracting something from the toilet seat.
And again, that is not the reason the wife feels hurt.
Another bunch of greedmongers who don't get it. Look, you can either sell me out to the ad companies, or take my money to provide me with a service. You can not do both. Sooner or later, the interests of the parties involved will clash, and we know that it's seldom the customer who comes out on top.
You ignore the much more interesting question of how the priest came into that position of power where he could kill tribe members for something as inconsequential as that.
It's not about hiding. Not in the sense of intentionally concealing something that others ought to know.
Having blinds on your bedroom windows is not hiding.
Heck, wearing clothes is not hiding, even in hot summer.
Privacy is simply wearing clothes. There are people that you show yourself naked, there are places (sauna, etc.) where you show yourself naked. But in general in public, you wear clothes. Likewise, not posting pictures of last nights sexual adventure online has nothing to do with hiding and everything to do with not shoving your john into everyone's face.
Oh, and a little bit with respect towards other people who were involved.
Not really. It's not limited to the online world. Camera surveillance is a very good real-world example. 20 years ago, the people who argued "if you have nothing to hide..." were the close-minded nutcases. Today, the ones who say "even if it helps solve a few petty crimes, that's not worth throwing away our civil rights" are the ones who get looked at funny.
Wow.
Thanks for reminding me why I still come to /. after all these years. That comment just blew my mind. You put into words exactly what I feel, but I'd need a page for every paragraph you wrote.
Thanks.
Yes, that does make sense. One could argue precautions, commitment that goes beyond sex, etc. etc. - but the most simple and secure position to take would be faithfulness.
I would also add that an unrealistic (biology, psychology) mutual commitment creates a strong bondage and requires considerable trust, which again is a good foundation for a long-lasting partnership.
I'm not into justifying my own behaviour, I talk about that with my partner, not with guys on /.
But I am seriously interested in the rational argument.
In my example of the business trip, the actual sex does not hurt anyone. Well, depending on what kind of fetish you're into... err, I disgres.
What does hurt is telling your wife. But what exactly is it that hurts? That is my question on rational analysis. Also, you can apply game theory and come up with the rational choice being not telling. At least that's what a payoff matrix comes to.
ok, my bad. English really gets me again and again on this "you" and its multiple meanings. :)
True, the vows are not in the bible, but the ten commandments are.
As is the instruction on what to do with adulterers. Funny, I don't see people following through on that. So please don't start arguing with content of the bible, unless you're willing to either take all of it, or admit that even the most devout christians are picking and choosing. In which case you lose the strength of the argument, because if you are allowed to pick "no adultery" and leave out "stoning of homosexuals" then please explain why someone else can't make the opposite choice?
Bible says, don't commit adultery.
It also says that if you just conquered an enemy tribe, you shall kill all the men and children and then rape the women. I guess that doesn't count as adultery. ;-)
So you may not have said in your vows you wouldn't cheat, but by being Christian you shouldn't be cheating, so forgive the spouse for expecting that....
No, perfectly ok. My argument isn't that cheating is fine. My argument is that it's an implicit agreement, based not on anything you actually promised, but on the context in which the promise was made. On that point, we don't really have a disagreement, I just considered it vital to point it out since the OP that I replied to was so insisting on words and promises and vows.
Most of what you are going on about is something that the two individuals should discuss BEFORE getting married.
Bingo! :-)
If you haven't talked this over,
I don't remember using first person singular in my posting. Then again, I don't have divorce lawyers chasing me on Facebook either, so why are we talking about me?
Cheating is not about ethics or morals or religion. It's not even about sex. Its about your commitment (or lack thereof) to your spouse,
So it says that if I put my penis in a vagina that is not attached to my wife, that somehow magically influences my commitment to my wife - but at the same time, it's not about sex?
Sorry, that is very hard to parse.
So what exactly is commitment? And how exactly does it get impaired by sleeping with someone else? I'm not trolling. It simply doesn't make sense unless you see a causal connection that is not automatically a given. Imagine the borderline case of a simple one-night-stand during a business trip. Nobody was deprived of time with you, there are no romantic implications, no danger of you leaving your wife or family - and still you'd argue that this affects the commitment? Why? Aside from hurt feelings, can you provide a rational argument?
And if you are not smart enough to find an acceptable outlet for your biological urges, I would have to say that's pretty stupid.
You really should follow the hint I posted in the other reply. There are scientists on this planet who have devoted their entire lives to this topic, and I find it a bit difficult to throw their judgement away in favor of a random comment on /.
The current state of knowledge indicates that humans actually do have a system for cheating built-in. There are good biological reasons (gene diversity) that may have created the selection process for this. But there appears to be more to it than just that. The very common "he couldn't keep his penis in his pants" accusation is almost certainly very short of the truth. It's not a matter of pure sex-drive. Again, I don't feel like summarizing several books. If you're interested, I posted the reference.
source, please. I did look up some variants of the traditional vow (e.g. the english version on wikipedia) and it was not in there.
Ok, if the bible is an implied part of the marriage contract, then I shall proceed to take all married couples to court for not following through on a lot, and I mean a whole freaking LOT of other stuff that's in the bible.
Like putting witches to death. Stoning homosexuals. Killing everyone who dares to work on a sunday.
Or are we at the "pick and choose" game again, when it comes to the bible? As in "yes, it is the holy book, the word of the unfailable god himself, but we don't really use all the parts..." ?
And before it comes - all the adultery stuff is part of the old testament. You know, the one that also contains all the killing for ridiculous offenses. And the parts where you're instructed to put entire populations to the sword. Except for the young women which though shalt rape. The new testament actually says something on adultery. Interpretation open, but one way to read it would be a hippie approach of "dude, we're all doing it, so what?" - which is pretty strongly supported by statistics. Throughout their lives, the vast majority of us humans cheat at least once. If we'd really kill everyone that does, we'd have a highly effective technique for population control on our hands.
Who knows, the Bible isn't really worth anything really to a Christian marriage....
The traditional marriage vow does not contain a reference to the bible, the ten commandments or anything like that. In case you are particularily dense, it's the phrase with the "in good days and in bad days" and the "till death do us part".
So, in fact, if you want to play it legal, the partner filing for divorce is actually the one who is breaking the vow.
Yes, adultery is a sin that you should be stoned to death for on the market place by the rest of the village, according to the bible. Which is precisely the point I was making: It is not an explicit word, vow, promise, whatever that was given. It is an implicit content of the cultural background.
If the spouses agree to an open marriage, then sex with other partners is not cheating.
Which is why I left that out of my argument, yes.
In marriage, there are a number of rules, some traditional (the vows), some legal (pre-nups, adultery, alienation of affection), but most of the rules are agreed upon by the spouses (you take out the trash, and I do the laundry).
And my argument is that a lot of the rules are never made explicit. Adultery is not a legal concept in most of the civilized world anymore, and it is not part of most marriage vows, at least not the traditionals. It is part of the cultural context since it's been only comparatively recently that free sex has become openly acceptable (don't think medieval people didn't cheat as much or more).
The "cheating" part is regularily implicit. Which leads to interesting cases of differences in interpretation if intercourse didn't happen, but the partner feels cheated anyways.
I respectfully disagree. The simple answer is "Keep Your Word", or even more simply "Don't Be an Asshole".
If it is "keep your word", then in most marriages, cheating would be a non-issue since exactly that never happened - an explicit word (or sentence) to the effect of "I won't cheat on you".
That's the problem I was trying to point out. That we have unwritten and sometimes unspoken rules, too. And "be faithful to a promise that you never really made, but that is implicit in relations of this kind in your specific culture" is a lot less simple than "keep your word".
Yeah, because de-friending your wife would so not sound her alarm bells... :)
Well unless you have in-person contact with your lover in your day to day life, that can be a little hard -- how else will you arrange meetings and whatnot? The communication will need to happen at some point.
Are you fishing for tips or are you wrong on /. ?
Web-Mail account, registered solely for this purpose. Browser in privacy mode when you access it. You don't need crypto to keep something hidden, you need crypto if you want to keep something secret that you can't hide.
For the experts, or those with much to lose, there are lots of other options, but unless your spouse is a geek, they're overkill.
Disclosure: I worked on some of this stuff many years ago. Our target audience were civil rights activists who in many countries likewise need to communicate with at least plausible deniability. A geeky UN-affiliated NGO built systems where the local military police could confiscate their computers and find absolutely nothing incriminating.
Actually, it is not.
It may violate your ethics, moral guidelines, religion or what-have-you. But it is not stupid. On the contrary, successful cheating does require considerable mental ressources, especially if you want to keep the affair going (and secret) for a long time.
It is also a built-in drive, the same way that hunger and thirst are. Look up Helen E. Fisher and read a few of her books, she is the foremost authority on the biology that drives lust, love and attachment. Here's a great TED talk of hers on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html
The same kind of idiot who posts all the rest of their life on social networking sites.
The vast majority of people today simply neither want nor understand privacy.
Cheaters who get caught and don't change their behavior cause divorces.
Uh, no. In the same sense that you post above.
People who file for divorce cause divorces.
If you promised someone your fidelity, and if you have broken that promise, look in the mirror to see whom to blame.
As a matter of fact, even the traditional christian marriage vow does not contain faithfulness. Look it up.
Now if your vow actually did contain these words then yes. In which case it is breaking your word that is causing all the trouble, and that could be on sex, but also on a lot of other things.
So on the traditional marriage, one could say that breaking an unspoken expectation of one party is what caused the breakup. Yes, it is a very common expectation. You'd be surprised at the small percentage of people who actually voiced it.
And then, of course, we could go down the road of "it wasn't the cheating, it was the finding out about it that caused the divorce", because there are tons and tons of marriages where one partner cheats or cheated that are still perfectly intact, because the other one doesn't know.
What all that leads up to is very simply: There are no simple answers. Relationships and their involved commitments and emotions are too complicated and interrelated for simple answers. What makes one, breaks another. What one partner sees as the root cause, the other sees as the reaction to something else.
Nothing, I assume - they've long turned to dust.
Though Jesus would probably feel terrified. Mohammed, not so. After all, he personally started this thing of spreading his religion by the sword. In fact, for all the faults of early christians, they didn't do that until the romans and the muslims had shown the church that it's a damn efficient way.
Uh, talking is cheating now? Nowhere did the OP even hint at more than a conversation going on.
5000 years isn't really a lot for evolution. Look at the cretins around you who are trying to tell you their imaginary friend will roast your imaginary "soul" in imaginary hell for all of eternity after you die and your brain has become compost. I don't mind the charlatans as much as the apes who really believe such nonsense, with the same conviction that you and I and every healthy being believes that there is something we call "sun" and it provides light and warmth.
It is a most curious fact of psychology how someone can hold on to a belief in the total absence of any evidence whatsoever, and even in the presence of evidence to the contrary, with the same strength as in a fact you could verify. How such a thing could evolve, as it is obviously contrary to survival, is going to be a very interesting story if we ever find it out.
However, apparently humans were strongly selected for this flaw, so there must be some so-far undiscovered advantage or relation to an advantage (as in, you can't get the other thing without getting this fault). So to rid ourselves of this curse called religion, we will have to find out what that is, if we still need it, and if not - do some genetic manipulation or selective breeding. Or we can wait until we evolve away from it, but if history is any lesson, the religious meme would rather kill off the entire host population then let go.
So, what is 5000 years when it comes to stuff that is part of the genetic makeup? The brain is grown, what we do with it is more flexible, but as always, no matter what magic you play with the software, the limitations of the hardware are always there.