Is Monogamy realistic in today’s marriage?

Ashley Madison the website that helps married people cheat on their spouses, had an astonishing 37 million users. The leaking of the emails some industry experts believe will cause an upswing of approx 8% on divorces in next few years. Should we really be shocked by this? A study in 2012 revealed 70% of married women and 73% of married men have cheated on their spouse at one time or another.

I personally speak to hundreds of divorcees and infidelity is as expected is a  hot topic and common one among our users, they are either cheating and feeling guilty or being cheated on and feeling rotten about it, but should we really be surprised by any of this. Statistically the majority of people have or are doing it, women and men I talk to are very interesting when discussing cheating. Men tend to admit to cheating to me anyway and insist that no way are their wives cheating on them, women will more likely think that their husband is cheating on them as well if also in an affair. Maybe it”s an ego thing but clearly as the percentages state all the men who are so “sure” their wife isn’t up to anything can’t be correct because stats almost equal. Men will reason that the wife says they love them and seems OK so that’s a sign that they aren’t. Yet when I speak to the women they say they often tell their husbands they love them and are perfect wives but are having an affair anyway. The point of this argument though is that if more than half the married adults are cheating why do we always still seem in denial or in shock when we hear or find out about our spouses infidelity.

Looking through history, infidelity was always the norm whether, Greeks, Romans, or medieval royalty additional sexual partners were the norm, accepted and as no iPhone in existence most cultures favorite entertainment and past time, on those long electricity less nights was sex.

People also had very short lives and therefor very short marriages, if your life expectancy was 43 years old any marriage at the maximum would only be lasting 20 years or so. Today’s society, we live an average of 79 years, that’s an awful long time to get bored, fall out of love or to find through never ending social media a plethora of new people to fall in love with or be with.

People come to me on DreamsRecycled.com with all kinds of questions and concerns, one of the most common asked questions by the cheater is are they a bad person. I ALWAYS say no, why do I say no? because we are all just humans and life is complex thing to navigate, we are ever evolving,ever changing, through out our lives, what we liked at 20yrs old we may not like at 4oyrs old. We get married for a million different reasons, for stability, for money, for children, for peer pressure, for the sake of our families. We also often marry people who maybe are great people but over time you realize either they are not great for you, or you stumble across someone who takes you to a place and contentment levelyou have never been too before. I personally don’t believe this makes anyone a horrible person, or an  inherently bad being, I do think though there are sometimes unrealistic expectations put on people to basically never mess up, to never evolve, to never grow or change. Modern day marriage preaches this, you made a commitment now deal with it, for the rest of your life, no matter how you or your spouse change, no matter how unhappy, this part I struggle to think can be right. Marriage takes work, it takes effort, it also takes the realty of understanding that if you enter into it, chances of you being cheated on at any point or wanting to cheat is relatively high. To vilify these people who cheat, or to be shocked when you are cheated on, seems antiquated, I think we should try and help both sides of the infidelity issue to heal, and realize  that we all are no matter what, just humans trying to find love and happiness and trying to do for the most part navigate through this messy thing we call life and marriage.

Tiffany Beverlin

CEO DreamsRecycled.com

tiffany@dreamsrecycled.com

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