Cheating in Marriage: “Red Line” or “Hall Pass”?

“Once a cheater always a cheater.” So said the instructor in my gym class this afternoon when Robin Thicke came on his playlist. Some people, for whatever reason (how they were raised, even their brain wiring), are just more programmed to cheat, like others compulsively lie or steal. But for the rest of us, can mistakes in a marriage just “happen”?

Last weekend my fiance Olivier went on a bachelor party in Miami with a good friend of ours, who is getting married to one of my closest friends from college. I’m not the jealous type. I swear. But while they were away, Olivier called me and at one point alluded to dancing at a club. I then asked him half-jokingly (but really more half not) if it was with a little college girl in a Miami-style short-short skirt. He laughed and moved on without answering my question. Which stirred up anxiety, as my mind wandered from my original scenario (which probably happened) to what else might have gone down at this bachelor party: Some little college girl in a short skirt grinding her rear on Olivier, and then maybe kissing him. And then maybe they end up in the hotel room by themselves…my mind traipsed to places it never usually goes and I didn’t want it to be. (In any case, none of the above actually happened — apparently he spent a good amount of time reading the New Yorker by the pool and swimming laps — which, knowing Olivier, is a much more probable scenario.) But as I was at dinner last week with the bachelor, my friend his fiance, and Olivier, it initiated an interesting pre-marital conversation: Is cheating a red line? And what would you do if you cheated, or you found out your significant other cheated?

Our friends, who are getting married in April, have been going to pre-marital counseling for the past several months (something we’re hesitating on doing — in the words of a sex/relationship writer I work with, “why stir the pot? that sh*t will inevitably come up later.”). But chock it up to the counseling, my girlfriend had a quick and definitive answer to the red line question. No. And for him, “pink.”

Her rationale: If my husband cheats, I must be doing something wrong that drove him to do it. Or, at the very least, there must be something wrong in our relationship that needs fixing. So instead of focusing on his behavior and how he hurt me, let’s get to the bottom of whatever’s wrong and fix it. His rationale: sometimes sh*t happens. People make mistakes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a larger problem. They did agree that either way, they’d work through it.

Later I talked it over alone with Olivier. I already knew his position on telling your significant other you cheated: He doesn’t want to know; thinks it’s purely selfish to tell the other person, and you do it because you have a guilty conscience. But at the same time, I have a very hard time imagining a scenario where either one of us could sleep with someone without making a conscious decision to hurt the other person. As I told Olivier, if you’re out dancing with friends and someone plants a smooch on you, that’s one thing…but going back to their room is a whole other level — less of a mistake than something calculated and extremely self-centered. And really, like my friend said, if the person who does that consciously decides to hurt their partner, there must be a problem in the relationship that needs fixing.

Yet people are not really meant to be monogamous, from a purely evolutionary perspective. But we do it because when when you find the right person who really is your best friend, you want that person in your life — all of it. And not sleeping around when you’re not both fully on board with an “open” relationship is a sign of respect.

So while I think that any cheating that happens in the first few years of a relationship is a bigger problem that needs to be discussed (whether or not you tell the person you were unfaithful), it’s not a stretch to imagine one or both people in a couple getting bored 20 years down the road. Wanting to spice things up. Sure, you can do things that bring you emotionally closer. But is there ever a point where you become OK with the idea of seeing other people, to make both of you happier (see: “Hall Pass“)? Or you just keep on trying to work things through?

As I told Olivier, I don’t know, we don’t have enough experience to know what happens after you’ve been married for 5, 10, 20 years. It’s got to be tough; marriage is work! So for now, I’m OK not having an answer. But as I told Olivier, I just hope that when issues like this do arise years later, that we both have enough respect for each other to talk them through and do our best to find a solution that works for both of us.

Do you think cheating is a “red line”? Or do you believe in the “Hall Pass”?

My Fourth Grade Essay on Chocolate (Kind of Makes Me Want to Eat Chocolate)

I was going through some old files yesterday when I stumbled across two drafts of an essay I wrote — yikes I’m almost ashamed to admit it! — 20 years ago, when I was in fourth grade. It made me smile, so I figured I’d share it:

September 22, 1993

Chocolate

I absolutely love chocolate. The reasons why are because: It’s sweet & I love sweet stuff. It’s just good old plain chocolate. It has that diffent [sic] taste. It comes in mints, which I love too. But there are bad parts too, just like with all desserts. If It’s all that I eat, I start feeling sick.

My fourth grade teacher, Ms. Lafrenz, was wonderful; she taught me my first lessons in creative writing — and I credit her for helping me to discover my love of words. Her feedback, I’m sure, was to make my piece descriptive, a little more show and less tell.

OK. Round two:

October 1, 1993

Chocolate, Chocolate!!

As you may know, CHOCOLATE happens to be people’s favorite type of desert [sic], all over the U.S. But However, out of all the people, I am the person that desires the sweet, crunchy sensation of chocolate the most. I love to bite down on the firm shell, and taste the creamy, but sort of solid center of the brown, chewy chocolate. Right now I can imagine the pleasantly sweet taste, permanently stuck to my toung [sic]. Oh, how I can not stand this sugary, sweet taste! Now how I just have to describe it! Thinking about it, it tastes like a wonderful chocolate land store, filled with all the chocolates you could imagine! Chocolate mints, smothered in a deep, dark brown chocolate. Ohhh, how I idolize the sweet taste of a chocolate mint, melting in my mouth, ever so slowly, so tasty. But after I think about it for so much time. I rember [sic] those horrible tummy aches I got when I ate too much of it. So now I guess that chocolate is so sweet tasting, but it doesn’t always turn out so great.

There you have it: A little chocolate fiend, attempting to describe a chocolate experience. Surprising how little has changed over the past 20 years (though these days, a good glass of wine is a very close second).

What It Would Look Like If Women Were the Wolves of Wall Street

YES. This is exactly what I was talking about in my post about women in Wolf of Wall Street — flipped on its head. Compared to the countless movies and books about bankers being d*ckheads, it’s refreshing original. I would totally watch a whole movie like this:

Please Forgive Me: I Grew Up in Arizona

In a red USC sweatshirt (who said I was ready to leave?!) c. 2002, with four of my best friends at our high school graduation party.

Anymore, I’m afraid to say it. When I’m meeting a person for the first time, I feel I have to open up the hometown discussion with a caveat: I’m from Tucson, Arizona — but it’s not like you think. What’s the Matter with Arizona? The State Americans Love to Hate, as this week’s Economist put it. Or John Stewart summing it up as only he can (a “nuclear waste dump”).

And I don’t blame them. Let me count the ways Arizona is looking like a holdout for extremist nut jobs.  There’s the 2011 shooting of Gabrielle Giffords (gun nuts). This month’s separate-but-equal style anti-gay law that would have permitted businesses to ban gays on religious grounds, passed by the state legislature and finally vetoed at the last minute by Governor Brewer (bigots). The 2010 immigration law legislators enacted but was later shut down by the Supreme Court that would have allowed law enforcement to racially profile people (in this case, mostly Hispanics) and literally pull over cars that they thought might contain illegal immigrants, then detain people without papers (racists). And the newest anti-abortion bill that congress took up just after the anti-gay bill failed, which would remove the warrant currently required for the Department of Health and Human Services to search abortion clinics (women-hating). Yeah, Arizona is not looking very open-minded these days.

The problem is, I spent a good 14 years of my childhood in Arizona. And while I can’t say I love the place (I high-tailed it out as soon as I graduated a high school I admittedly hated for LA, and then even more liberal Paris and finally NYC), it pains me to see the state in this light. Because it just wasn’t my experience growing up.

My parent’s dog fetching with another gorgeous pre-sunset Arizona sky.

I was born in Tucson, moved with my parents to Hawaii when I was four, then moved back to Tucson to spend 10 more (of what were admittedly some of my worst) years, through middle school and high school. I was always a bit shy and awkward, a book nerd, a free spirit, not a conformist or a cool kid. I didn’t wear brand-name clothes or drive a BMW offered for my 16th birthday like other students in my upper-middle class public high school. But for all the classism, I, at least, can’t recall outright segregation or racism. There were definitely gay kids — and I spent a lot of time with many of them (I was in the school choir and, in middle school, theater). And while not a single person came out back then, I was there in the late nineties, and being gay wasn’t yet a national conversation. One of my closest girlfriends from high school (who, admittedly, no longer lives in Arizona either) has since started dating a girl. Many others I suspected (and some I didn’t) have come out since — and some still live in Arizona. They’re getting along fine; one even took to the streets in protest of the new law. (Though I have to admit, it must still leave a sour taste — especially since the veto was ostensibly because of the damage the law would have caused to local businesses…I digress.)

More admittedly apparent is the separation of races. There were the middle-to-upper class areas — where the houses sit on acres and there are fancy plein-air shopping centers and yoga studios and high-end Mexican restaurants and Starbucks every five blocks — and there you’ll definitely see more whites than any other race. And then there’s the lower-middle-class-to-poor downtown area — where the houses are packed into small streets and gunshots are part of the soundtrack of the night (my dad, an engineer, told me of one project in a particularly bad neighborhood, where he had to design a special bulletproof streetlight because gang members would shoot out the bulbs and then sometimes each other so they could do their business in the dark) — where you’ll definitely see more Hispanics than whites. But in my high school experience, while there were more Caucasians than Hispanics, the races seemed to get along fine.

What’s more, unfortunately this separation happens everywhere. It happens in New York, where — even though it’s a wonderfully diverse city — a good portion of races leave Manhattan for home in the boroughs every weeknight (the island is filled with obscenely rich white folk who are the 1% of the 1%). Oh yeah, and then there’s that stop-and-frisk law which basically legalized racial profiling and was part of the city’s infrastructure for years. It happens in Paris too, where I taught English in the suburbs for a year after college (in the same area where, just a year before, protestors burned cars in the streets due to a case of racial profiling). As soon as you’re in the suburbs, in many areas you quickly go from white and wealthy with a long lineage of French ancestors to black and impoverished often Muslim from formerly colonized North African countries. In France too, there have been many attempts at anti-immigration laws, and even a controversial law banning Muslim headscarfs in schools.

None of this is something to proud of, but it’s a reality. We can only hope that with the Internet allowing us all to see everything going on around the world, maybe our eyes are being slowly opened…and someday we’re heading toward a more colorblind society.

Back to my original point. Arizona: It’s unfair to classify a whole state (and anyone who comes from it) as a bunch of gun-slinging bigots. Tucson, at least, is a relatively liberal (or at least libertarian) city. I have friends who are working as pro-immigration lawyers, friends who are artists and Democrats and open-minded. I hope that they will continue to fight against the ridiculous laws frustrated conservative groups are peddling and the intimidated legislators who let them have their way. And I just hope the rest of the country can keep their minds open too and not pigeonhole an entire state because of the horrendous things happening on the fringe.