\u201cCheating is easy.\u00a0 There\u2019s no swank to infidelity.\u00a0 To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first.\u00a0 You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on.\u00a0 Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there\u2019s nothing there.\u201d (p. 77)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most reliable Securicor, church sanctioned and state approved, is marriage.\u00a0 Swear you\u2019ll cleave only unto him or her and magically that\u2019s what will happen.\u00a0 Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex.\u00a0 The charm didn\u2019t work. \u00a0You paid all that money, ate the cake and it didn\u2019t work.\u00a0 It\u2019s not your<\/em> fault is it?\u00a0 Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.\u201d (one paragraph later, p. 78)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These musings from Written on the Body<\/em>\u2019s narrator follow their train of thought after Jacqueline has just learned of their infidelity.\u00a0 The narrator has been swept up into a self-admittedly familiar haze \u2013 the first few months spent teetering on the edge of an illicit tryst, then finally falling into a full-on affair.\u00a0 From what has been established so far, the narrator is very used to being an affair partner, but not so much being the one actively cheating.\u00a0 Still, it\u2019s possible to surmise that rationalizations their partners have given in the past have informed the narrator\u2019s justifications.\u00a0 My first quote emphasizes how effortless it was for the narrator to become entangled with Louise.\u00a0 They express that it\u2019s “easy” to get into a rhythm of taking increasingly more from the trust built up in an established relationship.\u00a0 I would assume that since the narrator elected to get into a relationship with a woman they found entirely bland, they had even fewer qualms this time than they would have otherwise.\u00a0 There are no considerations of how Jacqueline might feel when she discovers that what she thought was a mutually-loving relationship was actually abandoned long ago by her partner.\u00a0 The only hint of hesitance in this first quote appears in the last sentence, when the narrator extends their metaphor to imply that they should have gathered something meaningful from \u201call that taking\u201d, but instead they end up bereft of any substantive relationship.\u00a0 Interestingly, though, this does still frame things in a way that makes the narrator the main victim \u2013 they\u2019re the one that\u2019s been left high and dry.\u00a0 Pay no attention to the partner whose trust has been violated.<\/p>\n The second quote holds a much more by-the-book justification for cheating.\u00a0 The narrator voices the argument of placing all responsibility for maintaining an infidelity-free marriage onto the state-sponsored institution, not on the people involved.\u00a0 There is no discussion here of incremental choices made on the part of the would-be cheater, so no accountability can be requested of them.\u00a0 Elsewhere in the story, the narrator considers how fantasizing about cheating does end up damaging a relationship even though it seems like a too-strict boundary to uphold.\u00a0 They conceptualize it as having given a portion of their heart away, even as they still lie in bed beside the person they\u2019ve pledged themself to.\u00a0 If they decide to continue going down that path instead of addressing the issue, communicating with their partner, and either deciding to recommit themself or break off the relationship, then emotional cheating can steal the passion and trust from a relationship just as much as physical cheating can.\u00a0 In this<\/em> selected quote, though, the narrator places the blame for cheating onto the cultural conceptualization of marriage as a \u201cmagical charm.\u201d\u00a0 Once someone discovers that it\u2019s not that, and that people within monogamous relationships \u2013 even legally-married ones, gasp \u2013 are still capable of experiencing desire for people outside their relationship, they can\u2019t be faulted for becoming disillusioned with the whole thing and drifting toward the next person\/people they desire instead.<\/p>\n The last sentence especially makes this viewpoint clear: \u201cMarriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.\u201d\u00a0 Sure, if you\u2019re viewing it as a spell that prevents you from ever experiencing attraction ever again, then yes, marriage as a construct will not prevent that from happening.\u00a0 Conscious choices to continue nourishing your relationship, and still experiencing attraction but making the decision to stay with the person(s) you love and have decided to be loyal to, are important.\u00a0 If you are so tempted to be in a relationship with someone else that you\u2019re already halfway out the door either emotionally or physically, then ending your current relationship first would seem to be the more moral thing to do instead of hurting the person(s) you\u2019re with.\u00a0 \u00a0Mutual decisions to keep choosing your partner(s) instead of other people are what sustains the trust of a relationship, not a legal document.\u00a0 The narrator undercuts this specific argument about marriage in the next paragraph, but \u2013 importantly \u2013 allows this same argument about disillusionment to justify their cheating on Jacqueline.\u00a0 People don\u2019t just fall magically into cheating; lots of tiny decisions are made along the way to get to that point.\u00a0 However, people invested in preconceived romantic ideas of following their hearts outside a relationship they made the choice to commit to, or<\/em> people who would rather just wash their hands of any responsibility to not damage the trust of their partner(s), would follow the same line of reasoning that the narrator\u2019s currently allowing themself to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cCheating is easy.\u00a0 There\u2019s no swank to infidelity.\u00a0 To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first.\u00a0 You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on.\u00a0 Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but … Continue reading Conceptualizations of Cheating in ‘Written on the Body’<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5607,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346812],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-class-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}