But never EVER say that you will NEVER do something, because usually that is the exact thing you will end up doing. I'm not sure why that happens, maybe we become so confident that we are 'above' that type of behavior...and then we never see it coming until it's too late. So just a word of caution. Beware of what you say and who you condemn.....keep an open mind.
Wise words, well chosen.
People who have never been in a long term relationship often imagine how they will handle it... but that is like claiming you
Know you will make it to the top of Everest, when you have never even been mountain climbing before.
I have had two long term relationships in my life, and I would say I started both believing in my heart that I would remain faithful.
In my first I failed... and the marriage decayed... but I can not with certainty say that it would not have decayed had I been faithful. I was having to cope with a wife who was increasingly clearly an alcoholic... and we were both so young when we wed, had so much growing yet to do that it was nearly impossible that that growth would not pull us apart.
In my second... I succeeded. I was faithful despite ample opportunity... But, that relationship also decayed over time... and my partner ended up believing in her heart that I had been unfaithful.
Let me ask you, OP, if you could lie beside a mate, night after night, for three long years, waiting for her to reach for you in the night? To respond in kind to your caress? Could you do that and never seek solace on another person's arms? Never succumb to the warm welcome you saw in some other's eyes?
Being faithful does not mean your mate will honor you for it. It does not prevent her/him from deciding you are less of a person...
All we ever know of each other is what we chose to believe of them.
In the beginning, we chose to believe everything wonderful... we value all those traits we have sought so long, and disregard the faults because they seem so trifling in comparison to all that is wonderful.
But over time, we grow accustomed to that very wonderfulness we once found so hard to find... it becomes our daily due, that which we expect.
It fades into the background of what life is like, now... and so we come to ignore it, as we do a scent, once we have been surrounded by it long enough.
And then those faults, that once seemed so minuscule, begin to grate.
Where we once were starving such that Spam would seem a delicacy... now we eat caviar every day and complain about its slightest shortcoming.
Love is not blind... and we do not come to see each other more accurately over time... rather, we never see any more of one another than what we decide to pay attentions to, and what we pay attention to changes.
The person you end up divorcing acrimoniously is the same person you once dreamed of being forever beside... and all that has changed about them is what you chose to believe... how you elect to interpret their actions.
It is rare to for two people, to find each other, so well suited in the deepest sense that they can, both, avoid the pitfalls of complacency and ennui. Rarer still, two people who can take full responsibility for how they chose to see their mate... to make the choice, with each day's dawn, to look at their love with the same eyes with which they first saw them... to keep believing that their faults are nothing, compared to how wonderful they can be.
The kind of judgment FancyPants warns against is the kind of mindset that is doomed to fail at relationship. The kind that sets absolutes on an action, or indiscretion, when you really have no idea the arc of suffering and insufficiency that may lead another to stray...
The kind of inflexibility that can not see that what your mate asks you to suffer in them is never any worse than what you ask them to suffer in you.
Until you have stood atop Everest, you have no idea if or even how you can make it. All you can do is try.
Fidelity, in and of itself, is not necessarily character. A man of no libido is not fighting the same demons as a man driven by passions.
Character is a bridge you build between the person that you are born, and the person that you strive to become.
And the intention and industry with which you build matter more than gaining the far shore.
