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I don’t know. What if the partner is a bad, manipulative actor, but it is just too difficult to dissolve the marriage? For the sake of children, financial commi

I don’t know. What if the partner is a bad, manipulative actor, but it is just too difficult to dissolve the marriage? For the sake of children, financial commitments, costs, unfair legacy laws and so on? It’s certainly not unheard of, so I’ll keep sweeping personality assessments based on cheating at bay. There’s clearly also other reasons, I’m not saying cheating partners are always poor martyrs of circumstance.

atoav 5y ago
Technically everything can be used to establish a (operational) perception of a person — and everything can be wrong. Someone wears a Rolex? Maybe they are rich and want to show off, maybe they inherited it from a dying family member. If they however additionally drive a super car, wear designer clothes the likelyhood of alternative explainations goes down. If someone is a nice, cordial and all around good person and you hear they cheated on their wife you might give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment. If someone behaves like the person who would cheat you now have the smoking gun. Why do egoists cheat on people? Because they don't care. Why do good people cheat? Because their relationship didn't provide them with something they needed and they weren't able to either communicate their needs properly to their partners or end the relationship.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  The most enlightening bit I read online on this subject was that of a serial cheater who held no remorse for doing so. Her attitude was basically something like: > Hey, I love him and if he doesn't know it doesn't hurt him and if I ask for permission not only will it hurt him, but he won't give it to me anyway. So I'll just lie to him. Which kinda blew my mind. I understand cheating as a I-messed-up thing or as a my-partner-literally-and-believably-threatened-suicide-if-I-left-them thing but an ongoing, decades long deception? Man. That's wild.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    > Hey, I love him and if he doesn't know it doesn't hurt him and if I ask for permission not only will it hurt him, but he won't give it to me anyway. So I'll just lie to him. I used to knew someone like this. "Love and sex are different, separate things." It taught me to be more guarded about who I associate with.
  - icu 5y ago
    That sounds like a personality disorder which is why you should thoroughly vet a long term partner and screen for personality disorders early on in a relationship. I hope the husband finds out and recovers from the betrayal.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  I mean sure good people can break sworn vows and lie to the person closest in their lives. For some definitions of good. But I’d never trust them.
  - atoav 5y ago
    While I agree in principle I still feel there are situations where one side is so disrespectful and or destructive, that despite all vows they can no longer expect unbroken loyalty of their partner. Don't get me wrong, two wrongs never make a right, but the reasons why people behave the way they do tell more about a person than their actual behavior. Cheating is never right, but sometimes what it tells you about the person is more them being a tragic person than a bad person. It depends.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  I think it’s the case where I would put more weight on what you label as confirmatory signals than the infidelity itself. My key concern about a cheating asshole is that they’re an asshole. Cheating on someone is just such a noisy signal. You don’t know why, or what’s wrong with the relationship. You mostly don’t know who is cheating, at best you have a biased sample. You don’t know what they are like to their parents or children, or frankly even their partners - are they loyal to them in other ways, caring for them when they need it? Relationships are super complicated and judging them from outside takes a psychology degree and extra training. I’m not going to jump to conclusions from a Boolean variable.
  - atoav 5y ago
    > I’m not going to jump to conclusions from a Boolean variable. Agreed, I wouldn't either. However the point of my comment was to explain that the variables rarely are boolean and never come in isolation (unless someone talks to you about someone else whom you never even heard of). For me all these traits don't necessarily mean anything. You can like children and pets and still be a mass murderer, you can hate children and pets and be the most honest, most cordial person on earth. When using outside traits to form an image about people your confidence in that image should never be exceptionally high. However cheating is not an outside trait, it is behavior. A single imstance of observed behavior will still not say much. But at some point the confidence raises. If a stranger yells once at the waitress that adds one data point with low confidence to my list. If I cannot judge the situation because I didn't see what it was about that confidence might be close to nonexistent. Even if I fully recognize the situation I still can't be totally confident, maybe the guy has a bad day, maybe he has a history with the waitress etc. However if I see the same guy being mean to different people for a prolonged period of time, my confidence in all other explainations will naturally fall and my confidence in the theory that the guy is mean will rise. That doesn't mean the guy is an asshole everywhere in his life. Maybe he is super caring with his kids or old mother etc.

atoav 5y ago

Technically everything can be used to establish a (operational) perception of a person — and everything can be wrong. Someone wears a Rolex? Maybe they are rich and want to show off, maybe they inherited it from a dying family member. If they however additionally drive a super car, wear designer clothes the likelyhood of alternative explainations goes down. If someone is a nice, cordial and all around good person and you hear they cheated on their wife you might give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment. If someone behaves like the person who would cheat you now have the smoking gun. Why do egoists cheat on people? Because they don't care. Why do good people cheat? Because their relationship didn't provide them with something they needed and they weren't able to either communicate their needs properly to their partners or end the relationship.

3pt14159 5y ago
The most enlightening bit I read online on this subject was that of a serial cheater who held no remorse for doing so. Her attitude was basically something like: > Hey, I love him and if he doesn't know it doesn't hurt him and if I ask for permission not only will it hurt him, but he won't give it to me anyway. So I'll just lie to him. Which kinda blew my mind. I understand cheating as a I-messed-up thing or as a my-partner-literally-and-believably-threatened-suicide-if-I-left-them thing but an ongoing, decades long deception? Man. That's wild.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  > Hey, I love him and if he doesn't know it doesn't hurt him and if I ask for permission not only will it hurt him, but he won't give it to me anyway. So I'll just lie to him. I used to knew someone like this. "Love and sex are different, separate things." It taught me to be more guarded about who I associate with.
- icu 5y ago
  That sounds like a personality disorder which is why you should thoroughly vet a long term partner and screen for personality disorders early on in a relationship. I hope the husband finds out and recovers from the betrayal.
merpnderp 5y ago
I mean sure good people can break sworn vows and lie to the person closest in their lives. For some definitions of good. But I’d never trust them.
- atoav 5y ago
  While I agree in principle I still feel there are situations where one side is so disrespectful and or destructive, that despite all vows they can no longer expect unbroken loyalty of their partner. Don't get me wrong, two wrongs never make a right, but the reasons why people behave the way they do tell more about a person than their actual behavior. Cheating is never right, but sometimes what it tells you about the person is more them being a tragic person than a bad person. It depends.
rich_sasha 5y ago
I think it’s the case where I would put more weight on what you label as confirmatory signals than the infidelity itself. My key concern about a cheating asshole is that they’re an asshole. Cheating on someone is just such a noisy signal. You don’t know why, or what’s wrong with the relationship. You mostly don’t know who is cheating, at best you have a biased sample. You don’t know what they are like to their parents or children, or frankly even their partners - are they loyal to them in other ways, caring for them when they need it? Relationships are super complicated and judging them from outside takes a psychology degree and extra training. I’m not going to jump to conclusions from a Boolean variable.
- atoav 5y ago
  > I’m not going to jump to conclusions from a Boolean variable. Agreed, I wouldn't either. However the point of my comment was to explain that the variables rarely are boolean and never come in isolation (unless someone talks to you about someone else whom you never even heard of). For me all these traits don't necessarily mean anything. You can like children and pets and still be a mass murderer, you can hate children and pets and be the most honest, most cordial person on earth. When using outside traits to form an image about people your confidence in that image should never be exceptionally high. However cheating is not an outside trait, it is behavior. A single imstance of observed behavior will still not say much. But at some point the confidence raises. If a stranger yells once at the waitress that adds one data point with low confidence to my list. If I cannot judge the situation because I didn't see what it was about that confidence might be close to nonexistent. Even if I fully recognize the situation I still can't be totally confident, maybe the guy has a bad day, maybe he has a history with the waitress etc. However if I see the same guy being mean to different people for a prolonged period of time, my confidence in all other explainations will naturally fall and my confidence in the theory that the guy is mean will rise. That doesn't mean the guy is an asshole everywhere in his life. Maybe he is super caring with his kids or old mother etc.