Home
How can we pretend that the person we love fulfils all our desires? That is not love and it’s not selfishness either, it is pure sadism!
Elogio del tradimento (Praise infidelity), page 40, chapter 3, « Because couples are self destructive and in sum are ridiculous in being eternally faithful».When we talk about infidelity, most people do not have a different point of view from public opinion. In this way, in the best of cases (I don’t want to imagine the worst), those who cheat are considered as a despicable selfish person and those who love someone that is already in a relationship as someone who is not very scrupulous.
Tv shows, which usually flatter the dominant view than go into depth on the subject, newspapers and journalists, stars and starlets, critics, the public and more, all, when confronting the subject of « adultery » agree that it is « dishonest » and « immoral », even sinister when ethics are mentioned, condemning the behaviour without judgment or appeal, without even trying to understand these people’s feelings.
There are very few people who express in public the fact that, and those experienced in adultery will not contradict me, cheating is loving. The lover of someone who is already in a relationship, represents someone who is loving, even if she has a lot less than if she was his only partner; because someone who cheats represents someone who, in some ways, loves the person who is at his side, and who would like to have other partners at the same time, one, two or three people in their life, it makes no odds.
What matters is the final result, and therefore that cheating is linked to love, to that unlimited and extensive capacity to give and receive love, with increased possibilities of love: and love, as we very well know, should not have anything to do with greed or selfishness, otherwise what kind of love would it be?
What were the words of Don Juan? «Everything is love. One who has only one is faithful but to others he is cruel». He then defines the concept of an « extended feeling ».
That is the key word, those who blame the act of treachery in a horrible way should at least once try to understand it, to let go of there views that are so frigid and fundamentalist, so censured and uncompromising : extended. Try pronouncing this word several times, listen to the sound it makes and which hangs and twirls softly in the air: ex-ten-ded… Now contrary to this, try with the word rule, can you hear what a blunt and short word it is, castrating and humiliating, say it: rule! One would say it sounded like a whiplash, of a big slap, of a guillotine.
Cheating, is not just like Henry Mencken said very rightly, «democracy applied to love ». It is not only this because the nature of love hides in reality very little links with rules and numbers: Cheating is above all love, which is in itself an extension of others, applied to love; To cheat is to refuse to benefit from the possibility of loving one person in particular, as a result, liberating that person from the obligation of being our only perfect source of satisfaction of our need for love. To sum up, cheating is to love even more.
What were the words of Osho? « Anything that takes away your freedom is not love. It must be something else because love and freedom are linked; they are the two wings of the same bird. » He also said « every time you see your love in conflict with your freedom, it means that you are doing something else in the name of love ». No one thinks of the real and violent selfishness which makes you faithful, of the word faithful and the restricted idea of love as being able to turn the end of a love or the discovery of a treachery into a tragedy, too often not only in an emotional way but literally.
However I don’t want to write any more on this subject because I want on the contrary to repeat the infinite love of people who cheat, to reassert the difficult harmony between the austere and oppressive social standards and individuals who suffocate love by imposing precepts, and to reinforce the feelings of freedom only to he who cheats.
What was the phrase that for me should be the only rule for love and which was sung by Sting? It said: «if you love somebody set them free».
Free to do what? Free to love others, free to be loved by others, free to forget about the usual partner and their expectations for a moment or forever, free to repeat for the rest of ones life that love is freedom and not a cage.
The word love comes from the verb to love which has no specific etymology. Some, who make more poetry than etymology, agree that love can be read as a-mors, which means without death. I am one of those, and I know that where there is a cage, there is no freedom, and that where there is no cage is where you will find real love.
