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It is a fact: Infidelity disturbs - even in France, whatever we tell on our national bawdy story. We are ready to forgive the socks laying around, the lack of ambition, incompatible libidos, carelessness or political incomprehensions, but infidelity is entitled to a special treatment. And it is the same story in the common speeches about couple: thousands of movies, books, theater plays or songs condemn infidelity, while we hear sharply fewer voices rise against conjugal violence - to quote a tragic but revealing example.
Why does this theme exactly sends back the most progressive of us to moralizing speeches? Why is my table neighbor transformed at once into a howling fundamentalist priest, when I carry a differentiating point of view on the question? Because the basis of infidelity, is to generate strong reactions - 100 % for or 100 % against, and what a shame for complexity and seduction games amateurs.
This fierceness necessarily hides something - otherwise, we would approach the subject calmly instead of throwing big pieces of truths and casting anathemas between cheese and dessert.
We know that number of homophobes are repressed homosexuals, that racism exists between ethnic groups of the same skin colour, that religious leaders end up in court for children's abuse, that morality sermonizers are regularly found with prostitutes on their knees... And what if extreme aggressiveness towards infidelity was a means to close Pandora's box, to be fool ourselves about our own desires?
Nowadays nobody denies anymore that spending fifty years in the arms of the same person (without ever thinking of choking him or her) is a most likely impossible challenge, but we still find a majority of people who assert without batting an eyelid that no, come on, NEVER have they experienced the slightest desire for another person, even for five minutes in an elevator. I do not doubt that they believe in it. On the other hand, I am more suspicious about people who react systematically in a excessive way. From outside the box, that looks like the Coué method: repeating ourselves that fidelity is natural and compulsory, so as to silence our own fears of cheating.
Maybe that fidelity firm defenders are exactly the ones who are the closest to slip. They go alongside with the dark side every day, and when they accuse the whole world either of carrying horns, or of crossing the white line of the Protective-Couple, it is above all themselves whom they hope to convince.
When indifference or debate leave place turn into rough assertion, we can bet that something shady brews. Only truth hurts. After all, we never really hate other people, but just our own reflection in him or her.
Maïa Mazaurette is the author of the blog Sexactu and several works, among which " Dare the meetings on Internet "..
