The Graying of Principles: What Daisy Jones & The Six Teaches Us About Cheaters

You have all these lines you won't cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won't instantly come to an end.
    You've taken a big, black, bold line and you've made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.
~Billy Dunne from Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Billy Dunne is a cheater. But he's an insightful cheater. In the passage above, from Taylor Jenkins Reid's bestselling Daisy Jones & The Six, Billy is considering how he's allowed himself to cheat on the woman he loves. And, make no mistake, he loves her. She is his North Star. But Billy is a rock star and, well, opportunity and drugs and booze and distance coalesce to make that black line grow gray. Also interesting is that Billy's father was a scumbag who'd left the family when Billy was six or seven. Billy was never going to be like his father, even as he somehow accepted it as fate that he was absolutely going to be like his father.

It's a universal story I read all the time on this site. A guy who loves his wife and despises cheaters becomes a cheater. And he's often as confused as the rest of us how it happened.

How could he do this? 

But his father cheated and he hated his father!

How could he love me and cheat?

But those are all questions that imply a certain degree of logical thinking. And affairs are illogical. They are not about weighing consequences, except in a sort of magical thinking "nobody will know" kinda way. (And, let's be honest, some affairs are never found out.) Cheating is usually not about considering moral ramifications. People who cheat know its wrong. Or they at least know that other people think it's wrong. They have just managed to convince themselves that it's not that wrong. That if nobody finds out, it's not as wrong as, say, murdering someone. Or they tell themselves that "everybody" does it (which can sometimes seem true, though it's not). They have convinced themselves that they somehow deserve it. I work hard and nobody appreciates me. I need sex more than my wife does. She doesn't listen to me. Blah blah bullshit blah.

The truth is, as Billy so kindly explains it to us, there was once a line and they crossed it and not much happened and so that line has grown blurry. They have come to believe their own justifications. They have convinced themselves that "nobody is getting hurt".

In Billy's case, his wife finds out. His bandmates loathe him for putting them in the position of covering for him. 

And that's where we get a masterclass in boundaries. While I don't entirely agree with his wife's approach, she gives him a deadline. Clean up your act by the end of the tour or don't come home. 

It is, of course, fiction. 

And I'm only half-way through and I have a bad feelings that Billy is going to cheat again. Why? Because he's already making excuses for himself. He's already blaming his father for his own bad choices. He's already abdicating responsibility, as if forces greater than himself are leading him astray.

Which also sound pretty true to life.

Cheaters aren't complicated. As Elizabeth Gilbert reminded us so beautifully a few weeks ago in this post, cheating makes us neither important nor interesting. 

Rather, they're predictable. And pathetic. And cowardly. They blame outside forces for their own lack of integrity. 

Those who remake themselves have all my respect. Those who don't? Not worth our time or energy. Except in fiction.