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. 

I'll Say It Again (And Again...)

It would seem from a lot of the comments on this site and the things I'm seeing in my Twitter feed that we are all due for a reminder that our husbands didn't cheat because there's something wrong with us but because there's something wrong with them.
It's what all the experts say, of course. It's even what the more insightful cheaters say. But that doesn't mean we believe it. Instead, far too many of us buy into this cultural myth that men cheat because they're getting something better than the boring old hag at home. Or because the sex is spectacular. 
But there is simply too much evidence to the contrary. The stereotype, of course, is the sexy Other Woman with long legs and a come-hither voice. The reality is often an Other Woman who works at Costco and wears mom jeans. In other words, she's not that different from us except that her moral compass is broken, if she ever had one at all.
Despite the fact that the OW in my case was a bloated alcoholic with anger issues, I still spent hours trying to figure out what she had that I didn't. Was she a porn star in bed? A delightful dinner companion who laughed at all his jokes? Was she smarter than I? Funnier? More interesting? Did he prefer her long hair to my short? Did he prefer her thicker waist to mine? Just what the hell was it that she had and I didn't? Or that I had and he didn't want?
What a waste of time that was! If I'd had any sense of self-worth, I would have figured it out a whole lot sooner. But a childhood spent with addicts had essentially groomed me for this. I already held a deep secret belief that there was something wrong with me. I had grown up convinced that if people knew the truth about me, they wouldn't love me. And so, when I discovered that my husband was cheating on me, it confirmed what I already believed about myself. That I was inherently unlovable. That I was unworthy of fidelity. That I wasn't enough.
You too?
Those beliefs exist in so many of us, long before our husbands cheat. But here's the thing: Those beliefs often exist in cheaters too. Why else do they risk marriages that matter to them for women who don't? Why else do they fall for this distorted reflection of themselves in another woman's eyes -- a reflection that tells them everything they want to believe about themselves but that they secretly doubt? 
Healing from betrayal, whether within your marriage or past it, is about healing those core beliefs about ourselves. It's about rediscovering the truth about our worth. That we matter. That we deserve respect and kindness and honesty. That, even if the marriage is well and truly over, we didn't deserve betrayal. 
Husbands that deserve a second chance will heal themselves too. And they will support us in our healing. Those that don't will continue to blame us for their own shortcomings. They will continue to look outside themselves and their marriage for validation. They will continue to need that reflection in others' eyes because their own reveal emptiness.
One more time – and louder – for those in the back: He didn't cheat because there's something wrong with you. He cheated because there's something wrong with him.

When Culture Insists It's Our Fault He Cheated

This cat is having none of your blame. Let's all be this cat. 

Here's a tweet I saw last week via a couple whose business relies on convincing people they've rebuilt a wonderful marriage after his infidelity:

Wives, you will NEVER build your man up by belittling and disrespecting him. Think about your words before you speak.

That stupid tweet infuriates me.
It's so patronizing. I can practically see the finger wagging in my face, chastising me for not keeping my man "happy". (As an aside, I tend to resist any advice that comes from anybody who refers to my husband as "my man". Please.)
There's plenty of advice like this floating around, on social media, in articles and books. And the underlying message is always the same: You can keep your husband "happy" (ie. faithful) by behaving in a certain way. Or to put the message more succinctly: You control whether or not your husband cheats.
Before I go any further, let me make it clear that I think belittling, demeaning, humiliating and so on are toxic to any relationship. The single greatest predictor of marital breakdown is contempt. So I am most definitely not saying it's okay to belittle, demean or humiliate your husband on a regular basis (you're forgiven for the occasional jab in the wake of infidelity cause, c'mon, he kinda has it coming).
What I reject is this notion – and it's pervasive – that happy men don't cheat. That happy men don't even think about it.
That, as so many of us know, is a total lie.
Cause another thing statistics tell us is that the majority of men who cheat insist that they're "happy" in their marriage. While women typically cheat to get out of a marriage, men cheat with every intention of staying in their marriage. There are exceptions, of course. But typically.
So let me make clear the truth:
You did not make your husband cheat and you cannot stop him if he is determined to cheat.
You have far less control over other people than you think you do.
Which feels terrifying for a whole lot of us.
I thought that if I was the reason my husband cheated, then I could also be the reason he didn't cheat. So, while it was devastating to think that my husband cheated because I wasn't fill-in-the-blank enough (smart, sexy, interesting, young...), it nonetheless felt better at the time than thinking I had nothing to do with it. Cause if I didn't cause him to cheat, I had no control over whether he continued to, or whether he cheated again.
And lack of control, to a control-freak like I was, felt horrible.
You would think I'd have figured out a long time ago that I had little control over others' choices, after realizing that nothing I could say or do stopped my mother's descent into addiction. But I hadn't. We children of addicts are famously insistent that we're more powerful than we are. If we can just be...something, then everyone will stop this nonsense and we'll get our family back.
H'mmm.
Sound familiar at all to you? If I can just make myself look younger/thinner/sexier. If I can just be calmer/more fun/less tired.
I've got bad (and good!) news for you. It won't matter. At least not long term.
But something good does happen when we finally get that we aren't the reason our husbands cheated -- not the real reason. And that something good is we finally understand that we control so much less than we thought but that we control the only thing that really matters: ourselves.
Which sometimes means that changes need to occur. Not to keep him faithful but to respect yourself. Maybe you really do need to take better care of yourself. Maybe you really do need to raise your expectations of yourself and your own behaviour. Maybe it's time to consider that it's not his betrayal of you that's the real kicker but the betrayal of yourself. The loss of yourself.
But that change must come from a place of self-care, not a misguided belief that it will keep him faithful.
So, to recap: Don't belittle or demean or humiliate your husband (or anyone else) because that demeans you to behave that way. Think about your words before you speak, especially when you're speaking to yourself.
Insist on being treated with respect and honesty. Start by respecting and being honest with yourself.
You can't stop someone from betraying you. But you can ensure that you don't do it to yourself.