Quote:
Originally Posted by Cantando  If your partner cheats on you, then denies it, then he has lied. No matter what viewpoint you or he adopts, no matter how your dress it up, does not alter the fact that he lied. It's done.
Am I missing something here? |
Yes, that's an excellent example. "Cheating" is not real -- it's an interpretation of a real event. So if he denies cheating, he may very well be telling the truth -- and if he were asked if he had sex with someone other than his wife, perhaps he would say yes. Maybe that sounds like a word game to you, but it's not. You can only cheat if you believe there's such a thing as cheating, and you can only be cheated on if you believe there's such a thing as cheating. That's quite a different way of being in a relationship than someone who believes it's possible to have sex with someone who's not your spouse, it's possible to break the promises you made to one another, but "cheating" is nothing but a ghost. Personally, I find it far more effective, empowering, and loving to deal with real events in a relationship, rather than our story about those events -- and "cheating" is the story that sometimes gets told when one person has sex with someone other than another particular person, to whom they've made a promise not to. Very often, it's considered "cheating" even if there never was any promise -- some people tell themselves the story that it's cheating even without any explicit agreement. Ai chihuahua!
So, it may very well be a lie to you and not be a lie as far as I'm concerned.
Again, you might go all frog-in-a-blender about it -- people often do when I talk about the subject of "cheating" -- and that's because you believe that it's possible to cheat. From that perspective, it can be very upsetting to hear someone talk about how "cheating is not real." It takes hopping out of the blender to be able to shift your perspective, something that can look absolutely impossible when you're inside the blender. To the frog, it looks like "dressing up the truth" or word games or denial or insanity.
