Making Adultery Fun, Profitable, And Shame-Free

Making Adultery Fun, Profitable, And Shame-Free May 28, 2015

Hester Prynne really deserves an apology. She got a raw deal.

We're not committing adultery, honey. It's ethical non-monogamy...
We’re not committing adultery, honey. It’s ethical non-monogamy…

Here’s the story from The Washington Post: How to break free from monogamy without destroying marriage

Before online dating, before her two kids, before the Big Conversation with her skeptical husband, Jessie already had an inkling that maybe she wasn’t quite like the ladies she saw at church, that maybe the sexual strictures of life in D.C.’s monied suburbs weren’t for her.

Her first marriage, in her early 20s, had ended after an affair. (Hers.) Her second marriage, started shortly thereafter, was “happy — very happy,” but as her boys grew up and moved out and moved on, she was left faintly bored.

She thought about cheating on her husband of 20 years. She considered bars, parties, a review of the lapses in her mid-20s.

Instead, she sat her husband down and told him something that more and more progressive couples are beginning to realize. They loved each other and wanted to stay together — but in the age of Tinder and Ashley Madison and OkCupid, they also both wanted to have other options. Options they knew were just a click away.

So we have this lady – Jessie – who goes to some church or other – maybe it’s Christian, maybe it’s not – so I’m thinking it’s safe to presume she knows the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. Her first marriage ended because she couldn’t keep her panties on around some other guy – and the lesson she learned from that mistake was to…tell her husband, “Hey, all the cool kids are swinging! Doncha wanna be cool too?”

I find it interesting that her husband is never quoted in this story, trying to lead the reader to believe he is okay with her ‘ethical non-monogamy’. What, you never heard of that? It’s what she calls it. Like how abortion is “reproductive health care”. Sounds so much more…acceptable. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if he told her ‘no’, and she threatened to take him for everything he was worth unless he played along. Because she was left ‘faintly bored’, doncha know, so she deserved it. And didn’t want to go through another messy divorce, getting pinned with the scarlet A a second time. And don’t you dare tell our sons, dearie, not unless you want to get Bobbitized. That’s just a hunch on my part – because later in the piece, she tells the journalist she “doesn’t like that word. Adultery.”

Um, no one does. Not really. That’s why it’s a big ol’ sin, and God commanded us to not commit it. Calling it ‘ethical non-monogamy’ is putting a dead skunk in a pretty box topped with a colorful bow, hoping no one notices the smell.

Open Minded isn’t quite like Ashley Madison, the unapologetic dating-for-cheaters service that expects a billion-dollar valuation when it launches its impending IPO. It also isn’t quite like mobile hook-up app Tinder, where — according to one recent report — as many as 40 percent of “singles” are secretly . . .not.

Instead, says Brandon Wade, the site’s pragmatic, MIT-educated founder, Open Minded is a new kind of dating site for a newly mainstream lifestyle: one in which couples form very real attachments, just not exclusively with each other. He expects swingers, polysexuals and experimental 20-somethings to use his site. But he guesses that most of his 70,000 users are people like Jessie: Those in committed, conventional relationships, who realize that, statistically speaking, few modern couples stay with a single person their whole lives.

“If you look at marriage, it developed as a survival strategy and a means of raising kids,” Wade said. “But relationships are no longer a necessary component of life. People have careers and other interests — they can survive without them.”

Get that? According to this dude, “relationships are no longer a necessary component of life”. He believes it so much, he has a business devoted to helping people destroy marriage, and takes money from people who are selling themselves for sexual encounters. At least he’s consistent in his beliefs.

The tidbit about Ashley Madison going public…investors will soon be profiting from yet another sin. There’s gotta be a hot tub in hell for people who do that, doesn’t there?

There’s more to that mind-numbing, soul-sucking story at the Post if you care to read the rest. But let me sum it up for you:

This is the latest salvo against the institution of marriage – as God intended, as the Church defines it, as society needs it. Greasing the skids for the approval of polygamy and polyamory. People will be harmed – and it will be women more than men – and children will be maltreated and messed up. The culture will continue to gleefully slide towards a cold, ruthless, unfriendly place, its pants around its ankles, where the individual’s selfish desires for momentary happiness reigns supreme, everyone else be damned.

Which makes this quote, at the end of the piece, all the more ironic: “That’s all sliding away from us,” Fisher said. “We’re shedding all these agricultural traditions . . . [and] returning to the way we were millions of years ago.”

That’s where we’re headed: to the way we were millions of years ago. Or worse. Heaven help us.

Photo credit: via Pixabay


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