FIDELITY AS AN EXPECTATION

King Henry VIII of England, our colonizers, married six wives in his lifetime. Here is a king who broke away from the Catholic Church, formed his own Church of England, divorced his first wife Kathryn to marry his mistress, Anne Boelyn. He got bored with Anne, cheated on her, had her beheaded and married his mistress. Rinse and repeat. What’s the moral of this brief lesson in history? Infidelity, while frowned upon, has always happened and is not about to stop happening.

Many of us (except me) get into relationships expecting our partners to have the decency not to cheat. That’s all good – but not realistic. Instead of expecting fidelity, why not expect honesty? I’m a firm believer in telling the truth, which, succinctly put by Oscar Wilde, is seldom pure and never simple. In all it’s ugliness, truth is a far firmer stone in building trust in a relationship. In telling the truth, you leave no gaps in your relationship that could very easily form cracks that lead to gaping holes. In short, if my person cheated on me, I would rather hear it from then than from anyone else. To echo Kanye in No Church In The Wild,

“And deception is the only felony,

So never f*** nobody without telling me”

Cheating is breaking trust because the cheater lied about being faithful. They ignored their responsibility to be honest with you and followed their impulses, then lied about it. When you think carefully through it, you’re better off being told the truth than being cheated on. It’s even in the phrase itself, being cheated on. So choose honesty. If I could rewrite wedding vows, I’d replace fidelity with honesty.