After Infidelity: Love Can Endure

After infidelity the pain can be excruciating, but it is not always so. A lady who owned a brothel had a married boyfriend whose wife did not mind him sleeping at the brothel. When customers called the lady sometimes left her boyfriend's bed, briefly hired out her body and then returned to her lover.

Monogamy and fidelity to one partner are not universal values. Muslims are allowed more than one wife and this must make gender relationships fundamentally different to those of married, monogamous Christians. A Christian woman who suspected her husband of infidelity started a sexual relationship with a family friend even though sex outside of the conjugal relationship was taboo in her mind.

The moral compromise in this case was perhaps more complex than that which was involved in the brothel. There no lies or duplicity were involved because each person understood clearly where he or she stood. So the question arises of whether infidelity did actually exist.

It can be that jealousy and suspicion create illusions of unfaithfulness. Desdemona did not betray Othello but he become jealous. The green eyed monster filled his mind with illusions and suspicions that writhed and stung like scorpions. The metaphor it conveys the almost physical pain that a man might feel as he imagines the person he loves sharing intimacies with another.

In the aforementioned brothel girls were kept as sex slaves. They were bonded by debt and forced to perform as prostitutes. A man fell in love with one of the girls. One afternoon he arranged to see her for an hour but when he arrived she had gone with a rich man to an expensive hotel for the night. He lay awake that whole night learning what it is like to have a mind full of scorpions.

Two of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, Hamlet and Othello, fell victim to imagined betrayal. Both felt that they had been betrayed and reacted angrily, cruelly hurting the women they supposed had betrayed them. The man who loved the prostitute behaved in the same way. He waited for the girl to come back and berated her cruelly.

Logic and reason take back seats after infidelity. Emotion rules. Hillary Clinton, whose husband's infidelity was aired to the world hardly seemed to turn a hair. Othello smothered his wife in a mad rage. Between the two extremes there is a whole gamut of possible reactions. Whatever the reaction and whatever the circumstances, those looking on should remember the metaphor of scorpions and judge others gently in light of the pain they have experienced after infidelity.