Fairy tales

It really is a funny old thing; love, relationships, fidelity. As it is we've been reared on a diet of idyllic fairy tales, our understanding of love nurtured at an impressionable age, expectations gleaned from stories of beautiful damsels in distress and the dashing men who rescue them. A somewhat rose tinted glimpse of perfection, the hope that we too will meet the perfect man, fall in love, forsake all others and marry The One. Happily Ever After.

But for me, this raises a pretty fundamental question; are we really destined for just one person?
One lover to the end of our dying day? Or has the rate at which the population is currently expanding given us a lot more choice than just The One?

I'm not entirely sure that we are monogamous creatures.
We are after all only animals, despite the expensive grooming and cloth. Or is that all just smoke and mirrors? Morally when we commit to love and treasure someone, we should do just that. We commit to remain faithful, mentally and physically to just one person.


For the rest of our lives.

Pretty bleak prospect, eh?

According to a press release by the BBC 11% of single people, and 11% of people no longer in relationships think that adultery should be the 8th deadly sin; whereas only 5% of those in stable relationships agree that it should be added. So does that mean 95% agree that cheating on our partner is not a sin?

As it is I'm not married, nor am I in a relationship. And I can't remember what it feels like to be in love so count me out of that equation. My inability to develop lasting relationships with members of the opposite sex are legendary.

At 30, I've only ever had 2 serious relationships. Obviously neither was The One, but that never stopped either of them breaking my heart in different ways. And in both, there was infidelity. My first love cheated on me, and I felt betrayed by the man who swore he loved me with his whole heart. I never got over the betrayal, yet when I turned to another man in my last relationship, I felt only a fraction of guilt I should have. And the next man I tried to have a relationship with after that? I'm loathe to admit that that also ended with me being tempted by the charms of someone else.
To this day, neither ex knows that I cheated on him; through my actions I found the courage to leave both of them very quickly afterwards.

So does this make my actions any more, or any less wrong because I was miserably unhappy? Especially as the most confusing thing about it is that morally I knew that what I was doing was wrong, yet at the same time I am struggling to see the cardinal sin in it all. I certainly never went looking for an affair, maybe just a way out. After all, I am a romantic at heart and I believed those fairy tales.

But what these stories never prepared me for was that the damsel in distress sometimes finds that forsaking all others for her perfect prince is not so easy as it seems.