#decades-long marriages being invalidated bc of how they began with ending a like 5-year relationship

[mermaidsirennikita]

What gets me that a lot of the time questionable/bad behaviour from the female or male lead is ignored but even the idea or something that's percived as cheating is meet with kill bill sirens.

lol YEAH.

This is a controversial take, but.... I don't know. I think cheating is a very bad, sometimes horrific thing to do.

I don't think it is universally felt in the same way by all couples, and I find it really weird that the internet has kind of come to uphold it is as like... on the same level as assault, domestic violence in general. I also find it really weird that everyone seems to have taken this very simplistic "once a cheater, always a cheater" take to the extreeeeme.

I've never been cheated on, and I've never cheated on anyone. I have several close loved ones who've been cheated on. I supported someone through a cheating situation that really, really rocked her, with diminished confidence, panic attacks etc following (she's also... fine now and views the whole situation in a different light, which is another thing that can happen)--so I'm not diminishing how bad this can be. I also have been friends with someone who did do it, and moved past it and has a happy marriage now. I do not imagine that I could get past it... but who knows, I've also never been there.

However, I think this idea that every cheating scenario is this WELL-THOUGHT-OUT insidious affair that was designed to harm the other person and manipulate and abuse them is... flawed. Because let us be completely real. A lot of people cheat. A lot of people cheat once, and their partners literally never find out and they stay married and pretty happy for the rest of their lives, and nobody finds out. I know that's like, scary to consider, but it does happen.

So while I don't think it’s okay, I do think it's kind of ridiculous that we act like something as common as infidelity is always the same. Sometimes people are just really stupid, dude. Sometimes, people are really stupid and their partners get over it and it never happens again. Sometimes, people spin a web of life-altering lies with secret families that mentally destroy their partners upon discovery. Sometimes, a one-time stupid thing does destroy a relationship (and rightfully so).

I think that this really black and white perspective on cheating as like this UNIVERSALLY CATASTROPHIC EVENT is part of what makes people so averse to it in fiction. And like? Tbh? While it is REALLY difficult to pull off in a romance novel, I do think it's like... weird that something as complex and again, common in real life is like, anathema in romance. People can (and do) have their happily ever afters in their real life love stories after their partners cheat, or frankly after their partners cheat on their previous partners with them. It's not savory... But it's also not always a straightforward "this party is good, this party is bad" situation.

I will always say that the one thing I think romance NEEDS is the HEA and the prominence of the love story. Those are genre conventions. Otherwise... I don't know that there are hard and fast rules. It's kind of like the "can you write a romance in which one party has a terminal illness that is not resolved at the end" question. I don't know, dude. It's hard to pull off, but are we going to say that people don't have HEAs in these complex situations?