sometimes made "Adventure" readers unhappy.
Both the married and the never married would ask me things like, "Do you really think there's that many spouses cheating?"
Uh... yes. I've been out in the world. I've worked in offices with a half dozen employees to a few dozen. Affairs are rampant in the workplace, large and small. Of course, it's not just spouses cheating and being cheated upon, but unmarried couples that live together. Or couples that don't live together but are thought to be "together".
I don't see it as men being jerks, or women being cold or uncaring. I just see it as people being people. Since when is it human nature to only have sex with one person? If couples have to work at their marriage (Dr. Phil, for starters, is fond of saying that "marriage isn't 50-50, it's 100-100"), then how can it be "natural"? Quoting the Bible isn't going to carry any weight with me, because I strongly doubt that God dictated a single word of it.
Granted, I put a lot of emphasis in the "Adventure" stories on how much Starsky and Hutch worked at their relationship. How much having a great relationship mattered to them. But was it really "work"? I used that phrase but, thinking back, I don't think either of them martyred themselves to the cause. Making the other happy selfishly made themselves happy. (I'm a big proponent of the natural power of selfishness). Well, okay, once Starsky went horseback riding while on vacation because Hutch wanted him to, but Starsky's motivation was seeing Hutch so happy. That made him happy.
Liberal comedian Bill Maher has a great bit about the Tiger Woods cheating scandal. Oh, the public and the media was so outraged and astonished. Why would Tiger Woods cheat, especially when he had such a trophy wife? The 24-hour news channels would have experts on, trying to analyze how it was possible that a "man with everything" would stoop to cheating -- and with so many different women. Ghastly! To paraphrase Maher: "Women, you know how you have twenty-five different pairs of shoes in your closet, and yet you want to go out and buy another pair? Because you want something different from the 25 pairs you already have? Well, that's what we men are doing when we cheat. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. We love you. You don't need to go out and get a boob job. We just want something different."
When the media gets outraged over polygamy, I always figure part of that outrage is intense envy that people in certain sects get to have so many different wives. (How dare they get to, when I can't!)
I never believed in all that marriage stuff, from a young age. My mother, an atheist, was a big proponent of the idea that cheating was horrible and ghastly and the worst sort of naughty no-no. And she made sure her children knew when their father was seeing another woman. Once, it reached the point where we sat in the car for two hours, with our suitcases packed, because she was leaving him. But first she had it out with him inside the house-- for those two hours. Then she called out to us that it was a never-mind and we could come back inside and unpack, because she wasn't leaving him. Interesting, to my 10yo or whatever mind, that as horrible as cheating was, it wasn't The Last Word on an even troubled marriage.
As a teenager, I read in TV Guide about David Soul talking about how he wished he and his current girlfriend and all his ex-wives and children could all live in the same place together. Like a commune. He had my admiration for being so honest about his feelings and desires.
I never expected to not get cheated on, when in a relationship, so I could never bring myself to feel outraged when there was evidence that it had happened. I never understood why having sex with Person B was considered the worst thing one could do to Person A. Once, my boyfriend's brother got caught by his wife of some 20 years cheating on her with a long-term relationship. She flew to another city under the pretense that she herself had a boyfriend. At that point, he wanted to work it out, so they did. Within a few weeks, the brother went right back to the same long-time girlfriend, and continued to see her for years. He would always call my boyfriend about going to the dog races most evenings, so his wife would hear the phone call and think he was going to the dog races. The brother would then to stop to have sex with his girlfriend before actually going to the dog track.
Almost all divorces happen because of cheating, regardless of whatever other issues a couple has.
So, with my amazement that people seem to think that marriage vows actually mean something, it was fun writing the "Adventure" series and experiencing a couple that actually took their pseudo-marriage seriously. Of course, some readers were appalled that Hutch had a moment of indiscretion in one of the stories, but most didn't have trouble going along with it, or how easily Starsky forgave him. In my experience, men just have a more casual attitude toward sex than women do, and are able to see the act as something that doesn't have to involve emotion.
Still, it's hard for me to believe that anybody ever goes into a marriage actually believing that they'll never have sex with anyone else except their new spouse.
留言