Infidelity Hits The Mainstream
Posted by: Catherine Strawn
Filed in:
relationships
12:30PM, Tuesday September 8th 2009
When something is written up in The New York Times’ style section, it means it has hit the mainstream. For example, vampires had been hot for more than a year when the Times gave them an article on the section’s front page. The paper doesn’t jump the gun on anything, so we were surprised by the couple the Times chose to feature in its “Vows” column, even though they’ve recently included a tattooed couple and one that was married in candy wrapper outfits.
Sarah Kabanuck and David Miller met while acting opposite one another in the Broadway production of “La Bohème.” The fact that they met at work doesn’t even register on the scandal scale, because there was another important factor in their meeting:
Like the conflicted characters they played, they faced many obstacles to happy romance. It wasn’t all that operatic (though he did lose a job at one point). She was married and he had a reputation as a womanizer. Yet as Ms. Kabanuck later remarked: “Love doesn’t necessarily make logical sense.”
So, someone who was married fell in love with someone who was not her husband. This happens, of course, but we can’t believe the Times highlighted Kabanuck’s infidelity. They went on to detail how Kabanuck spent two weeks in Paris with Miller, who was there for work, and when she returned to the States, she moved out of “the home in New Jersey that she shared with her husband.”
While we have no idea what was going on in Kabanuck’s marriage before she started seeing Miller—she told the Times that leaving her marriage and devoting herself to Miller was difficult—we bet her ex-husband doesn’t appreciate how his relationship’s demise is being paraded around in public. And what does this say about the Times? Is infidelity so mainstream now that the paper doesn’t bat an eyelash when a couple’s relationship starts when one of the two is still married? My, how the paper has embraced modern marriage (and divorce). [NY Times]
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LayD
wrote on September 8 2009 @ 02:52 pm: [report]
I feel like infidelity whether it happens in a marriage or in a serious (non-marital) relationship is becoming more common, even somewhat tolerated. It scares me. I really hope I am never with someone who cheats on me and I hope I never have an affair. I use to tell myself that if someone ever cheated on me, I would leave them then and there, but now as I am getting older and have been exposed to different scenarios and complexities of relationships, I am beginning to think that perhaps I would be forgiving, depending on the situation. I don’t ever want to be in that position, but with articles like the one in the Times, it seems like it is more likely I will than not.
Sofjna
wrote on September 8 2009 @ 06:24 pm: [report]
@LayD: you’re right, it does seem more tolerated and it scares me too. I have been cheated on in a serious relationship and he was the last person anyone thought would do something like that. I’ve always been a little scared of getting married and distrusting of people, and the fact that my ex did what he did makes me wonder why I should even bother trying to find someone to be happy with, since it seems in the end they will all do the same thing anyway. (Although on a side note, I got the last laugh. Actually. it was a bit more like pity and laughter. He proposed to the girl he cheated on me with. He ended up loosin his job, his friends, and his money. And she cheated on him; they didn’t even make it a year. Then he had the nerve to come crawling back. Yeah right, like I would want him now.)
BlueVibe
wrote on November 2 2009 @ 12:11 pm: [report]
I want to know who decided that just being in love exempted people from all the rules of decency. Whatever happened to self-control?
I mean, I’ve been in love before, but I didn’t use it as an excuse to barge into other peoples’ personal lives in the name of my own selfish wants. It’s not all about me and the object of my affection/lust/obsession/whatever. There are always other people involved.
GreenAura
wrote on November 2 2009 @ 12:22 pm: [report]
As someone who ranted several times about The Frisky’s pension for posting articles that seemed to shine infidelity in a rose-colored light, let me be the first to say Thank You for this article. Infidelity is a huge problem and its nice to see that not everyone is embracing it.