Having 
coffee with a friend, flicking through a magazine that features a very sexy Tiger Woods on the cover, naturally the conversation turns to Tiger and his philandering. My friend is a man.
“We all do it, it’s no big deal”. He tells me. I’m surprised.
“Do you cheat on your wife?” I ask.
“Sure”. He says.
“Why would you do that”? I ask.
“Because I can,” he tells me with a grin.
‘Because I can’? What does that mean? You can because you are physically able? You can because you have a faulty moral compass? You can because your wife believes in open relationships and therefore gives licence? Could it be that he ‘can’ because he can get away with it? Does he not love and respect his wife? My friend is sure that our South African society doesn’t care about infidelity. “It’s expected”, he says. And he believes it. Yes, he does love and respect his wife. However, she doesn’t know about it so it doesn’t hurt her. He just feels that to have one sexual partner isn’t enough.
I have a question. Did this man not stand up before his family, his wife’s family, his friends, ancestors and God and promise ‘forsaking all others as long as we both shall live’? Yes, he did say that but he didn’t mean it, he tells me. Fidelity was never his intention. So why did he get married? Marriage isn’t about fidelity, he says. He married because he wanted a family; a woman at home; someone to look after his kids. I love my friend like a brother but I think he is a class ‘A’ plonker.
Look at nature, he tells me. Look at Lions. There is one Lion to how many Lionesses and
the lion has his fill of them all. Therefore it is natural that a man should ‘dip his wick’ in as many female’s honey pots as possible.
This is the fantasy that fuels his behaviour? He wants to be like a Lion? But that’s possibly one of the most asinine things I have ever heard.
Let us look at this in the most simplistic terms possible. Lions don’t stand up in churches and make vows. Besides, he is not a Lion he is a human and he is not part of a Pride he is
in a monogamous human marriage. What nature intended for Lions as a way of life and socialisation is not for human beings with evolved brains – well, some of us have evolved brains. Humans live in houses and work in corporations. We do not drop a litter of babies in the middle of the bush and lick them clean. Lions do not shop at the PicknPay and Lions do not wear Prada. There are, in fact, so few similarities between the life of human and that of a Lion as to render his whole argument irrelevant.
Infidelity is the ‘it’ topic, it seems. There has been so much press on the subject. We’ve had the much chronicled tales of Tiger Woods, who I suspect, despite his vilification in the press, is the secret hero, if not envy, of many men. There’s also been the British football star who had a fling with the other British football star’s ex-wife. There was also another football star who’s married to a pop star who has just left him for getting a little ‘Tiger’ action on the side. Here in SA the very air we breathe has been resonating with the mammoth scandal of our first citizen’s twentieth child, and then, there’s my plonker friend.
My friend says that fidelity is a ‘man made law’, and therefore he doesn’t see why he should be bound by it. What a load of baloney. What is wrong with man made laws. The world is run by man made laws and yes, we are bound by them. He stops at the traffic lights does he not? That’s because of a man made law. He doesn’t steal, he has good table manners. He follows, as far as I have seen, all the societal, man made laws. Law doesn’t begin to be a defence.
He refuses to be judged. He can live his life as he likes, blah, blah, blah! Yes he can. But he’s in a partnership here. Far be it from me to be the judge, but he made promises. Why didn’t he tell the truth in the church? He should have said ‘I intend to be a willy wielding plonker who is up for a quick frolic with any available female till death do we part’.
There are serious possible consequences here that cannot be ignored. Consequences like
HIV/AIDS and other STD’s. Now there’s a consideration that Lions don’t have to deal with. Does this get a thought while notches are being piled up on the belt? Yes, but he can see that the women don’t have HIV. Well, that answer is a classic. It’s right up there with ‘I took a shower’.
Nocturnal Ramblings of a Mind Unplugged 
“Because I can” seems like a good idea at the time. It is only when the consequences become apparent that one realizes that asking why, and what could happen if I did, would have been better ideas. And how would I feel if my wife did the same, for the same reason?
The Iron Law of Consequence – that for every action there shall be a reaction – has taught humans, at least those who would learn, the strategic value of positive ethical behaviour in reducing undesirable consequences.
Put simply: behave to others the way you would like them to behave to you.
Charles Kingsley’s Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid from “The Water Babies” (1863) come to mind.
I remember those two. I was, actually telling the child of a friend about them the other day when she was contemplating how to deal with a troublesome “colleague” at school. I advocated that this was a case for Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. Moer the little f****er! LOL!
But you are right about the law of consequence. However, men typically suffer no consequence for infidelity. So, perhaps my friend has a point. Filander on because that little wifey isn’t going anywhere. And they ask me why I’m not married? P-lease!
It reminds me of one of those old Zulu jokes that does the rounds. Mthoko tells his father that he has fallen in love with Jabulisile, daughter of a neighbour down the road and would like to marry her. “No my son. You can’t do that. She is your sister. When your mother was away visiting her family when you were very young I got lonely…”.
Mthoko, troubled by this, eventually spills all to his mother. “Go ahead and marry her my son. She is not your sister. When your father was in jail the year before you were born I too got lonely…”
LOL, I love it!