When the topic of infidelity spills into our daily dose of media, we may say we saw it coming, or we may react with shock. Either way, we don't exactly look away. Without even meaning to, we learn details, names, sources and suspicions. Most of us would admit that there is little point in speculating about the ins and outs, agreements and lies, secrets and circumstances of a stranger's affair, but our fascination with the indiscretions of others should tell us something about ourselves and the world around us.
It's hard to deny that, as a society, there's a lot to be examined about the ethics of our own relationships. In the United States, 45 to 55 percent of married women and 50 to 60 percent of married men engage in extramarital sex at some time during their relationship, according to a 2002 study published in Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy. Still, other studies reveal that 90 percent of Americans believe adultery is morally wrong. Infidelity is inarguably prevalent, yet it is extensively frowned upon. Given this discrepancy, it is important for every couple to address how they are going to approach the subject of fidelity and to examine the level of honesty and openness in their relationship.
Earlier this week I got a call from a well-known women's magazine and was asked to explain when it is okay for a woman to lie to her partner. I declined answering the question, for one simple reason: it's not! Since when did lying become okay? Lying to someone, especially someone close to us, is one of the most basic violations of a person's human rights. Whatever one's stance is on open versus closed relationships, the most painful aspect of infidelity is often the fact that someone is hiding something so significant from their partner. Two adults can agree to whatever terms of a relationship they like, but the hidden violation of the agreement is what makes an act a betrayal and an affair unethical. Thus, the real villain behind infidelity isn't necessarily the affair itself, but the many secrets and deceptions built around the affair.
In the book "Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships," I cited extensive research on the subject of infidelity and posed the following:
Deception may be the most damaging aspect of infidelity. Deception and lies shatter the reality of others, eroding their belief in the veracity of their perceptions and subjective experience. The betrayal of trust brought about by a partner's secret involvement with another person leads to a shocking and painful realization on the part of the deceived party that the person he or she has been involved with has a secret life and that there is an aspect of his or her partner that he or she had no knowledge of.
Damaging another person's sense of reality is immoral. While keeping a relatively insignificant secret from someone you're close to diminishes that person's reality, going to great lengths to deceive someone can actually make them question their sanity. It's true that feeling an attraction or falling in love may be experiences that are out of our control, but we do have control over whether we act on those emotions, and being honest about taking those actions is key to having a relationship based on real substance.
As kids, we are taught that it is wrong to lie; yet as we get older, the lines tend to become increasingly blurred. This is especially the case when we are faced with the challenging conditions that come with intimate relationships. Too often, when we get close to someone, our innermost defenses come into play, and we unintentionally alter ourselves to "make it work." The baggage we carry from our past weighs heavily on us, and we have trouble breaking free from old destructive habits and harmful modes of relating that distort both ourselves and our partners. When this happens, jealousy, possessiveness insecurity and distrust can cause us to warp and misuse our relationships.
Once a relationship becomes about compromising ourselves or denying who we are, we are no longer living in the reality of what the relationship is but in a fantasy of what we think a relationship should be. An example of this might be a woman whose boyfriend gets so jealous that he forbids her to be alone with other men. Another example may be a man whose partner feels so insecure that she demands to be constantly reassured of his love and attraction to her. Though these couples may go along behaving as if everything is OK, they'll more than likely begin to resent one another and lose interest in the relationship. This type of restrictive situation can become a hotbed for dishonesty. The woman may lie about time alone she spent with a male friend or co-worker, or the man may lie about an attraction he is starting to feel for another woman.
When we treat our partners with respect and honesty, we are true not only to them but to ourselves. We can make decisions about our lives and our actions without compromising our integrity or acting on a sense of guilt or obligation. When we restrict our partners, we can compromise their sense of vitality, and we inadvertently set the stage for deception. This is not to say that people shouldn't expect their partners to be faithful, but rather that couples should try to maintain an open and honest dialogue about their feelings and their relationship.
If our partners trust us enough to admit that they find someone else attractive, we might just be able to trust them enough to believe them when they say they won't act on this attraction. The more open we are with each other, the cleaner and more resilient our relationships become. Conversely, the more comfortable we become with keeping secrets, the more likely we become to tell bigger and bigger lies.
When an affair occurs, denial is an act of deception that works to preserve the fantasy that everything is okay. Admitting that something is not okay or that you are looking for something outside the relationship is information that your partner deserves to know. Emotions sprung from deception (like suspicion and anger) can tear a relationship apart, but more importantly they can truly hurt another person by shattering their sense of truth.
Psychologist and author Shirley Glass wrote in her book "Not 'Just Friends'":
Relationships are contingent on honesty and openness. They are built and maintained through our faith that we can believe what we are being told. However painful it is for a betrayed spouse to discover a trail of sexual encounters or emotional attachments, the lying and deception are the most appalling violations.
An ideal relationship is built on trust, openness, mutual respect and personal freedom. But real freedom comes with making a choice, not just about who we are with but how we will treat that person. Choosing to be honest with a partner every day is what keeps love real. And truly choosing that partner every day by one's own free will is what makes love last. So while freedom to choose is a vital aspect of any healthy and honest union, deception is the third party that should never be welcome in a relationship.
He's sexually "inappropriate." He lies about it for a while, but gets busted anyway. He apologizes to everyone he's hurt, mostly his wife.
Can you guess whom I'm talking about?
The joke is that men often think with the wrong head. But with all the high-profile sexual misadventures of late -- Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Rep. Christopher Lee -- it's hard not to struggle with the word "think," as in were they thinking?
And now, add New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to the list.
It's baffling how any politician would continue to engage in the kind of shenanigans Weiner admitted to Monday--that he had "inappropriate" online exchanges with at least six women in the past three years. But the past is the past and for the 46-year-old Weiner, the unmarried past. But then there's the lewd photo he Tweeted to a college student in Seattle last month, which he repeatedly lied about for the past 10 days.
Okay, I get (but don't condone) the lying -- it's embarrassing because the photo was meant to be private, and who wants to get caught with his pants down (or with a big ol' erection in your tight undies)? Very few of us would come clean on the first questioning. And you have to appreciate a guy who has a sense of humor in his online lust. In one photo allegedly emailed to a young thing, Weiner is on a couch with two cats nearby. The subject line -- "Me and the pussys."
Weiner says he never met any of his online flirts, and he says his wife of barely a year, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, knew about some of his online escapades, although not the latest one. Tellingly, perhaps, she wasn't by his side at the tearful press conference. Weiner said "we have no intention of splitting up over this" and that she told him "we're going to get through this" as a couple, but she wasn't quite standing by her man.
Whether Weiner should resign or not isn't the question here. The question here is, does Weiner's sexting qualify as cheating?
Yvonne Thomas, a Los Angeles psychologist, would say yes. "When you're going outside the boundaries of what you're supposed to share, emotionally and physically, only with your partner, cheating is cheating is cheating," she says.
For Sexorcist columnist Michael Alvear, co-host of HBO's The Sex Inspectors, "sexting is not the new lipstick on the collar. It's the application of lipstick before you get it on the shirt. As such, sexting doesn't qualify as a fling." But he's quick to add it's stretching marital vows "to the breaking point."
On a CafeMoms forum, more women than not say they consider sexting cheating, although a few mention whatever you call it, it's wrong. At the online dating site PlentyofFish's forum, one wise commenter writes, "If your SO [significant other] would be deeply hurt, ticked off or kick you to the curb for doing it ... what difference does it make what you call it. Get permission first."
Since Weiner repeatedly apologized to his wife at Monday's press conference -- and one would have to presume even more earnestly in private -- it's likely he didn't exactly have her permission. But that she knew of his sexting history before marrying him doesn't make her "partly responsible" either, as MSNBC's Chris Matthews said. Like most newlyweds, she probably thought he'd stop that nonsense.
So, if Weiner never had any sort of physical contact with the women he'd been sexting, what, exactly has he done? He flirted, he teased, he talked dirty and he sent pictures of various body parts to presumably willing, of-age recipients. In fact, he's been doing what20 percent to 39 percent of America's teenagers admit to doing. Do you dump someone for that?
Chatting is not cheating, or so John Portmann, assistant professor of religious studies at the Unversity of Virginia, says in an essay by the same title in his book In Defense of Sin."The Internet has not given us a new way to have sex, but rather an absorbing new way to talk about sex. Distinguishing between flirting and infidelity will show that talking dirty, whether on the Internet or on the phone, does not amount to having sex."
The problem with the kind of constant online sexual banter Weiner has been engaging in, a sort of reciprocal crush at a distance, is that it "intensifies this type of relationship and promotes its distortion," says Michael J. Formica in his Enlightened Living blog at Psychology Today. In a weird way, emotional infidelity is safe -- there's a perception that you're not actually "doing" anything so you can't get "caught," even if there are a handful of women with photos of your junk in their inbox. But Abedin and every other partner who's had to deal with a sexting spouse are, he says, "in the curious position of experiencing all of the hurt, anger and sense of rejection associated with an affair, while the 'cheater' shrugs it off and 'doesn't get it.'"
I imagine Weiner "gets" it now.
Here are some leaked nude photos that have been heating up Indonesia in recent days. Oh yeah! It is Tarra Nadhira Hindersah, a cute and sexy Indonesian college girl of Binus University (also known as Bina Nusantara) an university in Jakarta, Indonesia. You have feel somewhat sorry for her having her private photos leaked and the resulting national scandal in a Islamic country because she seems like a nice girl and I am not just saying that because she has big beautiful boobs. Seriously, she is truly a good person who volunteer her free time to help poor children to read according to her blog. And now she is famous for all the wrong reasons... The story is Tarra Nadhira took these camwhoring pictures of herself and uploaded them to her Facebook profile where they were made public accidentally or her account was hacked. That is the story but I would bet it was her boyfriend who shared the nude set of photos with one too many or a ex-boyfriend seeking revenge. Anyway, her Facebook page is now gone but it is too late... The photos only recent became famous but the truth is the set were leaked much earlier and as been circulating on the Internet since before 07-14-2010.
So it is somewhat interesting that she was still a regular student at a private university as late as mid-January 2011. However she is now nationally famous for this scandal after the nude photos were recently posted by a user to a forum on a popular human rights website serving Indonesia. And the Indonesian government is now even rumored to have suspended and/or shutting down several local websites where users uploaded these explicit pictures. But the people in the country are still searching like crazy to see Tarra Nadhira in the nude. This is a list of some of the hottest search term killing Google search for the past two weeks:
tarra nadhira , thara nadhira , tharra nadhira , tara nadhira, thara nadira, tarra nadhira hindersah, Tarra Nadhira facebook, tarra nadhira video, tarra nadhira bugil, foto tarra nadhira, tarra nadhira foto, tarra nadira, Tharra Nadhira Hindersah, tharra nadira, tarra nadhira download, video tarra nadhira, tara nadira, full foto tarra nadhira, Foto Bugil Tarra Nadhira, tara nadhira bugil, tarra nadhira blog, download foto tarra nadhira hindersah, tarra nadhira hindersah facebook, tara nadhira facebook
Local website are not only get shutdown but also she is crashing blogs, forums and other websites all over Indonesia due to the heavy web traffic of web surfers horny for her naked photos. It is so insane many website used up their monthly bandwidth in the first five days of March. LOL... This chick as gone viral in her country so she deserve some international exposure as well. And we are here to provide... In most of these pictures she is sporting a winter bush that will make natural lovers go wild. But not to worry if you are into shaved muff because Tarra Nadhira was kinda enough to photographed her vagina after a fresh shave too. And if that is not good enoght, the rumor is there is a video to go along with these pics so we have something to look forward to but until then here is Tarra in he glory. BTW, her last entry was Sunday, January 16, 2011 right before the storm and this is her blog "another silly day another silly me." Enjoy! Click on pictures to enlarge.
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