A
female
age
30-35,
anonymous
writes:How come less and less people have self restraint these days? There are so many instances about people cheating on their bf/gf, students sleeping with teachers and most recently an acquaintance of mine who slept with her sister's husband. Why does this happen? I have fallen for off-limits men as well, but I never acted on it. Not just because of the potential negative consequences, but also because I have my morals and values. I used to assume most people were like this, until more and more people in my social circle began betraying their partners, breaking the law and ruining their family. By crossing the line --well the line as it is in my opinion-- I would be betraying myself. But I wonder how this works for other people. Am I just being old fashioned here? Reply to this Question
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female
reader, Miamine  +, writes (11 March 2012):
 Everyone keeps on talking about some mythical golden age where everyone was moral, kind and never did anything wrong...
Ummmmm.. what golden age was that, maybe during the Victorian age, which was rife with prostitution and syphilis, or maybe we is talking about the 1950's, where men had affairs and women took Valium and rape is marriage was legal and child abuse was common, tell me when was everyone faithful and good?
You have your morality, that's the only important thing. Let other people worry about themselves and what they are doing. I made myself a promise a long time ago, to try not to judge other people and never say never... you are still young, who knows what life will bring to you. It's the people who claim that they wouldn't cheat, or never would consider an abortion, that come to me in secret and tell me that's exactly what they done.
Life can be hard and people make all kinds of mistakes. It's great that you haven't faced such challenges yet. Check Dear cupid archives for women sleeping with married men... so many of them say "I'm not that kind of woman, I never thought I'd do something like this..."
Life hasn't changed at all.. until you are old and grey you can't really make judgements about everyone. My uncle, the gentlest man you could ever know, wouldn't hurt a fly... until he reached 60 and got into a fight and killed some guy. Just live as best as you can and let other people do their own thing. Life has a way of making fools of many people.
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female
reader, anonymous, writes (11 March 2012): NO your not old fasioned but you are trying to say you are perfect and your actually not!!!as i am not either. Morals values judge your own not others.
spunky monkey
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female
reader, adamantine  +, writes (9 March 2012):
 I don't think you're old fashioned.
I have never cheated on my boyfriend and would never even dream of it, and he has never cheated on me.
I think if one truly loves and respects another, they would never do that. There has to be an issue within the relationship for those thoughts to even be occurring, and that needs to be addressed before anything happens.
Some people are just very blase when it comes to relationships, and all they care about is themselves. Loving someone and committing to someone often involves putting their needs before your own - its a selfless act of love, and it's rare to find.
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male
reader, anonymous, writes (8 March 2012): I don't think it's a case of these things occurring more now than in the past.It's just that it's not as damning to a person's life as it once was so people aren't troubling as much to hide it.If a person cheats, they are a cheater... big deal, there are many worse things a person can be in this world. Children are dying all over the planet from starvation and you want me to care about someone I don't even know sleeping around.That is just an example of modern mindsets.When it comes down to it... most people are told to seize the day, to live in the now... and the problem with that is almost all actions you can take in any situation WILL have negative effects.You find a person attractive and you wish to have sex with them because of that? Seize the day, what does it matter if that person is involved or you are? We have to live in the now. Consequences are not now, they are later.Perhaps in the past we were more weary of consequences and weighed it all up before making dumb decisions that would result in overwhelmingly negative ones.Perhaps out perspective is simply skewed because the media loves to highlight the flaws in people's relationships publicly than most of the more pressing concerns around the world.Flynn 24
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reader, anonymous, writes (8 March 2012): i personally would never EVER cheat or sleep with someone who was married or had a bf under any circumstances.. i have been pissed off my face and been able to turn down womens advances when i was dating other women.. there is no excuse for cheating and people who cant show some self control disgust me
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reader, Honeypie + ♥, writes (6 March 2012):
 I have to say I agree with you.
I see a LOT of people (at any age mind you) throw common sense and moral out the window.
I think amoral behavior was always fairly common though, it just seems like these days it is not frowned upon as much.
Stick to YOUR morals and values and you can't go wrong. Just because the others run around like lemmings doesn't mean you have to jump off the cliff with them.
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reader, anonymous, writes (6 March 2012): I'm going to mention the obvious and probably get slammed for it. It's not just that people care less about keeping their transgressions secret. It's that society has gotten so secular and individualistic that a lot of these transgressions aren't even seen as immoral anymore. Morality is all relative now, with no universal right or wrong, no sense that any action might have eternal consequences. For many people, a thing is only "wrong" if you can go to jail for it. As long as it doesn't really hurt anyone and you're likely to get away with it, then nothing is off limits, not even an affair.
Religion is being forced out of the public square and replaced with an equally religious devotion to individual freedom... the idea that "I can do whatever I want and no one has any right to tell me I shouldn't or to force their own morality on me." Taken to extremes, this produces a society of people all fiercely asserting their own rights, with no sense of responsibility to anything outside themselves. People become hyper-vigilant against any perceived threat to their freedom. Personal freedom becomes an end in itself, with no obligation to use that freedom for good.
Another recent change is humans coming to see themselves as nothing but highly evolved animals, or talking apes. We've adopted a very "reductionist" view of our species which wants to reduce things like love, spirituality, conscience, righteousness, etc., to chemical reactions in the brain or the accidental products of evolution. Of course if you're an animal, then any denial of your basic instincts must then be "unnatural". Self-control and self-denial go against eons of evolution. (Maybe that's why thin people in the media are now so vilified, while fat is seen as normal.) The idea is to just go with what your body wants. Do what your instincts tell you to do, what evolution is pushing you to do, or what your hormones and gender are making you do. Once that takes hold, ideas like monogamy being unnatural or that porn is a basic life need start to spread and even make sense. Very little is expected of an animal. All you need to fulfill your biological imperative is to consume food, defecate, reproduce, and seek pleasure. This is the only morality that a lot of people live by. Their definition of a good person would be someone who doesn't hurt or kill anyone else.
It used to be that everyone in the society held more or less the same beliefs. There was general agreement on values and much more social pressure to lead an upstanding, moral life. Now it's a free-for-all, with everyone having very divergent views and little agreement on morality. The idea that right and wrong even exist at all is up for debate.
Does that answer your question?
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reader, CindyCares  +, writes (6 March 2012):
 I think you are just being a pessimist :).
Nothing new under the sun, these things always existed, they were just kept a bit more under wraps.
Read the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio . It wsa written in 1350, it's a collection of tales taken from, or inspired to, real life episodes,- the highbrow equivalent of today's tabloids - it's brimming with friars sleeping with nuns, cuckolded husbands, in-laws seducing each other,gentlewomen sleping with their valets and servants etc.etc.
Read the immortal chapter V of Dante's Inferno ( 13th century !) - Paolo and Francesca, the two doomed unfortunate lovers, condemned to wander around together ,windswept for the eternity, were two really existed people and they were brothers in law.
People has always been up to a ot of shenanigans, it's just that today they care less about keeping them secret.
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reader, anonymous, writes (6 March 2012): Greater access to other people and easy availability of the means to get caught up in this kind of stuff.
Before mobile phones, internet chat and social networking we had to physically meet people in order to develop relationships with others, now we can do so without even getting out of bed, just turn on our laptops and we have access to hundreds of millions of people.
person12345 is right too OP. The media has changed. It has made it more acceptable to cheat and do these things.
Think of the effect that Sex and the City has had, there is a hell of a lot of academic study put forth into it. The rise of feminism has made it okay for women to do traditionally masculine things. Sleep around, get with married men and become the hunter instead of the prey.
Capitalism and patriarchal democracies then espouse the "virtues" of stepping over others to make money, that greed is a good thing and selfishness is more important than being good to others. That is the very nature of capitalism sure.
There are lots of reasons but I have to say feeble mindedness, easy access and greed would be the top two that I see. Even people with your moral fortitude can very often be caught up in something that started off innocently but then grew into a moral corruption. A married man who became a nice acquaintance, gets closer to you online, sends messages, eventually your feelings take over, you know it's wrong but god you want him so badly you just can't let go, you won't do anything, you swear to yourself you won't cross that line but in that moment it feels so right and you just need to have him. Even the strongest of people can fall prey to their emotions OP, nobody is perfect and we all have our weaknesses, it's much easier to be morally clean when you don't have temptation knocking on your door with such ease.
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reader, person12345 +, writes (6 March 2012):
 There are a lot of theories why instances of cheating are rising. One is that we interact with more people more frequently. With all the ways to contact people we otherwise wouldn't, phones, texts, email, video chats, and of course Facebook, there's just more opportunity to stray.
The fact that people get married a lot later is playing a part too. There's more freedom to date and mess around as a young person, so a) more people are available and b) people feel more entitled to some amount of casual sex before settling down.
The media has changed a lot too. While people used to have nuclear family media shoved down their throats, now most media shows tons of casual sex with friends and relative strangers as the norm, when it isn't. But like all things in the media, people begin to set it as their norm to strive for.
Internet pornography is also thought to play a part due to warping people's senses of what normal sexual behavior is. In porn everyone has sex with everyone all the time. So you see a world where you think the norm is that everyone is out having sex with a different person every week, when the reality is that the average number of sex partners for a man is around 6 and for a woman it's around 4.
You also have people in a lot of countries generally reporting lower levels of happiness in general, largely from work. Especially in the US, people are now expected to work much longer hours than before. So not only are people spending more time with coworkers than before, they are also just more stressed and unhappy in general, which can lead a person to stray.
There's no single explanation, it's just a lot of things happening in a changing culture (this is an example of negative things obviously though) and these are just a few of the things cited.
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male
reader, xnickx +, writes (6 March 2012):
 You're not being old fashioned - I'm atleast 4 years younger than you, and I can tell you the vast majority of my friends in college are huge sticklers on this.
Honestly, if we find out one of us cheats, guy or girl, they slowly die out of the group, because to be honest, if someone isn't honest in a situation like that, how can you trust them in other matters?
My best friend in college is in a 4year relationship, my other friend is in a 5 year, and I'm in a 1 year with a girl from back home, and i drive back 100mis every weekend to see her.
So no, you are not old fashioned, i suppose it has to deal more with your social group and what their personal social norms are.
Nick.
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reader, anonymous, writes (6 March 2012): People never did live by the morals they preached. They just used to work a bit harder at hiding it than they do today.
If it seems like you are encountering more moral laxity today than in the past, look to your age. You (and your peers) are getting older. That means everyone has less restraint caused by shyness and it means you find out about more drama that used to be kept secret from kids.
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reader, anonymous, writes (6 March 2012): I am with you, I too have morals and have fallen for off-limits men, but never acted upon it. I am interested in what people think also. Personally I think that it comes down selfishness and a lack of respect for others as to why people do it, but I could be wrong.
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