The Touchy Taboo Topic Of Affairs

Human Nature vs Social Creation

The topic of marriage has come up a few times in class. Also love. And of course...affairs. The big A word. We have a few characters in situations where their love clashes with the socially manufactured idea of marriage.

I don't like to judge people in affairs. I would like to think that the situation is very simple on some level and super complex on another level. Both at the same time. I will say this for certain: I have never met a perfectly happy person leading a perfectly wonderful life with a perfectly wonderful relationship who has cheated. So, I guess, if you could just meet that criteria you could ensure the likelihood of cheating or being cheated upon is slim to none.

Being a part of the rest of the world I would like to look at a couple books from class with affairs in them and make a final statement about the nature of affairs, which is similar to the nature of marriage, nature of love, nature of human beings.

Goethe's young Werther is madly in love with a spoken for woman. I doubt that this relationship is entirely in Werther's mind and I think that his little friend-girl has contributed to the burning passion in Werther.

Elizabeth Smart's narrator has a sexy affair with a married man. She tells us this love story in one of the most poetic writings I have ever come across. (By the end of her novel I want to sleep with her. Perhaps out of vanity and wanting to hear her say those things about me!)

It is hard for me to judge the narrators in these works. They seem to operate from a different perspective as the rest of us. Werther is consumed by his burning desire as is Elizabeth. There is no comfortable way to stand in judgement of these two characters as we need to be able to understand where they are coming from. I think that once we understand that we can accept what they do. I don't think we should promote what they do but perhaps on some level we ought to.

The narrators are following their emotions. They are remaining true to their feelings. Werther is eventually contained and extinguished for being too much out of society. For these two characters we have to consider that their personal passions were outside of society's view of morality. I do not know that they are better than or higher than that morality, just that they are outside of it. They are not to be measured by the same measuring stick is what I am trying to say.

We created this limitation of marriage and we work to preserve it. Every now and then someone like Werther or Smart comes along and I have to wonder if we can fault them for not agreeing to the socially constructed notion of marriage. Personally, I am on the side of the truthful and passionate person, no matter how immoral or rebellious they seem. There is a sweet attraction to the honesty with which they live.