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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (40437)	6/13/1999 10:47:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 108807

Internet romances when at least one of the parties is married: infidelity, or not? Sounds like a good topic for a talk show. One thing that I think might be relevant to the discussion is a study I read, that married men find the marriage is more threatened when their wives engage in purely physical relationships with other man, than when their wives become emotionally committed to other men; vice versa for women, they find the marriage more threatened when their husbands become emotionally committed to other women than when they engage in purely physical relationships with other women. So it depends on who's complaining. My sister's husband has been involved in an internet flirtation/romance with a woman who lives a couple of thousand miles away, for more than a year. It really bothers her, and he won't give it up, even though he has never met the woman. He talks to her on the phone, and has sent her a CD and a book, which really, really bothers my sister. I have known two marriages which were broken up by consummated internet relationships. Having a crush on someone you meet over the Internet can be more satisfying, intellectually, and emotionally, than having a crush on someone that you meet at work or socially, because writing to each other can be very pleasurable if the other person is a good writer. Those of us who like to post on SI are obviously people who like to write. And we are probably all much handsomer in cyberspace than in real life.

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (40437)	6/13/1999 10:49:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 108807

An interesting question, to which I have no real answers, except to say that I wouldn't want to judge any case except by its own merits. I'm sure that others among us will not hesitate to come up with absolutist statements. Perhaps the most interesting part of it will be the opportunity to observe as a new item in our code of conduct gets defined, and as a social consensus emerges around us. This will teach us a fair bit about our perceptions of right and wrong. Of course even the old issues of married people and sexual intention, or flirting, or other forms of non-physical sexual conduct has yet to be defined, so a new ingredient may only complicate matters. Almost everybody flirts to some perceptible degree; it is deeply encoded in our genes. Most married people will flirt more when their spouses aren't around. Is this deception, intent to start or explore the possibility of an affair? Or is it simply a practical mrthod of avoiding recrimination? Is sexual talk over the internet actually sex, and a betrayal of vows, or merely an advanced form of flirtation? Wrong or right? Depends on who you ask, I suppose. Certainly safer than a real-word affair, if nothing else....

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (40437)	6/14/1999 12:03:00 AM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 108807

anyone have an opinion? Sure do! It's not cheating as long as you know it's not serious and it doesn't damage your life relationships. Any more than reading steamy romance novels is cheating.

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (40437)	6/14/1999 3:30:00 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Sidney, dear, (you handsome thing, you!,lol!) did you address that question to me because of my outrageous albeit ludicrous behavior during the Beltane festivities, and because you think I may once again make a fool of myself during those for the Summer Solstice? Well, I am deeply offended, I must say! <g> Are you including among your concerns the Beltane species of jolly and only so very mildly naughty mock-flirtation? I mean, if you are, do keep it in perspective: All us funloving sillies were pretending to dart behind bushes and climb trees and talk Elizabethan and seduce one another in normal post text while whispering [in brackets, sotto voce] to assembled imagined rivals and push one another into fountains and pretending to conspire in the Private Meadow and doling out lavish hilarious and usually duplicitous compliments, and, of course, infidelity and betrayal and double entendres were worse than rampant, they were required for the laughs they produced; and I, myself, managed to obtain, over the objections of a very strict tree nymph, the lease to a luxury penttreehouse overlooking the vast fairgrounds for which (I am particularly proud of this) the U.S. Government (with your taxes!) has agreed to pay all maintenance costs, and what's more, to transport, beechtree and all, also at Government expense, to whatever site the next revel is located. (I thought of this to foil the fair Lady Edwarda from thwarting my penttreehouse advantages by changing venues, even though I did bestow on her a key, that ungrateful strumpet!) In a rivalrous fit of pique, I am ashamed to admit, I scrubbed down the Fountain and shined the abundant statuary on the grounds with Lady Fox's discarded yellow sundress. Somone else threw a large animal of some sort at a rival of his, and I won't even go into the humiliation that ensued! So... Sidney, I evoke the mood of Beltane so you can see that the spirit behind it is of playfulness and absurdity and the most defensible and lovely naughtiness, or parody naughtiness, not that of serious adulterous assignations, and no step toward the destruction of our marriages. As for the internet as a place for the setting up of real rendezvous, I guess my reaction is that it's one among many. Different people will use it differently. Some will find their true love there. Some will get their hearts broken, and their marriages. (I have two friends who've been married three times each, though, and had, between them, dozens of lovers, and the internet had nothing to do with it; in a way, plus ca change.) But of course, just as cars and coeducation and women joining men-not-their-husbands in the workplace and birth control and feminism have all required that we learn new, self-protective mores, so will the internet; and some will devise sound new rules for themselves better and quicker than others, and some will use it while others get used by it. What do you think, yourself, Sidney?