An End/Beginning of Year Update (Section 2)

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

I won't argue with this if it's your personal viewpoint of what is important in a marriage. But I don't think you have any ground to stand on if you insist this applies to everyone's marriages in general. I'm just saying that from my POV refusing sex on a long-term basis and sex outside the marriage are opposite sides of the same coin. I don't consider the immediacy of the effect to be the pivotal difference. Nor do I consider the inability to "undo" an exclusivity to be pivotal. Those are your constructs, and one could come up with other reasonable-sounding constructs which would lead to different conclusions.

I still see in this an American value judgement, that enduring long-term celibacy or forcing it on your spouse is more wholesome than having an affair. Refusing to have sex in a marriage is also a breaking of vows, at least implicit ones.

So, you are speaking from your experience of being cheated upon by your wife in your marriage? Or are you speaking from your experience of cheating on your wife in your marriage?

You see, unless you've done one or experienced the other (or both), you are (at best) guessing what it would be like for you if you actually had to address one situation or the other. Maybe the reality of it actually happening might match (for you)
what you think about strictly as a hypothetical. That, however, has not been my experience with friends and acquaintances that have dealt with marriage infidelity.

While I know you've repeatedly painted this as an American value judgment, it can also be viewed that your own inaction and lack of freedom (to have sex outside of your marriage) is rooted in geography. That is, if only you lived in France or Italy, you could have your marriage and your sex outside of marriage, too.

You do know that you can move to those places, don't you? There is a process you'd have to go through, but if my son can do that, so can you.

So, here is the ground I stand upon....

I have been cheated on in my first marriage. I have my own experience of what that is like, both the immediacy of the impact and the more drawn out part about seeing if a marriage is salvageable that ultimately ends in divorce. I've got both my childhood experience of what that was like and my experience as an adult. I can say that my experience as a child and young adult with the effects of infidelity on the family unit had little to do with my viewing it through a lens of an American value judgment (unless my mom and dad should live together as a family is a uniquely American value judgment). Your experience is....???

In a marriage where there is no sex for a long time, being "faithful" doesn't really have meaning. By that definition, any celibate person is faithful to the pope, or anyone else, because he could say "I'm not having sex with anyone else." So a celibate person is exclusive to everyone, and is therefore the purest of the pure.

You have a conflation of religiosity with reference to that Pope that, for me, is not real. Actually, it does have meaning. Yes, I am (like you) in a legally recognized relationship that has as part of it's vows and in it's legal underpinnings an exclusivity in sexual relationships. And while you can make some valid claim that has some basis in "religion" it is not exclusively religious or entirely based with religious values. While you may have an agreement/arrangement with your spouse that rules out exclusivity, the legal underpinnings don't, nor are they required, to recognize it.

So I would disagree with the logic your reasoning implies, that in a marriage where one partner refuses sex, and the other partner has an affair in response, the denying partner can stand on holy ground and accuse the other partner of doing worse.

See above, there is nothing about standing on holy ground. There is a choice in pursuing the dissolution of a marriage on the basis of the absence of sex. An affair might complicate that, even if it is "justified" in the way that you seem to be justifying it.

And yes, I'm aware that the second partner could instead have divorce. Which any dunce can think of. And what difference does that make if the affair results in divorce anyway? Oh, yes, the exclusivity was maintained until the divorce. I could see that provides legal protection, but I don't see the point otherwise.

I know you have the answer to this from your vast experience of cheating, being cheated upon, and going through divorce. While a shallow answer is it provides legal protection, the difference is much deeper than that. It is a choice of action that defines who you are. And the proof is that it matters to you.

Time for me to go running again.

The Captain