Infidelity

Anyone can search the internet for some top ten reasons why women and men cheat. Curiously left out of the blame is the role of our societal norms and their roots in puritanical protestant dogma. We court (hopefully) and develop relationships around explicit and implied social expectations. The expectation of monogamy, for example, is well established in our social programming. Whatever an individual’s sexual variation is, there is still the tendency to form exclusive pairs. We are no different. We wrote vows around our commitment to each other and decreed those pledges under witness of friends and family. Like countless others, we tested those vows as we tried to find our purpose in the world and we both dealt and suffered wounds in the process.

Early in our marriage, we can say that Kaleda was concerned for partner/ family centric life. One focused on building security and prosperity within the conventional model- home, career, family, recreation. Bailie, however, was concerned with legacy and purpose. He aimed to avoid all the tropes of convention aka ‘the real world’ with the goal of destroying the benchmark of mediocrity that he saw as a sort of cage. Of course, our younger selves could not articulate these differences and conflict abounded.

Contrary to the political notion that men and women are equal, the biological differences are extreme and should be treated with care and investigation into the different patterns that we owe our sex. The manner in which we in America are educated about sex is alarmingly void of the primary catalyst for sex and kinks- pleasure. Dr. David Page of the Whitehead Institute at MIT notes that there is as much genetic difference between a man and a woman as there is a human and chimpanzee. Kaleda and Baile fell into the stereotypical pattern of sex, less and less.