Post Date December, 03 2023
A few days ago, I saw a very interesting joke online: "According to my analysis, the fundamental cause of extramarital love is marriage!" This joke also said "quite reasonable". The fact that there is no marriage, there is no occurrence of extramarital love. High school philosophy also said that quantitative change is a necessary preparation for qualitative change, and qualitative change is an inevitable result of quantitative change, right?
1. One-sided public opinion
These extramarital jokes are "deeply popular" not because they are right, but largely because of the recent article "Going Red in Asia, Going Global" about Ma Yili's marriage. The plot is always clich é d, except that the male protagonist and female protagonist have a happy and happy family, as well as cute and obedient children. Later on, for some unknown reason, the male protagonist found a mistress and was stabbed by entertainment records. Then, the male protagonist and mistress were bombarded with various ethical and moral criticisms. In short, the entire public opinion is one-sided, denouncing the shamelessness of the male lead and the mistress, and regretting the innocence of the female lead and the children.
2. Behaviors and Ideas
Unlike other creatures on the earth, we humans generally follow monogamy. As a male protagonist who has lived in human society for at least 30 years, he is not unaware of this, and he is also well aware that the general ethics and morals of society do not allow him to cheat. So I believe that, especially in the early stages of infidelity, the article must have gone through a cognitive dissonance process that may be long or short.
The theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that if a person's thoughts and behaviors are uncoordinated, they either change their behavior to match their thoughts or change their thoughts to match their own behavior. It is obvious that the article adopted the latter, otherwise he would not have cheated. (Note that the idea here is that betraying a partner is not good, while the behavior here is infidelity.) People who cheat may feel guilty for their actions, but they will then change their cognition, which means changing their original thinking and "making the big thing small" by cheating, in order to make their conscience feel better.
3. To deceive oneself
Cognitive dissonance can cause people who cheat to develop feelings of disgust towards themselves, but it does not hinder some people from knowingly committing it, as they will find ways to change their thoughts and dilute the mistake of cheating. Just like smokers who know they can cause cancer, but for the sake of their inner well-being, they will refute and say, "Look at an old leader who smokes and doesn't live to be 100 years old." "The cigarettes I smoke are good and contain relatively low levels of harmful substances. In this way, their sense of guilt will decrease and their inner feelings will be much better. In fact, it is just deceiving their own brain.
4. External temptation
Some people say that the article's infidelity is because Ma Yili is too powerful, and we, the people who do not know the truth, naturally do not understand the inside story and are not good at commenting on anything. However, by appropriately reducing many demands on our partners and reducing the need for self-expression (female men and strong women should pay attention), we can also better maintain our marriage.
In the process of marriage, there will inevitably be many temptations from the outside world, and the threat to marriage can only be sustained by both spouses. If you want to avoid potential temptations from the outside world, not only to avoid each other, but also to avoid being tempted, then maintaining strong enough love between yourself and your partner, investing more time and other resources in marriage, can help everyone not be distracted by them. Research has shown that the key to making a partner blind to others or subjectively reducing their attractiveness in their partner's eyes is to enhance mutual affection.
