Somewhere on the series of tubes this week I encountered the term “micro-cheating” and thought “hmmm, that sounds like I could get a post out of it.”
And here it is. But it’s not the post I thought I was going to write.
I thought it would be about closeness in general. I was prepared to rebut a position that any closeness with a member of the opposite sex who is not my wife was inappropriate and “micro-cheating.”
But, no. That would be an intelligent response to a sincere, but inadvertently wrong-headed, article. The actual piece itself is silly and essentially useless, containing gems like:
“…listing a ‘friend’ under a code name in your phone…”
and
“If your partner is hiding any aspect of their relationship with someone else — say, if they close Gmail the minute you walk into the room — that could be a sign that something’s amiss.”
Is this really a hair we need split for us now? If I think my “friend” needs an alias, or if my inclination is to hide email from my wife, do I really need to read in an article that I just might be doing something wrong?
“The top signs are secrecy and deception.”
Wow! A revelatory insight, indeed.
We need to cease the apparently-comforting-to-some fiction that morality is some hopelessly complex continuum, responsive to endless dissection and interpretation. There are some things that truly are morally ambiguous, but they aren’t dilemmas we generally encounter day to day. You know the difference between right and wrong. Do you actually need some nitwit with a fancy title coining a Newspeak term for something before you know you shouldn’t do it?
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