Is fidelity a virtue or a weakness?

Let me turn some ideas around.

For some people sexual faithfulness is the easiest faithfulness to keep, but they betray their partner in many different ways not always less destructive than infidelity. When people stay in a destructive relationship, and they are not imprisoned, it begs to question: Is this an act of fidelity, of faithfulness?

If people are aggressive or fighting with each other, if they’re addicted to each other, if they each have a mountain of judgments that stick their wings to the wall like a butterfly and prevent them from moving, if there is the inversion of their passion that has now taken the place of love, are they still faithful? At that moment we wonder is it fidelity or weakness? A lack of courage? Or is it boldness, audaciousness, or affirmation of oneself? Usually, infidelity is vilified as an evasion of morality and a lack of control of one’s instinct, an egoistic act that doesn’t take into account the established order and that breaks the existing commitment. It’s a flaw. And yet without infidelity nothing would be thrown into question, into movement. No creation of a disorder in order to prepare a new order. We wouldn’t be able to evolve.

Some writers define infidelity as anything that occurs between a married person and someone other than a spouse that lessens the intimacy and increases the emotional distance between the spouses. But such definition fails to take into account the many other ways that partners can emotionally leave each other.

Infidelity is not only a betrayal or a form of abandonment it can also be an opportunity.