Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Terminating The Contract

Some societal values and mores remain constant. Particularly those of a partnership in life between a man and a woman.

Most women would very much hope that their husband's attention would not go astray in regard for the allure that other women might hold for them. Most men would prefer to believe that their wives remain constant to them. Each has, through their marriage vows, undertaken the traditional assurances that they will be 'true' to one another, 'through sickness and in health'.

Love, or a common purpose, both physical and social, has brought them together. To live their days together in companionship and mutual dedication to one another's well-being. And, if their intention is to raise a family, to do it in tandem, so that the children born of their relationship will know emotional comfort and security within the family their parents have created.

This is, of course, the idealization of the marriage contract and the family compact.

Reality is often otherwise, with something in the neighbourhood of 47% of marriages failing somewhere along the way. Sometimes the failure of a marriage is a result of simple incompatibility, an inability to agree, to find satisfaction with one another's constant company. And often enough, marriage failure results from strictures one of the pair cannot live within, imposed upon them by the other.

And then, of course, infidelity.

People are given to committing acts of sexual dalliance, often against their better judgement. Of course there are those men who are natural Lotharios who find it personally too difficult to surrender to a reality that precludes all other women but one's wife. And the gender counterpart where curiosity, or surrender by a woman to a desire to experience sex with someone other than her husband.

Human lives are various and human nature complex. People make choices they later regret; this forms part of the human tragedy. There are consequences for every action undertaken that grates against the grain of accepted practise. And, generally speaking, lies and artifice will be revealed sooner or later, and that proverbial piper waits in the wings.

The other thing about human nature, however, is that we have a tendency to lay blame elsewhere than with ourselves.

Our decisions to embark on an emotional, physical journey that will take us away from what we value, and when we are faced with the consequences, we refuse to accept responsibility. Some agency other than ourselves is held to be responsible for the consequences of actions that we undertook of free will.

So it is, that a 35-year-old woman, Gabriella Nagy of Toronto, has launched a $600,000 lawsuit against Rogers Wireless Inc.

This will do nothing to repair her shattered life, but it may help her ego, and it would certainly help her bottom line. Her marriage has been destroyed. Her husband, having suspected his wife was having an affair, discovered incriminating evidence through checking her cellphone invoice.

"My life is beyond repair. It was a mistake. I rectified it and learned from it, but I will carry it for the rest of my life", bemoaned Ms. Nagy. Yes, yes, no, no, and yes.

What she did to herself, to her husband, to her children was, in fact of her own volition. Her choice to do as she would. But she has also chosen to brood balefully to reach the conclusion that she was a victim in this sad story that she herself engineered. Her husband's consolidation of their communications billing was a practical household choice.

That the telecommunications company recommended and acceded to the change was routine business.

That this enabled her husband to determine that his wife, the mother of their two children, was being unfaithful to him was unfortunately circumstantial. The opportunity was there, he took advantage of it. In her turn, she would likely have done the same thing.

We are suspicious creatures, we humans, particularly when we feel we have good reason. When Ms. Nagy's husband telephoned a number that seemed doubtful to him, he spoke with the man with whom his wife had just concluded an affair.

"The affair was over. The thing that really hurt me is that it all came out not through my own doing", she claimed. And she is wrong, dead wrong. This was all, all of it, her doing.

Now she laments her broken marriage, her lack of self-esteem, her inability to perform in the workplace. But this was not the responsibility of a telecommunications company, nor did they engage in nefarious machinations to ensure such an event would occur.

It would appear, on the evidence, that Ms. Nagy is in a suspended state of immature denial. This is her life and she is wilfully awarding herself a failing grade.

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