I have always found the way some men lose their heads over infidelity to be, at least in part, a failure to understand the human condition. There is nothing pleasant about betrayal, yet there is also nothing about being loved that suddenly places a person beyond the reach of temptation, weakness or poor judgment. The mistake, I believe, lies in the elevation. Many men place their partners on pedestals, imagining them incapable of the very flaws that make them human. Love encourages this illusion. It persuades people that the person before them is somehow different, somehow exempt from the impulses and contradictions that govern everyone else. And when reality eventually collides with that illusion, they mourn the betrayal; much more than that, they mourn the image they had constructed. The shock from the act itself is devastating, yes, but the deadlier shock comes from the realization that the person they thought incapable of such a thing was, all along, simply human.
