America's Moral Dilemna: Real or Imagined?!?

Perhaps you can sense it. The struggle that most people experience in life around relationships. In a conversation with a close friend this week he concluded that there is virtually no one with moral integrity regarding infidelity in relationships. In short, "Everybody cheats!" While he came just short of that claim, he spoke very candidly about his lack of trust of virtually every intimate relationship.

According to the February 2007 MSNBC/iVillage Love, Lust & Loyalty survey, about 1 in 5 adults in monogamous relationships have cheated on their current partner. The survey which does not purport to scientifically conducted suggests that approximately 80% of people in monogamous relationships (married and common law) are in fact faithful to their partner.

Why does infidelity seem so widespread? If only roughly 20% are "unfaithful" and 80% remain faithful, then why the perception of rampant illicit relationships? Don't the numbers reflected in the iVillage survey fly in the face of the perceived reality?

One challenge may be in our perception of what actually constitutes cheating.

• Is romantically kissing another person cheating?
• Is using pornography without your partner's knowledge cheating?
• Is becoming emotionally involved with someone other than your spouse without a physical relationship, cheating?

Perhaps the issue is that the 80% who profess faithfulness personally know the 20% who have admittedly strayed. The reality is no one is untouched by those relationships that disintergrated via infidelity. We all know them and we even care for both parties as friends.

The Love, Lust & Loyalty survey logged 70,288 respondents about 54% men with an average age of 43 and 46% women average age 38

If the survey remains true today, then why are perceived infidelty rates so high? Researchers expected the numbers to return at almost double the rates at which the actually returned.

Perhaps it is the media's infatuation with cheating husbands and wicked wives profiled in virtually every primetime television show. Given the accuracy of the survey, we might conclude that the perception of widespread infidelity is more fiction than reality. The magnification of art into something that is larger than real life especially in human imagination.

Another possible conclusion is that the fidelity rates may have remained relatively constant over the passing decades, but the promiscuity rates have continued to explode upward.

In a world of "Girls Gone Wild" videos, Desparate Housewives, NipTucks and the like it is not much of a stretch to conclude that every one is having unrestricted, wild, uninhibited sexual encounters. The political faux pas of Eliot Spitzer, the subsequent confessions of now Governor David Patterson, the alleged Illicit trist of The Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and more only serve to reinforce the perceptions that infidelity is rampant.

The question remains, is there a true moral dilemma with infidelity or is the dilemma our infatuation with the idea of promiscuity of which infidelity is merely a subset.