We’re not all love rats, Rod ( or even sex-crazed voles)
GOOD old Rod Liddle. He’s at it again, banging on about. . . er, banging. On Monday, he wrote in this paper about how his infidelity was all down to his genes, and that philanderers like him can’t help but cheat because of the evolutionary pressure to sow their seed as widely as possible. I’d heard this argument from Rod two years back and I thought it as much a load of rubbish then as I do now.
In fact, Rod and I were neighbours in our Wiltshire village until last year when it emerged that he had been having an affair with a woman two decades his junior. When his wife Rachel Royce discovered the truth, Rod moved out, and the details of the bust-up made for gripping reading in these pages.
But before the great divide,
Rod and I would spend many
evenings discussing — over my
expensive wine and his cheap
wine — the thorny question of
male fidelity.
Rod and I come from different
poles on this. I’ve been happily
married for nearly five years and
I’ve never strayed. In fact, I’ve
never cheated on any girlfriend.
Ever. Not even a drunken snog at
university. I just think it’s
dishonest and low to lie to
someone whom you claim to love.
Clearly, Rod thought I was a
little peculiar. ‘ You’ll cheat,’ he
said. ‘Men always do.’
Well, not this man, Rod.
‘ Ah, you must be religious.’
Nope, I said, ’fraid not.
Rod then made the point that
one day I would be smitten by
someone, and then a combination of what’s in my genes and
what’s in my jeans would see me
embrace some nubile new lovely.
Still, I continued to deny the
inevitability of my infidelity.
Of course, what I could not
dispute was that I found other
women attractive. If Liz Hurley
and Kate Moss cuddled up to me
in a nightclub and told me there
was a hotel nearby, then it would
require an enormous strength of
will to refuse their attempts to
woo me. Of course it would be fun, but at what price? I would have to lie to my wife, and if she found out she would leave me, taking the children with her.
It’s one thing to cheat on your wife, but it’s quite another to risk your children. There’s no woman in the world for whom I would leave my children.
Infidelity not only hurts the partner, but also those who are at a most vulnerable stage of their lives. Anybody whose parents got divorced will surely appreciate the damage marital breakdown causes.
I’m sorry if this all sounds like high-horse moralising, Rod, but I just don’t buy that men have to be unfaithful.
ROD argues that monogamy is unnatural, and that most animals sleep around as much as he does. But isn’t the whole point of being human that one is trying not to behave like an animal? Rod is welcome to compare himself to the slutty American montane vole, as he did in his piece, but I’d like to rise a few notches above it on the evolutionary scale. (I Googled the montane vole, and with its shaggy greybrown hair there is a similarity between it and the species rodus liddlus. Incidentally, the vole is considered to be a pest. They are regularly exterminated.)
It’s not as if promiscuity is the only socially undesirable trait we have in our genes. Like most men, I have the urge to punch someone from time to time, but being violent is not exactly beneficial to civilised society. And neither is infidelity. It destroys with its emotional punches and mental violence.
Rod cites that 84 per cent of human societies aren’t monogamous. Big deal. I can bet you my bottom euro that those are precisely the same societies that neither I nor Rod would like to be part of. What’s the likelihood that they’re the same societies in which women are barely emancipated, and where the surrendering to other genetic programmings, such as violence, is accepted?
Stating that bad behaviour is ‘in my genes, man’ is a convenient and morally lazy way to renege on one’s responsibilities. It’s a Chav excuse.
Rod writes that if there were an anti-infidelity shot on the market, he’d take it. Ah, the quick fix, the easy way out, liposuction rather than the diet.
The only way to be ‘cured’ is to try to put the needs of others above one’s own. You don’t even have to be a Christian to do this, just plain decent.
Hypocritically, men who cheat hate it happening to them. I remember one of those chats I had with Rod in which I suggested — jokingly — that if he were unfaithful to Rachel, then would he mind if I slept with her? After all, she would only be doing to him what he was doing to her.
I remember Rod’s expression through a haze of Raffles smoke, his black montane vole-like eyes scurrying around my face looking for signs of insincerity.
‘No bloody way,’ he said.
Somehow, his answer didn’t surprise me. Those who cheat don’t like being cheated upon for one simple reason — it bloody well hurts. ■ DO YOU think men are programmed to cheat? Join the debate at www.dailymail.co.uk/femail