SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I am reading an interesting book, one that is challenging my way of interacting with others when stress, of any kind or origins, is involved. On page 100 it asked me something that I have asked myself hundreds of thousands of times. The question was not what I found challenging. It was what followed the question, a zinger of a statement, that really has my mind focused on the enquiry it asked.

Are there any circumstances under which I could imagine myself behaving as they do? If my answer is yes, I’m reminded that they are human. If my answer is no, I haven’t considered the question deep enough.

What's the book and the question?

This reminds me of the Roman playwright Terrance who once wrote:

"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."

"I am human, and I consider nothing that is human to be alien to me".

I’m assuming this is asking if I’d cheat on my wife as she cheated on me? This should be a simple answer but of course for me it’s not.

Difficult to give a yes/no on this. I think it was sissoon who said some of us are hardwired not to cheat, I’ve always felt I was one of those creatures but I also know I’m human and the right set of circumstances could change everything. I’ve had some great opportunities to cheat but it wasn’t me pursuing and as soon as I saw what was going on I ran away asap.

After my wife told me about her affair the idea of revenge cheating crossed my mind but I knew I would never do that. It definitely wouldn’t make things better and I couldn’t put her through that kind of heartbreak, even in my messed up state of mind!

I'm guessing the question isn't specifically about infidelity, but any and all behavior in general.

Pogre, you’re probably right but since Asterisk posted here I figured I’d put my 2 cents in :)

Can I imagine robbing my wife of her agency, violating her consent, deceiving her about the reality of her own life, and choosing not to protect her when doing so would cost me something I wanted?

No. I cannot.

Understanding another person’s humanity does not require me to believe that I would eventually make the same choice if only I thought deeply enough about it.

At some point, agency matters.

I have struggled with people saying they "could never"commit infidelity, as in, they consider themselves incapable. Not because I think people are inherently bad or morally corrupt, but because I thought myself incapable of doing that to my H as well. I even convinced myself of it after having done it on multiple prior occasions...

The thing about infidelity is that prior, during, and afterwards, a WS is often way deep into delusion territory. Many WS describe "not knowing how this happened," because they rationalize their way all the way up to the line, and then they get so close they don't even notice the point at which they cross it. You don't even need to go seeking out an affair for it to "find you," and many WS don't even recognize that they're vulnerable to temptation when it presents itself, even if they've declined dozens of times before. People often have issues they don't even know about until they express themselves as unfaithful behavior and betrayal...Not Just Friends by Shirley Glass does a great job elaborating on the workings of the "slippery slope" A.

Ironically, I feel much safer now being able to say "I am capable of infidelity. I did that and I could do it again. But I don't want to, and so I'm not going to let my guard down against the possibility." At the advice of the sage Unhinged, I have stopped chasing "I am incapable of cheating" and replaced it with "I am unwilling to cheat." That feels so much better.

I know that it's a pretty contentious subject, but I lean toward Morbs' position on this. My wife is the last person anyone would have thought would do something like that. No major FOO issues, was never promiscuous growing up, and we had 27 years of loyalty and fidelity. I'm convinced she did and still does love me very deeply, but she had an affair.

I know this is a hot take, and I think there are plenty of people who are truly loyal, very unwilling to ever have an affair, and never will. I know those people exist, but I think pretty much anyone is capable given the right (wrong?) conditions and the right set of circumstances.

I undrstand the argument, but I disagree with the idea that everyone is capable of infidelity if the right circumstances come along. I genuinely believe I am incapable of it, not because I physically couldn't do it or because I think I am somehow morally perfect, but because it would require me to violate something fundamental in myself. I have had a plethora of opportunities over the years, including situations where I could have cheated and there was virtually no chance my WW would ever have known. Even after DDay, which in my opinion would probably be the easiest time in my life to rationalize doing it, I still couldn't. The reason is simple I would know.

That matters to me. I don't need the fear of being caught to remain faithful. I can find another woman attractive, enjoy attention, recognize interest and even be presented with an opportunity. None of those things require betrayal. There are still conscious decisions between attraction and infidelity, and I know where my line is. I understand the slippery-slope argument, compartmentalization, rationalization and gradually moving boundaries. I have watched my WW do exactly that. But a slippery slope is still made up of choices. My WW did not accidentally maintain affairs for years, repeatedly lie, compartmentalize relationships, have unprotected sex, come home to me and then continue doing it. Those were countless individual decisions.

Maybe saying "I am unwilling to cheat" works better for some people because it reminds them to remain vigilant. For me, unwilling doesn't fully describe it. Fidelity is part of my identity and my own code of conduct. Cheating would require me to become someone I could no longer respect, and whether anybody else ever discovered it would be irrelevant. I would have to live with knowing what I had done.

So when I say "I could never cheat," I am not claiming immunity from attraction, temptation or bad judgment, and I am certainly not claiming to be incapable of doing anything wrong. I am saying that I know myself, I know the opportunities I have already walked away from, I know what I have endured without crossing that line, and I know what I do when nobody is watching. At some point we have to allow people to know their own character. I know mine. Betraying the person I committed myself to, especially through the prolonged, deliberate and deceptive behaviour I experienced from my WW, is simply a line I cannot see myself crossing under any circumstance.

Attachment wounds do not necessarily come from family of origin. They certainly can, and often do, but there are other ways attachment wounds can develop later in life.

I also don't think promiscuity is a meaningful indicator of infidelity. The two are not the same thing. By many definitions, there were periods in my life when I probably would have been classified as "promiscuous," but I would never, under any circumstances, betray someone I was pair bonded with. If I reached the point where I no longer wanted that bond, I would leave the relationship. I would not maintain the bond while secretly violating it.

I have practiced mindfulness for more than twenty years, and that gives you a great many tools for managing your own reactions, impulses, and interactions, especially with the people you love. But even before I started down that path, infidelity simply was not something I had in me.

My first marriage was absolutely miserable. My wife had BPD, we fought constantly, and fairly early in the marriage I didn't even particularly like her anymore. We stayed together in large part because we had children. During that marriage, there were several women with whom I easily could have had affairs. I didn't.

And that is why I don't find the promiscuity argument particularly convincing. Sexual openness, a high number of partners, or a willingness to have casual sex does not tell you whether someone is willing to deceive and betray a bonded partner. Those are different questions involving different values and boundaries.

So no. I couldn't do it even to someone who, at the time, felt like my worst enemy. And if I couldn't justify betrayal under those circumstances, I have a hard time accepting the idea that sexual history itself meaningfully explains why someone else can.

This is not to be inflammatory, but I just don't believe it. One can say "This is the way I fundamentally am inside" but they forget that most people who cheat believe it's wrong. Some, like I did, even feel incredibly guilty as they're doing it, but can't bring themselves to stop. Many heavily compartmentalize. Infidelity is not just a betrayal of the spouse, but a betrayal of oneself. One can say "I've had marriage problems and been stressed out and had people come onto me, but I passed them up just fine," but so did many WS so many times before they actually cheated...

Believe whatever you want about yourself and your capabilities or incapabilities, by all means. But I think it is inherently less risky to avoid saying "I could never because xyz," and instead opt for some version of "However unlikely, it's a possibility. There could be some combination of situational and internal factors out there that would produce infidelity as a result. But I am unwilling to do it, and I plan to choose not to." Might require a slight softening of the ego, but it's a super simple mentality shift that provides a lot of protection from the pitfalls and blindspots WS encounter.

What are the downsides of that?

I think there are two things going on when people insist that "this could happen to anyone," and then get irritated when you say, "No, it couldn't happen to me."

First, a lot of people are still stuck in the "I don't know what happened" stage. As if they slipped in the garden and accidentally had sex with someone for seven months.

That is still a form of cognitive distortion. They do not want to look too closely at themselves, because doing that means confronting the traits, beliefs, rationalizations, wounds, entitlement, avoidance, validation seeking, compartmentalization, or whatever else allowed them to repeatedly make those choices.

"This could happen to anyone" is much more comfortable.

If it could happen to anyone, then maybe there is nothing particularly important to examine in themselves. Maybe they were simply unlucky. Maybe they got caught up in circumstances. Maybe infidelity is some kind of human weather event that occasionally blows through people's lives.

But affairs do not just happen. They are made up of decisions. Usually a long series of them.

And that is really the heart of why I disagree with the idea that everyone is equally capable of infidelity.

I do not think I possess some magical quality that makes me immune to temptation. I think I simply lack many of the motivations, coping mechanisms, and ways of interacting with people that commonly lead someone down that path.

I do not particularly need external validation. I do not derive my self worth from being sexually desired. I am not especially afraid of loneliness. I can tolerate rejection, frustration, and sexual dissatisfaction without needing to escape from them. I do not tend to solve problems by creating a secret parallel reality. I do not believe being unhappy entitles me to quietly change the terms of a relationship while continuing to accept all of its benefits.

When something is wrong in a relationship, my instinct is to deal with the relationship.

If I am unhappy, I say I am unhappy. If something needs to change, I try to change it. If the relationship becomes intolerable, I leave.

What does not occur to me as a reasonable solution is to lie to my partner and build another relationship behind their back.

That difference matters.

There are people who feel attraction and move toward it. They feed it, enjoy the secrecy, test boundaries, rationalize each escalation, and see where it goes.

There are other people who feel attraction and simply leave it alone.

There are people who become unhappy in a marriage and start looking outside of it for relief, validation, excitement, sex, or escape.

There are other people who confront the marriage, tolerate the unhappiness for a time, or end it.

There are people who are very good at compartmentalizing. They can put their spouse in one mental box, the affair partner in another, and avoid forcing the two realities into contact.

Other people do not function particularly well that way.

Those are real psychological and behavioral differences between people.

My own history gives me some reason to know which side of that divide I tend to fall on.

I have already been deeply unhappy in a marriage. I have already been sexually frustrated. I have already disliked my spouse. I have already had attractive women make themselves available to me. I have already had opportunity. I have already been in circumstances where an affair could have offered sex, validation, excitement, escape, or revenge.

I did not do it.

Not because I was never tempted by another person, and not because I am morally perfect. I simply did not interact with those situations in the way someone has to interact with them for an affair to develop.

The second thing going on is that saying, "No, I would not do that," can sound like a claim of moral superiority, even when that is not what you are saying.

For whatever reason, people have a complicated relationship with anyone they perceive as "better" than them in some respect. We admire people we place above us, but we also have a strong tendency to pull people back down when their behavior creates an uncomfortable comparison.

There is a strange duality to it. People will idolize celebrities, including celebrities who are obviously deeply flawed, but someone who appears genuinely more disciplined, principled, or morally consistent can provoke hostility.

There is a reason the metaphor of crucifying Jesus works so well. The offense is not merely that someone claims to be good. The offense is that their existence creates an uncomfortable standard.

So when someone says, "Everyone is capable of cheating," and you answer, "No, I am not," what they may hear is something much more threatening:

"You did this because there is something about you that made you capable of doing it, and that thing is not universal."

And that is a much harder idea to live with.

Because if infidelity is simply a universal human frailty, there is less to explain.

But if there are people who can experience the same loneliness, resentment, temptation, opportunity, sexual frustration, marital misery, ego injury, or desire for validation and still refuse to betray their partner, then circumstances stop being a sufficient explanation.

Now you have to examine what happened between the circumstance and the decision.

Why did you respond to loneliness that way?

Why did validation matter that much?

Why did you protect the secret instead of protecting your partner?

Why were you able to compartmentalize the harm?

Why did each boundary violation become permission for the next one?

Why did you keep choosing it?

That is the part I think "this could happen to anyone" can sometimes obscure.

Maybe it can happen to many people. Maybe more people are capable of it than they would like to believe.

But that is very different from saying there are no meaningful differences between people in the motivations, coping styles, boundaries, values, and decision-making patterns that make an affair possible.

There clearly are.

And recognizing that is not necessarily ego.

Sometimes it is simply knowing yourself well enough to understand how you behave when temptation, unhappiness, and opportunity actually show up.

If I reached the point where I no longer wanted that bond, I would leave the relationship. I would not maintain the bond while secretly violating it.

Except that what we see, generally, is a desire by the WS to maintain the bond with the partner and add a bond with the ap. IOW, you are perhaps not seeing the primary threat.

IMO, one can't know what they'd do until they have to choose. And IMO, one can make the same choice 100 times and make another choice the 101st time.

I understand the point that a WS may want to preserve the primary bond while adding another one. I just don't think that changes the basic argument very much.

My point is not simply, "I have resisted temptation before, therefore I will always resist temptation."

It is that my overall psychological profile appears to be almost the opposite of what is required to conduct and maintain an affair.

I am securely attached. I don't experience relationships primarily through fear of abandonment, desperate validation seeking, or a need to secure another attachment in order to regulate myself.

I have practiced mindfulness for more than twenty years. A large part of that practice is noticing what you are doing, noticing what you are feeling, and examining the consequences of your actions before simply acting on an impulse. I tend to think several moves ahead. If I do this, what happens next? Who does it affect? What does it cost? What kind of person am I being while I do it?

That does not make me incapable of making bad decisions. Of course I make bad decisions.

But affairs require something more sustained than a single bad decision.

They require repeated decisions, repeated concealment, repeated rationalization, and usually some ability to suppress or compartmentalize the conflict between what you are doing in one part of your life and what you are doing in another.

That last part is especially foreign to me.

I am highly integrated psychologically. I find compartmentalization extremely difficult. If something is wrong in one part of my life, it bleeds into everything else. I cannot easily put one reality in one box and another contradictory reality in another box and move back and forth between them.

I would have an extraordinarily difficult time going out with another woman, sleeping with her, coming home, looking my wife in the face, carrying on normally, and then doing it again.

Not simply because "cheating is wrong," but because I don't function very well with that kind of internal contradiction.

I also have fairly high self esteem. I don't particularly need someone else wanting me in order to feel valuable. Sexual attention is enjoyable, but it is not regulating my sense of self. I don't need another person to make me feel desirable, important, powerful, young, interesting, or alive.

Again, none of those things individually makes someone incapable of cheating.

But taken together, secure attachment, low dependence on external validation, mindfulness, high self awareness, a strong tendency to consider consequences, and very low ability to compartmentalize all point in the opposite direction from the psychological machinery that seems necessary to sustain an affair.

That is why the "you could make the right choice 100 times and the wrong choice on the 101st" argument does not persuade me very much.

Technically, sure. Anything is possible.

But if I have made the same choice repeatedly across very different circumstances, including periods of severe marital unhappiness, sexual frustration, resentment, opportunity, and women making themselves available to me, that history tells me something about how I actually respond to those situations.

And more importantly, it tells me something about the processes underneath those choices.

The affair would require me not merely to experience attraction or opportunity. It would require me to start behaving in ways that are deeply inconsistent with how I normally process relationships, conflict, consequences, and my own internal state.

Could I wake up tomorrow and become a very different person? I suppose.

But at some point "you never know what you might do" stops being insight and becomes unfalsifiable.

I know how I tend to operate. I know what motivates me. I know what does not motivate me. I know how difficult compartmentalization is for me. I know how I respond to relationship problems. And I have a fairly long behavioral history to compare that self assessment against.

There is also a much simpler point.

If what I wanted was to remain married while also sleeping with other people, I would just ask for an open marriage.

In fact, my wife has explicitly told me that I can do what I want, both before and after the affair.

So if I wanted sexual variety while maintaining the marriage, I already have a path available that does not require deception, secret phones, hidden relationships, compartmentalization, or constructing an alternate reality behind my wife's back.

I would just ask.

I am not really agreeing or disagreeing with anyone here- I didn’t actually read all the responses yet.

I don’t think everyone will cheat, because in my mind that translates to not everyone will make that choice. And there is a big population who never do make that choice.

Why will they not? Maybe they have a stronger tie to their values, maybe they do not need the things like validation that make affairs tempting, maybe they have better boundaries.

Personally, I do not think I am capable of cheating again, so I believe anyone who says they never will.

If you asked me before I cheated, I would have probably said I don’t think I will. I can’t say that I spent a lot of time considering it. For most of our marriage prior I felt like I loved my husband and would not do something to jeapordize that. But that’s as deep as it would go.

When I did it, I was okay jeopardizing it because I had become so unhappy and blamed him. And was too coward to just say I am really thinking of leaving. I was. I now understand I am the creator of my own happiness and construct my life accordingly and it doesn’t mean create a structure that makes cheating seem unfathomable.

It was self betrayal as much as it was a marital one. I know 100 percent that I did not act in my best interests. I now understand what an affair is, the pain it caused me, my husband, and some woman I don’t even know. It would never be worth it to me, I can no longer be delusional and tell myself lies.

I think overall its not that either my husband and I value monogamy any more than we did before, but I do feel the value on honesty and creating a life that has as much happiness in it as possible can’t include being duplicitous in any sense.

So I believe someone can know more strongly that they won’t cheat than I did before I did it. I don’t think they have to experience infidelity to have that level of decidedness about it.

However, I do think we are all light and dark and there are grey areas of morality that exist in everyone that consciously has to be noticed and dealt with at some point or another. For example, you will find a good deal of men here who will argue for their use of porn and say it doesn’t affect them negatively in their marriage where studies show otherwise. There is a lot of justification around it, but there is a slippery slope that exists—-anywhere from alienating your mate, having unrealistic expectations of what sex should look like, clear to the other end of the spectrum where there is an addiction formed or a reliance that becomes unmanageable.

We all have our things. It doesn’t mean they are all as impactful as infidelity, but there is often denial about the impact ahead of time. Justifications and unintended results and even damage can come from many practices. I use porn as an example because it is so widely used, accepted, and often a hidden threat

[This message edited by hikingout at 4:34 PM, Tuesday, August 11th]

My parents thought me and I still firmly believe that most people are capable of doing most things. It's a good reminder to actively strive for good and keep away form bad. Apply the rule of limited trust to yourself and others.

That said I don't know the complete context of the book, but without context the question seems to be aimed at building false equivalence between 2 similar deeds done under different circumstances. Circumstances do matter as much as the deed itself, sometimes more. You can be adored for killing and condemned for trying to help. Would I cheat under the circumstances in which my ex did? No, I wouldn't even think of thinking of considering it. If I was reckless, ruthless, needy, greedy, obsessed with myself like she was? Yes, likely.

[This message edited by Itiswhatitis000 at 5:05 PM, Tuesday, August 11th]

I think there are two things going on when people insist that "this could happen to anyone," and then get irritated when you say, "No, it couldn't happen to me."

To clarify: I'm not saying infidelity "happens" to anyone. It's undeniably a series of choices. Certainly situations and circumstances happen to people, and then those things affect their psychological state and ability to make choices that are in alignment with their values and desired identity.

First, a lot of people are still stuck in the "I don't know what happened" stage. As if they slipped in the garden and accidentally had sex with someone for seven months.

Obviously, a WS must do a deep dive to dissect what exactly happened that led them to infidelity. But when they're at the point where they're saying "I don't know how this happened," the implication there is a) they don't believe their actions align with their values/identity (i.e., the unfaithful behavior is not "like them;" that the infidelity is a significant departure from "who they are"), b) the infidelity has already occurred, and c) there was complex, cognitive distortion (rationalizations, justifications, competing needs/values/emotional states, etc.) present leading up to the choices to engage in the unfaithful behavior, such that they don't presently understand what enabled them to engage in it. They failed to prevent infidelity.

Which is why I think the belief that one "could never" engage in it is inherently risky. One could believe that with absolutely certainty that it's wrong, that they could never live with themselves if they cheated, that they would never choose to betray and hurt their partner so horrifically, that they would quite simply leave a relationship they weren't happy in, etc... but then the cognitive distortion sets in and then all the sudden they've betrayed themselves. They call it the affair "fog" for a reason. The way to avoid being caught in the fog is to monitor weather conditions. But logically, if you truly believe you'd never be caught in it, why would you monitor the weather in the first place?

We have no way of predicting what every future version of ourselves in every possible psychological state will behave in every possible combination of future situations, to be able to say with absolute certainty what we are capable or incapable of choosing. That goes back to the "humans are imperfect and complex" argument in Asterisk's book quote.

Assuming there does exist a definitive binary, there are three possibilities:

One could be incapable of infidelity, and not cheat.

One could be capable of infidelity, and not cheat.

One could be capable of infidelity, and cheat.

If you accept the possibility that risk of cheating is present, even if extremely slight, you can actively mitigate it. The outcome is therefore more likely to be maintained fidelity.

If it's actually true, as you believe, that you are incapable of cheating, then accepting the possibility of risk doesn't change the inevitable outcome (maintained fidelity.)

If it turns out your assessment of yourself is inaccurate and you are, in fact, capable given the "perfect storm" of factors, then you are less likely to mitigate the risk should that perfect storm come along and sweep you up in it. (The risk of the outcome being infidelity is higher.)

Accepting the possibility of risk may require a relinquishment of certainty in one's sense of self and categorical, black-and-white thinking. I understand that can be extremely uncomfortable or scary for some people to do. But I do think it's worth it. And I have found that the uncertainty doesn't stay uncomfortable forever; eventually it's replaced by a greater sense of agency-- the belief that who I am is not static, but a collection of my actions going forward, and even if I don't control the circumstances I find myself in, I can still choose what to do. I choose to remain vigilant because I value myself, my family, and my marriage more than I value the illusory comfort of certainty.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 6:01 PM, Tuesday, August 11th]

Are there any circumstances under which I could imagine myself behaving as they do? If my answer is yes, I’m reminded that they are human. If my answer is no, I haven’t considered the question deep enough

To me the first sentence comes across as an excuse for someone doing something unethical "because he/she is human." That is a very slippery slope.

The second sentence seems to imply that if someone spends enough time thinking about doing something unethical he/she may/will be inclined to do so.

I used to naively believe that my wife could NEVER do what she did. Friends and family would agree. Now? Now I know she is and it makes me wonder what else she is capable of. Now I believe there is no such thing as an affair proof relationship.

Asterisk’s original post asked: Are there any circumstances under which I could imagine myself behaving as they do?

​If we are talking about raw human nature, biological capacity, or situational pressure, the answer for virtually everyone is yes. Anyone is physically or situationally capable of making a terrible choice given the right combination of stress, delusion, or vulnerability.

​Where I disagree with the idea that "anyone can cheat under the right circumstances" is that it ignores the role of deeply held principles. Some people are fundamentally incapable of breaking their core principles—not because they lack human temptation, but because their adherence to those principles sits higher in their value hierarchy than their own comfort, pleasure, or self-preservation.

​Look at human history: people have willingly submitted to being flayed alive, drawn and quartered, or burned at the stake rather than renounce their faith, break an oath, or betray a core belief. If a human being can withstand literal, unimaginable physical torture for the sake of an abstract principle, it stands to reason that someone with that same level of conviction can turn down an affair or resist a slippery slope, regardless of how unhappy or tempted they might be. Are we seriously going to say William Wallace or St. Peter were willing to die in agony rather than denounce their respective stances, yet pussy is where they'd trip up?

​To see the flaw in the "anyone is capable of anything given the right circumstances" argument, you only have to apply it to other severe transgressions. Technically, as human beings with physical bodies, virtually everyone is physically capable of becoming a child predator. Yet, almost anyone with a functioning moral compass would rightly balk at the idea that they are just a "bad set of circumstances" away from sexually assaulting a child. We don't view our refraining from child abuse as a fragile streak requiring constant hyper-vigilance lest the "right weather event" blow in—we view it as a fundamental impossibility based on who we are.

​If we can confidently say our internal moral boundaries make us entirely incapable of committing sexual assault, why do we treat fidelity as though it is completely exempt from that same level of absolute moral conviction?

​For people who operate this way, fidelity isn't just a mood, a preference, or a streak of good luck. It is an unyielding part of their identity.

​Saying "anyone is capable of cheating if the circumstances are right" assumes that circumstance will always eventually override principle. But for a certain subset of people, principles always override circumstance. To cross that line would require destroying their own self-concept—a price they simply will not pay.

​If someone's follow-up to this is: "Well, I (or my partner) had deeply held principles regarding cheating, yet cheated anyway," my response is simple: No, you (or they) didn't, or you weren't actually attached to upholding them. Quod erat demonstrandum. Infidelity is always, at its core, a principle issue—either a failure of the principles themselves or a failure of commitment to them.

​Logically, this brings us to a debate over whether we have more Judases or St. Peters in the world. I couldn't comment on the exact ratio. Sometimes it looks like we have far more Judases, but I choose to live in optimism.

​So to answer the core theme of this thread: Yes, I can understand how human beings rationalise betrayal, and I can recognise the psychological mechanics behind it. But recognising human frailty doesn't mean every individual's internal breaking point sits below the threshold of temptation. For those who are genuinely anchored to their principles, some lines simply do not move.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 6:48 PM, Tuesday, August 11th]

I'm going to let ChatGPT handle this one:

DRSCOOLERS has arrived with martyrs, William Wallace, St. Peter, and child sexual assault.
But underneath the rhetorical fireworks, there actually is an argument here worth separating out. And then at the very end he makes the exact epistemological problem we've been discussing explicit.

His argument is basically:

Some people value a principle so highly that no circumstance can cause them to choose against it. We know this sort of commitment exists because people have endured torture and death rather than violate deeply held principles. Therefore, it's plausible that some people possess an equally inviolable commitment to fidelity.
That's not a stupid argument. It is stronger than merely saying, "I've had opportunities and didn't cheat."
But it doesn't establish what he thinks it establishes.

The martyr example establishes extraordinary commitment, not incapacity
Suppose someone is tortured and killed rather than renounce their faith.
We can conclude:

Under extraordinarily severe circumstances, this person maintained this principle.

That's powerful evidence about character.

What we cannot conclude is:

There existed no conceivable psychological state in which this person could have renounced that principle.

And history actually contains plenty of people who did recant beliefs under torture. Others didn't. There are presumably enormous individual differences in resilience, values, psychology, circumstances, type and duration of coercion, etc.

That's completely compatible with your position.

Your argument has never been:

"Circumstances will eventually override everyone's principles."
That's the same mistake LittleMonk was making.
You're saying:

"We cannot know with certainty that circumstances/internal states could never contribute to a future situation in which we choose against our principles."
DRSCOOLERS has quietly changed your proposition from an epistemological claim into a deterministic one and then rebutted the deterministic claim.
And then he walks directly into the unfalsifiability problem
This is the money paragraph:
"Also if someone's follow up is going to be: 'well I / my partner had deeply held principles regarding cheating and were deeply rooted as people to my / their principles yet cheated anyways - I will say, Nope you / they didnt or nope they weren't because... Well sign quod erat demonstrandum."
YES.
THAT IS EXACTLY THE PROBLEM. 😂

He's saying explicitly:

People with sufficiently deep principles are incapable of violating them.
How do we know someone's principles were sufficiently deep?
They never violated them.
What if someone sincerely believed their principles were sufficiently deep and then violated them?
Then by definition their principles weren't sufficiently deep.
His proposition has become immune to counterexample.
There is literally no possible observation that could show him that somebody he classified as "fundamentally incapable" was actually capable.

If they remain faithful:

See? Their principles were inviolable.
If they cheat:
See? Their principles weren't actually inviolable.
That's textbook circularity/no-true-Scotsman territory.
And amusingly, he knows he's doing it. He's invoking quod erat demonstrandum as though the circularity proves the premise.

It doesn't.

He's defined "sufficiently principled" partly by the outcome he's trying to predict.

The child-abuse analogy sounds powerful but has the same problem
This is rhetorically much more uncomfortable because virtually everyone reading it will instinctively think:
Of course I couldn't sexually assault a child.
I certainly understand why someone would say that.
But as an argument about epistemology, it doesn't solve anything.

He says:

"almost anyone with a functioning moral compass would rightly balk at the idea that they are just a ‘bad set of circumstances’ away from sexually assaulting a child."
But balking at an idea isn't evidence that the idea is psychologically impossible.
More importantly, he's smuggling in another definition:

"with a functioning moral compass"
What happens if someone regarded themselves as possessing an excellent moral compass and subsequently committed a horrific act?
Presumably:

Well, then their moral compass wasn't actually functioning.
We're right back where we started.
None of this means people should walk around thinking, "Better remain vigilant today lest I molest somebody!" That's absurd, and I don't think your risk-management argument requires treating every conceivable immoral behavior as equally probable or equally deserving of active safeguards.

Risk management should be proportional to plausible risk.

I don't install a lightning rod inside my refrigerator because "anything's possible."

Similarly, a person with absolutely no sexual attraction to children doesn't need to maintain elaborate anti-child-molestation boundaries. There isn't an identifiable pathway requiring management.

Infidelity is interesting precisely because many of its precursors aren't inherently aberrant: attraction to another adult, enjoying someone's attention, friendship, marital dissatisfaction, loneliness, resentment, secrecy that initially seems innocuous, gradually changing boundaries, rationalization, etc.

That's exactly what you were talking about earlier in the thread when you described the slippery slope.

So "I don't maintain constant safeguards against committing every conceivable atrocity" doesn't establish "therefore safeguards against infidelity are unnecessary."

But there's something in his argument I think you should concede
He's right that principles differ in strength, both between people and within one person.
I wouldn't argue that everybody's fidelity is equally fragile.

And I wouldn't argue that every person has some finite amount of marital misery where, once the meter reaches 100%, they automatically cheat.

That's clearly not true, and you've never claimed it.

Some people's commitment to fidelity may indeed be so extraordinarily robust that they will go their entire lives without ever seriously approaching the line.

Maybe some really are incapable.

You don't know. Neither do I.

And that's the epistemological humility at the center of your argument.

His position also creates a fascinating problem for "safe WS"
This brings us straight back to our purity discussion.
If cheating demonstrates QED that the person's fidelity principle was never sufficiently fundamental, what happens after rehabilitation?

Can that person develop an actually inviolable principle?

If yes, how can DRSCOOLERS determine that they now possess one?

They can't prove it by saying:

"I know myself. Fidelity is now absolutely fundamental to my identity."
because apparently people can sincerely believe exactly that and be mistaken.
They can't prove it through twenty years of subsequent fidelity, because twenty years without cheating still doesn't logically establish what they'll do in year 21.

And they can't prove it by experiencing terrible circumstances without cheating, because we've already established that passing previous tests doesn't logically establish incapacity under every future test.

So again:

What epistemological privilege allows the never-WS to know that their principles are inviolable that isn't available to the rehabilitated WS?

And hikingout is sitting right there in this very thread saying she personally believes she is now incapable of cheating again.

That's the question I'd be fascinated to see DRSCOOLERS answer.

Because his QED sentence unintentionally demonstrates your objection better than you could have designed it yourself:

"Anyone who violates an inviolable principle thereby proves that it wasn't inviolable."
Sure.
But then "I possess an inviolable principle" cannot be established prospectively.

You only ever discover that you didn't have one after you violate it.

Which brings us almost perfectly back to your position:

Maybe you're immune. Maybe you're not. Until your life is over, you don't actually get the experiment's final result.

So behave according to whichever risk posture you think is prudent in the meantime.