I do agree with you about the quality of the acting and the complexity of long term relationships. Though I would keep the cheating aspect separate from that: the fact of the matter is that betraying and deceiving your loyal partner "is", in fact, "black and white", there is really nothing nuanced, ethically, about this, it's basic golden rule level stuff. I mean, it's just untrue to say that "nothing in life is black and white". It's manifestly not the cases. Some things are unambiguously good, and other things are unambiguously bad. There are certainly morally complicated issues. But betraying your partner's trust is not really one of them. This is pretty standard golden rule level stuff: would anyone want to be treated in this manner? No. Then they shouldn't treat other people in this manner. That's something that anyone with a working moral compass and not completely inverted sense of priorities would have to agree with.
Incidentally, I would say that the issue of infidelity does apply to short term relationship and non monogamous ones as well. It is not merely about sex, it's about honesty and trust, and those can be broken in poly just as well as they can in monogamous marriages. I would say that if someone is untrustworthy and deceitful, or a toxic manipulator, it's not as being poly would fix that problem.
"Nuanced" and "mature" view of cheating is just saying, in not so fancy words "betraying and deceiving your devoted partner is not all that bad", and that's just an evasion and unwillingness to face the serious consequences affairs have on other people: the attitude of an immature person who is unwilling to take responsibility and wants to shift the blame or to pretend that "context" could somehow improve the optics of the situation or make it go away. Again, such "nuance", thankfully, usually ends when the person spouting this hogwash, or someone they care about, happens to be on the receiving end of such toxic manipulation and deception.
If I were to say what would be an immature view of infidelity, it would be one that seeks to trivialize it, or victim blame, or where the one doing the betraying and deceiving fails to acknowledge that they are entirely and solely responsible for their actions (and who else should be, the person they are betraying, who is not even aware of what goes on behind their back?), as adults with agency. Any attempt to change the subject and push it on one's unhappiness, mental state, or worse their partner or the relationship in general, is just evasion and equivocation and it's not taking responsibility in any adult way. Not that one needs to be an adult to grasp basic concepts such as loyalty and honesty: even children are pretty well acquainted with them and they are the basis of their budding social interactions, such as friendships, etc.
Bottom line, for perfectly obvious reasons betrayal and deception are essentially universally reviled. Doing so is far from irrational: in fact, it is perfectly rational and legitimate. Basically no one would like it if it was done to them (and certainly the cheaters wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of a comparable betrayal), and everyone understands the concepts of loyalty, honesty and respect, and cares about them in their relationships (unless they are sociopathically indifferent, but then again they wouldn't care only as long as it happened to someone else, when they are on the receiving end they would sing quite a different tune). Again, nothing "nuanced" about this: that word is an overused platitude in this context, and apart from allowing the one using it to pretend to be morally sophisticated (they are not), when really it just comes off as immature evasion and what one could call self serving cynicism (i.e. pretending that being a toxic manipulator betraying and deceiving one's loyal partner, and putting them through the consequent emotional abuse, is something to be normalized or explained away).
Frankly, more than on the perpetrator's unhappiness or mental state, the key question should be whether the person being deceived and betrayed deserved it or not. That's where the so called "nuance" is concentrated, in my opinion. For example, if a woman was betrayed I would be fully supportive if her choosing to sleep with someone else behind their partner's back (there was an example to that effect, but I'll put the details in a spoiler block). Conversely, if you never did anything like that to your partner, you are fully entitled to expect them to show you the same consideration in return: that's a basic standard, it's not something that one should have to fight for in order to get: loyalty, honesty and respect are the foundations of a relationship.
That, I think, would be the one difference and nuance in this regard. In terms of the "difference" between other cases, such as the protagonists' and a certain lawyer character's, that's really just a double standard and naked hypocrisy. Both betrayed and deceived their partners for self serving reasons (well, there is really no reason to cheat that is not self serving, it's a matter of the person being betrayed deserving it or not, as above) and were ready to continue deceiving them indefinitely, furthermore both did so feeling no guilt during the affair, by their own admission. Incidentally, I am pretty sure both would have found it intolerable if they partner had treated them the same way (though only one of them explicitly acknowledged that talking about his dream). There was certainly no moral superiority there -to pretend that there was is just hypocrisy, mere optics and color-: betrayal without guilt or even thought about their family during the affair, and no inclination to actually come clean to their spouses. The rest is really a distinction without a difference.
In fact, there is a difference, in that I think that in one case at least the reason for the affair was related to the act itself: he wanted to sleep with multiple women, and he did. By contrast, the other example was one where their action was not only cruel, but also completely unnecessary and easily avoidable: they could have very easily addressed their issue by simply talking to their partner, in fact that is what would have allowed them to address the problem, the affair even on a practical level did not help with their supposed problem at all. So, if anything, this was even worse, adding insult to injury, being even more futile and unnecessary. In fact, while both were disgusting, I do find the naked shamelessness of one of them less hypocritical than, and preferable to, the faux dignity and poise of the other: acting buddy buddy and being all apathetic, putting up a dignified facade and care while being prepared to sleep with the other person's partner, etc. was surreal. More on that in the spoiler block.
There was also plenty of stuff I found objectionable, more in comment block.
There was unfortunately no character, male or female, that showed anything close to Astrid's moral clarity at the end of the Crazy, Rich Asians movie.
I do agree with you about the quality of the acting and the complexity of long term relationships. Though I would…
Yoon-ki did dream about his wife cheating on him and he didn't like it very much. FL, I guess, would have felt similar had ML betrayed her like she did.
Regarding the "deserve" part, I was 100% behind the cheating wife who betrayed the man who had kid out of wedlock behind her back: if he was not going to keep his promise, she had no obligation to stay loyal to him.
In terms of the toxic messages, I did think that there was a consistent pattern of people that were cheated on trivializing their painful experiences and somehow not seeming to put suitable importance on loyalty, honesty and respect as the basis of mutual trust in a relationship. Basically, relativizing/normalizing cheating.
I mean, from FL's mother in law (completely unrealistic, both because it made me wonder if ML was his biological son, or someone she adopted from a woman he hated, and because of her own experiences) differential reaction to cheating when she learned of FL's infidelity, to the way everyone, from ML to his mom, to his supposed friends, to the netizens, essentially engaged in fawning hagiography of FL, while ML was consistently gaslighted (and self flagellated): one was elevated, the other put down, and the victim was the one doing all the supposed growing (really, an involution rather than an evolution if you ask me: he was much better off as he was in the beginning than the self flagellating mess that internalized all the gaslighting he was reduced to at the end) and self reflection, not the one that had been ready to betray and deceive them indefinitely without guilt
And this was not just about ML either: ML's female colleague admires Yoon-ki's wife's action, and says that she had walked away from her cheating husband. But she was completely correct to have done so, it was Yoon-ki's wife that was making a mistake, and making herself miserable, and thankfully she realized it at the end. There was also FL's lover's wife that was essentially the only one that could see through FL and call a spade a spade, and yet didn't seem to grasp that her own husband was essentially the same as FL: someone that was willing to sleep with a married lover with kids behind their spouse's back, and would have been willing to continue deceiving them indefinitely, and to risk jeopardizing their own kid's happiness.
I mean, if women don't hold men accountable for their behavior (untrue as a general statement, some do, thankfully), the solution wouldn't be to hold no one accountable, but to hold men accountable. For that matter, this is not some twisted social experiment or score setting exercise where ML ought to be the sacrificial lamb: this is his and their kids' lives. And the truth is that ML had never done to FL anything close to her betrayal, so he was not part of the "unaccountable cheating men" previously mentioned. If women want to betray such cheating men, please go ahead, I would encourage it: divorce them and have an affair on the way out, or do whatever you want with them.
There was also the Orwellian thought crime and incredibly insulting notion that women in general were basically more strict the most fundamentalist religious person on the planet, between equating or even comparing finding someone attractive (completely normal, most people don't find the rest of the world entirely unattractive the moment they decide to be in a monogamous relationship, they simply choose not to sleep with them) to a full blown affair and kid out of wedlock, to treating something like a lunch or car ride with someone of the opposite sex as meaning that they will necessarily plan to, and will, end up in bed together... just untrue, ML in the end didn't sleep with anyone else, so the natural experiment was run and it came out false. Plus I recall the Pence rule being widely ridiculed in the past. I mean, I understand in cases such as ML where he found the messages, and he was bothered by the dress and car ride (and hard caress he witnessed), but to say that in general a drink and car ride mean two people are planning/going to sleep together? Insane. And, I mean, even a fundamentalist religionist has a concept of "resisting temptation", which does not mean "never being tempted". I mean, people don't control whether they crave something, like a doughnut during a diet, they can only control whether they act on the impulse, wolfing it down, or resist it, by refraining from eating. As your cardiologist and weight scale might attest, those are two very different things. In the context of the affair, that would be not risking destroying your family and jeopardizing your child's happiness (or in the better which would really be worst case scenario where they are in the dark forever, living a lie without the ability to make an informed decision).
Plenty of other objectionable things: the notion that one would only be upset by the betrayal if one wast still having feelings for the one that betrayed them? As if betrayal and loyalty didn't matter anymore the moment you stopped having feelings for the other person? Or what about the demonization of divorce? Frankly, if two are unhappy together, divorce is part of the solution space, not of the problem space.
Plenty of other stuff I found objectionable, but I think this would suffice. There was unfortunately no character, male or female, that showed anything close to Astrid's moral clarity at the end of the Crazy, Rich Asians movie (probably Yoon-ki's wife was the one that came closest).
On Yoon-ki's shamelessness, I did find it less hypocritical than the dignified facade of, say, FL and her lover. To abuse Oscar Wilde (no issue with changing the subject, given that he was already moving from talking about slavery to socialism): "the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it". It's not as if a dignified facade should cover the fundamentally toxic and manipulative nature of the behavior.
On Yoon-ki and FL be perfectly clear, they were both willing to betray their spouses indefinitely without a shred of guilt, or even a thought about said spouses during the affair, by their own admission. Neither of their spouses had ever done anything similar to them, so they didn't deserve such treatment. As mentioned above, they were both repulsive in their behavior, but I do have to say that if given a choice, I would prefer Yoon-ki's naked shamelessness to, say, FL's lover's affectation and dignified facade, greeting the man of the woman he was about to sleep with mere seconds before with calmness and dignity, as if he wouldn't have been in bed with his wife at the moment had he not been in that elevator. ML should have replied "not very nice to meet you". Basically, if you were going to stab me in the back, I would prefer you were at least coherent and didn't act like you cared, given that you manifestly didn't care enough not to betray and deceive me, anyway.
And, again, at least Yoon-ki's actions were connected to his goals: he wanted to sleep with other women and he did. FL's betrayal was not only cruel, but unnecessary and easily avoidable: she was completely uncommunicative and even outright deceived her spouse, she could have simply reprioritized (dropping the pandering would have been good regardless) and talked to her spouse without lying to him (he was already helping, he would have obviously not been opposed to doing more, plus they had family and friends that could help). For that matter, that's the only thing that would have helped the overscheduling issue. Even at face value her issue would not have been addressed by having a lover: that would not have freed up her schedule, if anything it would have added another thing to juggle. Yet, very conveniently and suspiciously, I am supposed to believe that she suddenly managed to find time to fit in a full blown affair in her agenda.
Incidentally, I would say that the issue of infidelity does apply to short term relationship and non monogamous ones as well. It is not merely about sex, it's about honesty and trust, and those can be broken in poly just as well as they can in monogamous marriages. I would say that if someone is untrustworthy and deceitful, or a toxic manipulator, it's not as being poly would fix that problem.
"Nuanced" and "mature" view of cheating is just saying, in not so fancy words "betraying and deceiving your devoted partner is not all that bad", and that's just an evasion and unwillingness to face the serious consequences affairs have on other people: the attitude of an immature person who is unwilling to take responsibility and wants to shift the blame or to pretend that "context" could somehow improve the optics of the situation or make it go away. Again, such "nuance", thankfully, usually ends when the person spouting this hogwash, or someone they care about, happens to be on the receiving end of such toxic manipulation and deception.
If I were to say what would be an immature view of infidelity, it would be one that seeks to trivialize it, or victim blame, or where the one doing the betraying and deceiving fails to acknowledge that they are entirely and solely responsible for their actions (and who else should be, the person they are betraying, who is not even aware of what goes on behind their back?), as adults with agency. Any attempt to change the subject and push it on one's unhappiness, mental state, or worse their partner or the relationship in general, is just evasion and equivocation and it's not taking responsibility in any adult way. Not that one needs to be an adult to grasp basic concepts such as loyalty and honesty: even children are pretty well acquainted with them and they are the basis of their budding social interactions, such as friendships, etc.
Bottom line, for perfectly obvious reasons betrayal and deception are essentially universally reviled. Doing so is far from irrational: in fact, it is perfectly rational and legitimate. Basically no one would like it if it was done to them (and certainly the cheaters wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of a comparable betrayal), and everyone understands the concepts of loyalty, honesty and respect, and cares about them in their relationships (unless they are sociopathically indifferent, but then again they wouldn't care only as long as it happened to someone else, when they are on the receiving end they would sing quite a different tune). Again, nothing "nuanced" about this: that word is an overused platitude in this context, and apart from allowing the one using it to pretend to be morally sophisticated (they are not), when really it just comes off as immature evasion and what one could call self serving cynicism (i.e. pretending that being a toxic manipulator betraying and deceiving one's loyal partner, and putting them through the consequent emotional abuse, is something to be normalized or explained away).
Frankly, more than on the perpetrator's unhappiness or mental state, the key question should be whether the person being deceived and betrayed deserved it or not. That's where the so called "nuance" is concentrated, in my opinion. For example, if a woman was betrayed I would be fully supportive if her choosing to sleep with someone else behind their partner's back (there was an example to that effect, but I'll put the details in a spoiler block). Conversely, if you never did anything like that to your partner, you are fully entitled to expect them to show you the same consideration in return: that's a basic standard, it's not something that one should have to fight for in order to get: loyalty, honesty and respect are the foundations of a relationship.
That, I think, would be the one difference and nuance in this regard. In terms of the "difference" between other cases, such as the protagonists' and a certain lawyer character's, that's really just a double standard and naked hypocrisy. Both betrayed and deceived their partners for self serving reasons (well, there is really no reason to cheat that is not self serving, it's a matter of the person being betrayed deserving it or not, as above) and were ready to continue deceiving them indefinitely, furthermore both did so feeling no guilt during the affair, by their own admission. Incidentally, I am pretty sure both would have found it intolerable if they partner had treated them the same way (though only one of them explicitly acknowledged that talking about his dream). There was certainly no moral superiority there -to pretend that there was is just hypocrisy, mere optics and color-: betrayal without guilt or even thought about their family during the affair, and no inclination to actually come clean to their spouses. The rest is really a distinction without a difference.
In fact, there is a difference, in that I think that in one case at least the reason for the affair was related to the act itself: he wanted to sleep with multiple women, and he did. By contrast, the other example was one where their action was not only cruel, but also completely unnecessary and easily avoidable: they could have very easily addressed their issue by simply talking to their partner, in fact that is what would have allowed them to address the problem, the affair even on a practical level did not help with their supposed problem at all. So, if anything, this was even worse, adding insult to injury, being even more futile and unnecessary. In fact, while both were disgusting, I do find the naked shamelessness of one of them less hypocritical than, and preferable to, the faux dignity and poise of the other: acting buddy buddy and being all apathetic, putting up a dignified facade and care while being prepared to sleep with the other person's partner, etc. was surreal. More on that in the spoiler block.
There was also plenty of stuff I found objectionable, more in comment block.
There was unfortunately no character, male or female, that showed anything close to Astrid's moral clarity at the end of the Crazy, Rich Asians movie.
Regarding the "deserve" part, I was 100% behind the cheating wife who betrayed the man who had kid out of wedlock behind her back: if he was not going to keep his promise, she had no obligation to stay loyal to him.
In terms of the toxic messages, I did think that there was a consistent pattern of people that were cheated on trivializing their painful experiences and somehow not seeming to put suitable importance on loyalty, honesty and respect as the basis of mutual trust in a relationship. Basically, relativizing/normalizing cheating.
I mean, from FL's mother in law (completely unrealistic, both because it made me wonder if ML was his biological son, or someone she adopted from a woman he hated, and because of her own experiences) differential reaction to cheating when she learned of FL's infidelity, to the way everyone, from ML to his mom, to his supposed friends, to the netizens, essentially engaged in fawning hagiography of FL, while ML was consistently gaslighted (and self flagellated): one was elevated, the other put down, and the victim was the one doing all the supposed growing (really, an involution rather than an evolution if you ask me: he was much better off as he was in the beginning than the self flagellating mess that internalized all the gaslighting he was reduced to at the end) and self reflection, not the one that had been ready to betray and deceive them indefinitely without guilt
And this was not just about ML either: ML's female colleague admires Yoon-ki's wife's action, and says that she had walked away from her cheating husband. But she was completely correct to have done so, it was Yoon-ki's wife that was making a mistake, and making herself miserable, and thankfully she realized it at the end. There was also FL's lover's wife that was essentially the only one that could see through FL and call a spade a spade, and yet didn't seem to grasp that her own husband was essentially the same as FL: someone that was willing to sleep with a married lover with kids behind their spouse's back, and would have been willing to continue deceiving them indefinitely, and to risk jeopardizing their own kid's happiness.
I mean, if women don't hold men accountable for their behavior (untrue as a general statement, some do, thankfully), the solution wouldn't be to hold no one accountable, but to hold men accountable. For that matter, this is not some twisted social experiment or score setting exercise where ML ought to be the sacrificial lamb: this is his and their kids' lives. And the truth is that ML had never done to FL anything close to her betrayal, so he was not part of the "unaccountable cheating men" previously mentioned. If women want to betray such cheating men, please go ahead, I would encourage it: divorce them and have an affair on the way out, or do whatever you want with them.
There was also the Orwellian thought crime and incredibly insulting notion that women in general were basically more strict the most fundamentalist religious person on the planet, between equating or even comparing finding someone attractive (completely normal, most people don't find the rest of the world entirely unattractive the moment they decide to be in a monogamous relationship, they simply choose not to sleep with them) to a full blown affair and kid out of wedlock, to treating something like a lunch or car ride with someone of the opposite sex as meaning that they will necessarily plan to, and will, end up in bed together... just untrue, ML in the end didn't sleep with anyone else, so the natural experiment was run and it came out false. Plus I recall the Pence rule being widely ridiculed in the past. I mean, I understand in cases such as ML where he found the messages, and he was bothered by the dress and car ride (and hard caress he witnessed), but to say that in general a drink and car ride mean two people are planning/going to sleep together? Insane. And, I mean, even a fundamentalist religionist has a concept of "resisting temptation", which does not mean "never being tempted". I mean, people don't control whether they crave something, like a doughnut during a diet, they can only control whether they act on the impulse, wolfing it down, or resist it, by refraining from eating. As your cardiologist and weight scale might attest, those are two very different things. In the context of the affair, that would be not risking destroying your family and jeopardizing your child's happiness (or in the better which would really be worst case scenario where they are in the dark forever, living a lie without the ability to make an informed decision).
Plenty of other objectionable things: the notion that one would only be upset by the betrayal if one wast still having feelings for the one that betrayed them? As if betrayal and loyalty didn't matter anymore the moment you stopped having feelings for the other person? Or what about the demonization of divorce? Frankly, if two are unhappy together, divorce is part of the solution space, not of the problem space.
Plenty of other stuff I found objectionable, but I think this would suffice. There was unfortunately no character, male or female, that showed anything close to Astrid's moral clarity at the end of the Crazy, Rich Asians movie (probably Yoon-ki's wife was the one that came closest).
On Yoon-ki's shamelessness, I did find it less hypocritical than the dignified facade of, say, FL and her lover. To abuse Oscar Wilde (no issue with changing the subject, given that he was already moving from talking about slavery to socialism): "the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it". It's not as if a dignified facade should cover the fundamentally toxic and manipulative nature of the behavior.
On Yoon-ki and FL be perfectly clear, they were both willing to betray their spouses indefinitely without a shred of guilt, or even a thought about said spouses during the affair, by their own admission. Neither of their spouses had ever done anything similar to them, so they didn't deserve such treatment. As mentioned above, they were both repulsive in their behavior, but I do have to say that if given a choice, I would prefer Yoon-ki's naked shamelessness to, say, FL's lover's affectation and dignified facade, greeting the man of the woman he was about to sleep with mere seconds before with calmness and dignity, as if he wouldn't have been in bed with his wife at the moment had he not been in that elevator. ML should have replied "not very nice to meet you". Basically, if you were going to stab me in the back, I would prefer you were at least coherent and didn't act like you cared, given that you manifestly didn't care enough not to betray and deceive me, anyway.
And, again, at least Yoon-ki's actions were connected to his goals: he wanted to sleep with other women and he did. FL's betrayal was not only cruel, but unnecessary and easily avoidable: she was completely uncommunicative and even outright deceived her spouse, she could have simply reprioritized (dropping the pandering would have been good regardless) and talked to her spouse without lying to him (he was already helping, he would have obviously not been opposed to doing more, plus they had family and friends that could help). For that matter, that's the only thing that would have helped the overscheduling issue. Even at face value her issue would not have been addressed by having a lover: that would not have freed up her schedule, if anything it would have added another thing to juggle. Yet, very conveniently and suspiciously, I am supposed to believe that she suddenly managed to find time to fit in a full blown affair in her agenda.