059 “The Lighter Side of Being Cuckolded”

This and the next are two strips about cheating. It’s no coincidence, since at the time I was thinking about it a lot. Not about myself cheating on someone, but about me being the Other Person. And about the time I was the one being cheated on, and trying to make some sense out of it. That latter story is covered in another commentary, so let’s focus on the former.

On being the Other Person … I’ve been in that position TWICE. And let me tell ya something … no matter how much you try to rationalize it away, you’re just creating a disaster.

When I was the Other Person, I didn’t set out to steal someone’s partner. It was one of those situations where when we were together, sparks flew, there was that natural chemistry there. Everytime. And though we tried to be friends, it was just so natural with the chemistry, that things happen and you begin to think that this person would be better off in a relationship with YOU than their current partner, and this person doesn’t seem to argue against that belief.

They complain about their relationship, they go on about how terrific your friendship is, how if they weren’t in a relationship, they’d rather have you as their partner, etc. And as their relationship seems to deteriorate (at least by what they tell you), you think you may have a chance.

This is an awful position to put yourself in, and I do believe that in most cases it is headed for disaster. In the two times I was the Other Person, the result was total and absolute failure. In fact, I lost not only the love, but the friendship too. And I got painted with being The Bad Person by everyone, which is true to an extent, but I do believe most of the blame should be levied on the one with the actual responsibility of faithfulness.

I was being painted The Bad Person at that point when I did this strip. Apparently my role as The Other Person wasn’t enough, it had to be deeply embellished and lies added to it. I do not know what these lies were myself, but a lot of “friends” wouldn’t tell me because 1) apparently since I did it I should know anyways and 2) they wanted to protect her (which I didn’t understand, since it was more than obvious who was saying this shit, and if it were true it would be more damning to me than to her).

When I started doing a comic called Little White Lie, this was what was on my mind … the lies we tell ourselves and others. The lies we tell ourselves when we think we can get the person we want in the end when it’s an obviously bad situation all around. The lies they tell when they try to have their cake and eat it too. The lies that attempt to escape responsibility. The lies go on and on.

As for the strip itself, there are tonnes of jokes about cheating and I wanted to do an original one, which is actually tougher than it sounds. The idea of the husband accepting just awful excuses and creating a worse situation through his gullibility made for a good strip, one that has given me a few more joke ideas. It’s interesting in the last panel where I cut it off so I wouldn’t quite show what he’s sucking, leaving that for the reader’s imagination. It’s doubtful I would have been so shy of drawing it in gory detail after Volume Two. In many cases, Volume Two was really where I started breaking my own barriers in what I would draw in the strip, but that’s for a commentary down the road.