The thing is in many cultures, or social groups, extra-marital affairs (usually for men) are normalised and accepted. It's simply not seen as a trust or fairness issue. And yes this can be mysogynistic and abusive, but these attitudes do exist.
> I live in one of those cultures today and I’d emphasize the “tolerated” part. Not that dissimilar to physically hitting your spouse.
It has absolutely nothing in common with hitting your spouse. It is extremely frowned upon to openly display it but relatively accepted if it's discreet. It's very correlated to the relation a population has to sex. People in very religious countries where sex is seen as moraly dubious have very strong view against infidelity and people in countries with a more casual view of sex don't think it's such a big deal.
France is a relatively extreme example. The last Pew Research Center study shows that only 47% of the French thinks that infidelity is moraly unacceptable and there is no large gap between women and men answers.
If it's culturally acceptable, a wink wink nudge nudge that both partners understand, it's not cheating since no trust is really broken. It's just an open relationship, who cares.
It's definitely cheating and the partner cheated upon might not find it acceptable at all. Everyone would understand someone divorcing because they were cheated upon.
It's just not seen as morally disqualifying. People view cheating as a mostly private matter and acknowledge it happens. When it was revealed that the former president was having an affair with an actress, it barely impacted his popularity.
Sure, fair enough, but it's not generally seen as anything to do with e.g. reliability as a business partner. I used to do a lot of work in parts of the world like this.
That I could understand, and that’s where my comment on domestic violence comes from. Plenty of people might slap their wife around but that’s not seen as disqualifying for a business relationship.
