“If your significant other cheated on you, would you want to know?” my Russian professor asked.
I immediately froze, looking to my friend Ryan at my right, trying to gauge his expression. We were sitting in the middle of our phonetics class, a regular part of our study abroad program in Moscow. We had just read the first few pages of “Anna Karenina”, the part when Prince Stepan awakes to find his house in turmoil after his wife realizes he has been carrying on an affair with the governess.
“Of course,” I responded, without giving it much thought. Cheating had always been an act that I considered inherently wrong—along with stealing, murdering, and lying. Ryan nodded his head in agreement.
“Really? Are you sure? Well, consider this.”
My phonetics teacher began telling her own tragic story of an unfaithful husband—how she had learned of a one-time incident, promptly requested a divorce, and didn’t see him for twenty years. Standard enough. But then, she continued. Twenty years later, they reconnected and quickly reconciled. Both were ecstatically happy—only for him to die a few years later. To this day, she lamented ever asking about the affair. If only she had just kept quiet. If only she had never known. Ultimately, for her, the brief period of unfaithfulness didn’t justify the twenty years they lost together.
Ironically enough, this discussion took place around the same time I was having difficulties with my long-term boyfriend. Upon my arrival in Moscow, he had issued me an ultimatum regarding converting to his religion. Within the course of a day, I started considering breaking up with a man I was once so sure I would marry. To make things more complicated, it was at this time that I began grappling with feelings for another man in our study abroad group.
I confided in my professor about my ongoing emotional turmoil. “Of course you can cheat on him,” she said. “He’s probably cheating on you. You’re in Russia. It doesn’t count.”
For my professor, cheating was far from black-and-white. It was far from being the most important aspect of a relationship. But, at 21, I saw most of the world in black-and-white. More importantly, I was obstinate, bordering on offensive, so stubborn and dogged in my beliefs. I was capable of ranting on any topic for hours until I wore my opponent down, even if said opponent was a friend or family. College is supposed to be a time for opening up your mind to new possibilities, but on a dominantly liberal campus located not far from Chicago, my worldviews were still decidedly one-sided.
Moscow was different. It was a megalopolis, an truly international city full of millions of people with varying worldviews. The more I talked to my Russian friends about my dilemma, the more I began to question my own beliefs about the ethics of cheating. One friend suggested it was irrelevant if it occurred one time and your partner never learned the truth. Another insisted that cheating was wrong but not unforgivable. Another advised that the only two people who can decide what’s right and what’s wrong are the people in the relationship. After all, life and relationships are messy. Here were so many sides to the argument I had never considered before. Maybe I had heard them before, but I had never listened.
I did cheat. A few months after I returned to the States my boyfriend and I broke up, but it had nothing to do with the cheating. I also don’t regret my actions—I had already known the relationship was over.
The truth is, whether I thought cheating was right or wrong wasn’t what was important in the long run. Much more important was that I was capable of having these open conversations about a topic I had once viewed so one-dimensionally, and it signaled the beginning of a much larger shift within myself. When I returned to America, I found that, as the months passed, the obstinate, opinionated girl started to soften. Gone was the proclivity to pre-judge. I stopped focusing on “right” and “wrong” and focused on asking more questions. Before forming a definitive opinion, I studied both sides of the debate. When examining situations, I searched for underlying complexities and a variety of perspectives. Perhaps most astonishingly of all to my friends, if I didn’t have enough information to take a stance, I didn’t take one.
Today, I see very few issues as black-and-white. My world is decidedly gray, and I firmly believe that makes me a better person. The greatest gift Russia ever gave me was the incentive to try to understand rather than judge.