Truth or dare (April 2010)

So… after nearly two months of heavy drinking – as an excuse to discover my true personality…, I’m back to blogging (totally sober this time, even if it won’t be obvious from this post).
I was wondering the other day why we are so stuck on this fidelity thing. It seems pretty obvious to me we’re not really built to be faithful, but we cling to this idea anyway. And it is a paradox for me, because I think we usually just adapt our conceptions and rules to the way of living that we want to have. The religion did not approve of sex before marriage, we just slowly (but surely) decided that this is just bogus and did it anyway. Some are prohibiting alcohol (and there were laws against it, too, once upon a time), we managed to get around that as well. Even prostitution and drugs are legal here and there, and basically they are quite accepted in our society.
So how come, when almost no-one really really believes we are “born to be faithful”, we are still considering this idea as a viable one? Of course, I doubt the percentage of people actually being faithful is that big, but it seems that somehow the idea that we should be faithful to our one-and-only never got to be a “has been” thing. Many have tried, but I don’t feel it’s a success as yet. Maybe I live in a bubble and I am not aware of the reality, but this is my impression anyway.
Any ideas why? Why we don’t simply say it’s not possible and forget about it? Maybe because it would bring some sort of chaos and the relationships (if any) won’t be structured in any way? Maybe it would mean we would be in some ready-to-explode society, in which no rule still applies? Probably it’s the same with the laws and criminals. The fact that there’s a law simply lowers the percentage of crimes, not the number of people thinking about committing them? I wonder if people would cheat less if we (still?) had a prison/death penalty for it? Or would they just pay more attention to not being caught?
And a more frightening question (for some): thinking that there is a high probability your sweet, loving half, will cheat on you at least once in the future, would YOU want to know about it? This is, amazingly, one of the few questions to which I think I know the answer, but I will keep it to myself. Hah!