Gwyneth Paltrow can separate affection for friends from the wicked things they do. Can you?
By Laura Schreffler
In 2008, 18% of all married couples had admitted to cheating on their husband or wife. I am not even close to being married, so this stat isn’t as important to me as finding out just how many men condone getting busy with another woman when they have a girlfriend, but it’s still an important insight into the minds of men. Call me naive, but I abhor cheating. My moral compass snaps shut at the thought of a person who’s seriously involved sleeping with someone else. So to hear Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s been (happily? Reports indicate otherwise, but who really knows?) married to Coldplay’s Chris Martin for nine years saying she still respects her best friends despite knowing they’ve cheated – despite never having done it herself, mind — well, I kind of want to slap her. Don’t preach what you don’t practice, woman!
I admire her fashion sense, her acting skills and, let’s face it, her figure, but I can’t abide this. Here’s what she said that have my panties in a twist: “I am a great romantic, but I also think you can be a romantic and a realist,” she told the Daily Mail. “Life is complicated and long and I know people that I respect and admire and look up to who have had extra-marital affairs.”
She rubs salt in the wound of our imperfect lives by saying, “I’m lucky — I have a wonderful, blessed life. I have two fantastically delightful children and a very nice husband. Knock on wood!”
She adds, “We’re flawed — we’re human beings and sometimes you make choices that other people are going to judge. That’s their problem, but I think that the more I live my life, the more I learn not to judge people for what they do. I think we’re all trying our best, but life is complicated.”
The problem here is that half of what she says makes sense in a full-on Monet kind of way. True, we are all flawed. That’s the beauty of life, no? Making mistakes and learning from them is how we grow. But cheating, to me at least, isn’t ‘trying your best.’ End your relationship, quit your marriage, call the whole darn thing a day before you start sleeping with someone else! It isn’t fair, it isn’t right and it isn’t decent.
I consider myself to be both a romantic and a realist as well (she and I are both Libras, after all, the sign best known for their loving-not-fighting abilities) and I realize that love can’t always last. Sometimes people grow apart, sometimes relationships can’t sustain major problems; it’s a sad fact of life that not all loves can last forever. But please, do right by the person you have loved (or liked) and respect them by ending it first before you move on to someone else.
Gwyneth claims that she still respects her friends regardless of what they do, but at the end of the day, would she still respect herself if she were the cheater in question?
