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FtttG  Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.  1mo ago (docs.google.com)   Edited 1mo ago   2017 thread views

The Motte infidelity survey

docs.google.com

UPDATE: My analysis available here.

In yesterday's small-scale questions thread, @cjet79 asks why the song "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers has had such staying power, famously staying in the UK singles charts decades after its initial release. Some explanations (including my own) point to its compositional elements; others focus on its lyrics and subject matter. @100ProofTollBooth argues that it's a very universal and relatable song, as "The experience of infidelity (to some degree) is common to many (most? idk) people."

I'm curious if this is really the case, so I decided to go Aella mode and created a simple survey to find out about people's experiences with infidelity. It consists of a few demographic questions (age, sex, sexual orientation, relationship style), then asks you if you've ever had an unfaithful partner, then asks you if you've ever been unfaithful to a partner.

Completely anonymous, and I've set it up so the form doesn't collect email addresses if you're logged in.

3
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Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

UPDATE: I've been advised that the good folks over at rDrama are brigading the survey, so I've closed it. I'll have to see if there's any way to exclude the troll responses from my analysis.

Rats. I was looking forward to the results and the ensuing discussion, too!

Analysis is live now! Although you may have to wait for the mods to approve it.

Wow, thanks! Talk about ask and ye shall receive!

ETA: link says the post is deleted, suspect that a mod needs to approve it, cough cough. Pretty please?

Most boring survey responder ever, reporting for duty.

I filled this out as a cheater and someone who’s been cheated on, can’t wait to realize I’m a terrible, whorish outlier

There's an entire section about the subset you fall into.

Am I the only person in the world who wasn't familiar with the song "Mr. Brightside"? Just looked it up and I'd believe I might have heard it once or twice in the past, but maybe not. It's musically chaotic and the lyrics are completely unintelligible to me.

Am I the only person in the world who wasn't familiar with the song "Mr. Brightside"?

No, same. Both my work and my extended family listen to (different) classic/vintage/modern rock radio stations 24/7, and I'm 100% certain this song hasn't been on rotation once on any of them since it was released.

The only context in which I encountered it was an old Soothouse video in which they did one of the "Google translate 1,000 times in various languages" games with the lyrics, producing:

Get out of my fucking cage
And I did all right
He must go
I want all the reasons
She began to kiss.
How it ended?
This kiss, kisses
I'll sleep
She called a taxi
Despite the fact that there is smoke
And she performs oral sex
Now they sleep
My stomach is very painful
All in my head
But she touched her breast
NOW HE GATHERED HIS HARVEST.
Let me go
I can not kill me.
Avoid
Hey, turn to the sea
Swinging lullaby
STRENGTHEN YOUR POWER
But that's the price I paid.
The fate is calling me
Open the sight,
Because I'm Mr. Brightside.

But I'd never actually heard the music, and still haven't.

Surprisingly, most of the context came through, and the "She's taking a drag" line becoming "And she performs oral sex," is almost a metaphor implicit in the song. I don't know how Google Translate somehow amplified the sexual content.

Never heard or heard of it before to my knowledge.

... Are you serious? Have you been to any weddings at all for the past 20 years? Or Karaoke?

I'm already aware you live in a different subculture but this is pretty surprising. It would be difficult for me to find a single person who's unaware of it.

I have also never heard this song before and I’ve been to a decent few weddings. It sounds… very early 2000s to me?

I did listen to The Killers a few times in the past too, I might have just forgotten about that one.

Have you been to any weddings at all for the past 20 years? Or karaoke?

No.

It's one of those songs that I'd definitely heard (at least in snippets), but didn't know the name... until a college football comedy sketch involving Missouri and Kansas.

It's funny because I have seen references to it for years but was finally only nagged into finding out what it is once this place spontaneously generated a ton of discourse about it.

Same here. I've heard of it but when I looked it up it wasn't a song I recognised.

I guess you had to be there.

I believe it was performed recently as the opening show to the Champions League Final, so it might not be entirely "spontaneous".

I believe at least one other person in the thread hadn't heard of it, but you might be the first native English speaker who hadn't. That genuinely surprises me.

I'm also a native English speaker and had never heard the song before either. I know of the Killers, but only through other songs (Somebody Told Me and When You Were Young). Never heard this one despite its apparent popularity.

Somebody Told Me

I had to look this one up -- not very familiar to me. I have to admit, the first thing that came to mind was Smash Mouth.

When You Were Young

Not familiar to me at all.

But me not knowing rock bands doesn't really mean much, I almost exclusively listen to disco, disco house, and Europop. Disco Demolition Night was an offense against God.

I like quite a few of the Killers' songs and have listened to them a lot which is what makes this even crazier to me. Although now that I've looked into Mr. Brightside I find it an unpleasant enough experience that I'd probably have just screened it out if it came up in the wild.

I'm now very excited for you to post the results.

122 responses so far, more than I expected. Debating how long I should wait before closing it.

I didn't even know we had over 100 people here, posters and invesred lurkers combined.

I had the same thought, although on reflection you do occasionally see comments with 80+ net upvotes.

Upvoting requires you to be logged in. I think it's a usual rule of thumb that accounts : lurkers is approximately a 1:100 ratio.

On Twitter and Reddit, maybe. Here, maybe not? The Culture War thread gets 1500 comments a week and 20,000 views. Presumably most of those are posters checking on their own threads, the average regular might individually reload it 10-50 times in a week. We definitely have some prolific lurkers here, but I doubt the ratio is close to 100 for every poster, or even 10.

Shhh, you’re ruining the fantasy.

I am an inspiration to millions.

It’s the right amount, really. Someone on another small corner of the internet mentioned this as one of those few small, good places a few months ago. Someone in the comments mentioned a few good users. Would you want more?

True. One of the sadnesses of this decade has been realising that most of the freedoms I took for granted around technology and the internet were essentially predicated on normies not knowing about them, and the creeping realisation that something can be light-touch regulated (airsoft, remote-control planes, websites) or popular, but not both.

A quick manual scan through the most recent five pages of the all-comments "firehose" page (covering the past six hours of discussion) reveals 50 unique posters just in that small slice.

Are people really listening to lyrics of songs that much? I mostly don't, regardless of what language they're in, even if I'm the one singing. I'm listening to the music.

Lyrics are often borderline incoherent and made to fit the music, not the other way around.

I always try to listen to lyrics. They're a major part of songs. Sometimes it makes them worse, most of the time it makes them better.

There's plenty of music where I enjoy listening to the lyrics but that kind of rock song often sounds to me like all the action is taking place in a fairly limited section of the mid-range, often with added distortion on the guitars and vocals that are pitched more towards shouting such that it tends to merge into a smear of tuneful noise rather than distinct musical elements. That doesn't help.

I like the Killers, and I do pay attention to lyrics, but I think you're right in that most of the Killers' lyrics are nonsense. Sure, the song has general themes of jealousy, but not much coherence beyond that.

Consider the first two lines. "Comin' out of my cage and I've been doin' just fine / Gotta, gotta be down because I want it all." These lyrics barely make sense and seemingly have nothing to do with the rest of the song. And then you get to lines like "Turning saints into the sea / Swimming through sick lullabies" that make even less sense. Sure, you can try to interpret them to mean something, but they're mostly just there to sound cool. I doubt Brandon Flowers intended any deeper meaning.

It's not even clear to me that the song is about infidelity. I read it as being about a guy who is pining after a woman who its not interested in him, and he is imagining scenarios where she is sleeping with other men ("it's all in my head").

Are you an ESL? I've had similar issues with songs in English where it's hard for me to understand the lyrics unlike with my mother tongue.

But otherwise it varies on the song and the type of music. Some lyrics are really good, others are incoherent(and that's a good thing), others still can be bad, but still work really because the singer's voice carries the song. Defenestration Song by Have a Nice Life is a good example of great lyrics and the singer's voice elevate a song to a level it could never reach without them. Another example is Coil's live session version of Triple Sons and the One You Bury. But the latter is probably too experimental.

I prefer instrumental music overall though.

Even in Finnish there is only one band where I pay any attention to lyrics beyond individual lines and they're legendary for having outstanding lyrics (they're obviously also largely untranslatable without losing all their meaning, cleverness and beauty).

I am but the language doesn't matter and I have no trouble understanding the lyrics. I generally don't think about the lyrics in Swedish either.

At most I think about individual phrases in a song and how they work together with music.

I agree with you, I don't think the success of "Mr. Brightside" is primarily explicable by its lyrical content.

Clearly the song is just popular because of the masterful rhyme bait and switch. You know the one. It is truly masterful.

I never thought it was about infidelity as such, it could be, but it could equally be a song about the immediate aftermath of a breakup where the singer is tormenting himself with imagining his ex-girlfriend has moved on and is with a new guy/is casually dating.

Mostly I think it's because the beat is catchy and you don't even have to pay attention to the lyrics, you can just as easily sing along "na na" until you get to the part to bawl out "I'M MISTER BRIGHTSIDE!!!!"

I suspect it is similar with Rihanna's "We Found Love". Yes, it is about drugs and a toxic relationship full of passion and risk. But mainstream EDM peaked with that track, that is why it's still popular.

@FiveHourMarathon thought as much.

It's a bit annoying that a person who has been in zero romances can't just skip all the pages past the first one.

(

Anecdotes on this topic:

  • I once received a consumer survey. It was a paper booklet with dozens of pages, including (probably literally) a dozen for the respondent to indicate how often he watched different television shows. After two or three pages of marking "did not watch" for every single show, I got tired of it and just scribbled a line through the checkboxes.

  • I once received an electronic survey from my university. It had (probably literally) a dozen different pages for the respondent to indicate which sports teams he paid attention to. After half a dozen pages of marking "do not pay attention" for every single team, I got tired of it and just closed the survey.

)

It's a bit annoying that a person who has been in zero romances can't just skip all the pages past the first one.

That's a valid point, I should have branched it accordingly. Let me see if I can change it without messing up the existing responses.

You're the human control group. I feel like we're lucky to have you.

What does this mean?

Wikipedia says:

In the design of experiments, hypotheses are applied to experimental units in a treatment group. In comparative experiments, members of a control group receive a standard treatment, a placebo, or no treatment at all. There may be more than one treatment group, more than one control group, or both.

I know what control is, I don't get the joke.

The joke is that everybody who watches sports and television shows at best is experiencing effects large enough to be evaluated in a future study, or at worst is being actively experimented on by television and sports companies.

My answers are not likely to be useful and my concerns about most of the questions probably don't generalize...

(eg, what does "without your knowledge or consent" mean in an open relationship, where I might well consent to broad ground rules without needing or wanting to know about every ERP partner? I put that down as "no" under the spirit of 'infidelity', but by the strict text? On the other hand, most social conservatives would see the actual open-relationships as infidelity with more steps... or hot, given the natal sex of the partners involved.)

That said, "What kinds of romantic relationships have you had?" could probably use a 'mix of above' answer before Other. I would be genuinely surprised if there were as many people who'd only had poly relationships as who have had a mix of poly and mono ones.

((I don't think jealousy is strictly universal, but its absence is closer to a form of damage than a strength; even in poly relationships, people like the underlying relationship claim that it represents. The extent cuckolding as a kink tends to be a marmite -- normal people either absolutely hate it or really like it -- suggests at least the fear of infidelity is extremely common.))

((I don't think jealousy is strictly universal, but its absence is closer to a form of damage than a strength; even in poly relationships, people like the underlying relationship claim that it represents. The extent cuckolding as a kink tends to be a marmite -- normal people either absolutely hate it or really like it -- suggests at least the fear of infidelity is extremely common.))

The great myth of polyamory (broadly defined) is that it is the lack of jealousy, rather than the negotiation of jealousy against other goods and utilities.

Jealousy is never something you want to predicate a healthy relationship on unless you really want to play with fire and risk a complete dissolution of whatever happens to be good in your relationship. One built off “power dynamics,” and “who needs the other the least,” is one a normal person should probably leave. A lot of people in relationships are afraid to discuss their insecurities because of things like this. They’re afraid of the risk of saying something like “I don’t like it when you talk this way to other girls,” that the man they’re with will use that against them at some point. If I were in a relationship personally, I take the devotion I make to the other person seriously. If they outright said they feel jealous that I do X with another woman (provided it wasn’t an overt demand as a way to control my behavior in general), then I would simply stop doing it to preserve their feelings; and likewise I would expect the same with them.

If they outright said they feel jealous that I do X with another woman (provided it wasn’t an overt demand as a way to control my behavior in general), then I would simply stop doing it to preserve their feelings; and likewise I would expect the same with them.

An exception big enough to park a Mack truck. The list of irrational and impossible demands a woman, or a man, can put on you because it makes them jealous rapidly limits your life in ways that are incompatible with modernity. The harem and the chador are stable equilibria, everything else requires that someone eat some jealousy on occasion.

My point isn't that polyamory is built on jealousy, it's that the polyamorous (and I include in this category those pursuing a lifestyle of serial monogamy) are trading off the possibility of feeling jealous for things that they want.

The executive's wife who accepts her philandering husband is trading off her jealousy against having a stable marriage, husband who provides for her, her kids having a father. The husband in an open relationship is trading off his jealousy of his wife for his own opportunity to sleep with other women.

And most men and women, post sexual revolution in an environment of serial monogamy, trade the jealousy of knowing that their partner had lovers before marriage, for the opportunity to take their own lovers before marriage. Premarital sex is exactly this kind of tradeoff, it's merely temporal separation rather than physical.

Where polyamorous relationships typically fail is that it's really hard for people to get enough out of them to balance against their jealousy.

That said, "What kinds of romantic relationships have you had?" could probably use a 'mix of above' answer

I considered it, but I thought having like nine or ten possible answers ("mostly mono but sometimes poly", "mostly poly but sometimes mono" etc.) would be too granular for an introductory demographic question, especially as I'm fairly sure the majority of respondents are going to answer "monogamous". So far the latter prediction has proved correct.

(eg, what does "without your knowledge or consent" mean in an open relationship, where I might well consent to broad ground rules without needing or wanting to know about every ERP partner?

I thought of that, which is why I included this subtitle below every question:

If you were in a polyamorous or open relationship, you can include instances in which your romantic partner had penetrative sex with someone in specific contravention of your "ground rules" (e.g. no sleeping with close friends or family members). Please provide details under "Other".

If you're in an open relationship with ground rules like "don't have sex with my friends or family members", then I wouldn't say you've been cheated on unless your partner had sex with one of your friends or family members.

Ah. I'd read that more as modifying "consent", rather than modifying "consent or knowledge", but that's probably an artifact of how poly people treat it and may not be an issue for the overwhelming majority of respondents here.

I said this in the original Mr. Brightside thread, but I think the theme is universal, and the feeling of jealousy is universal, because infidelity as a feeling isn't limited to "legal" infidelity as outlined in the survey.

The song is not about a girlfriend cheating on you. It's about feeling ambivalent after leaving a girl behind and knowing she is probably moving on. You have feelings for her, and in another life maybe you would end up together, but for bigger reasons you are moving on and you know she is too, and while you know you have to move on you still don't like the thought of her hooking up with someone else. That's the joke in the name: he's "Mr. Brightside" because even though he's the one who chooses to change his life and become a rock star, he's still jealous of her, he can't help but look on the "bright side" of everything.

Lyrics for analysis

Comin' out of my cage and I've been doin' just fine, Gotta, gotta be down because I want it all

He's "coming out of his cage" because "he wants it all." He's moving on, moving up, changing his life. He has to because:

it's just the price I pay, Destiny is calling me

Losing the girl he loved is the cost of the changes in his life, which he has to make, "destiny" is calling him. He knows he wants to become a rock star, he has to become a rock star, the cost is worth it. But there is a cost, he can't have the girl and his destiny, and even if he still must pursue his dreams he still has feelings for the girl.

Everyone with romantic feelings feels jealousy, even if they've never formally been cheated on by someone who had formally promised not to do that, it's a natural human emotion. Girls who get married get jealous when guys they turned down marry someone hotter. Boys who break up with their girlfriend when they go off to college get jealous when she gets a new boyfriend. Guys who get married to women are still jealous of ex boyfriends she had twenty years ago, even if they never had sex, even if they only ever kissed. People are jealous when people they dumped move on. Men rage with jealousy when their ex finds someone better because they don't want her to have someone better; they rage with jealousy if she sleeps with every loser because it implies that he is also a loser.

Jealousy is pretty much irreducible as a feeling. Maybe when you achieve true monogamy, as opposed to serial monogamy, first kiss on the altar, it reduces somewhat. But I don't really see much active evidence of that in anecdata.

I gotta say, selfishly, I like this comment and the responses to it because it confirms my original hypothesis that "Mr. Brightside" is a choose-your-own-adventure about relationship ambiguities, general feels of "hurt" or "pain" etc. and that is why it's such a big song.

I don't think anyone in this thread is right because I also don't believe anyone in this thread is wrong. And that makes me happy. I guess I'm looking on the brightsid---GOD DAMN IT.

The song is not about a girlfriend cheating on you.

"Choking on your alibis" at least gestures pretty hard in that direction.

Also, the guy who wrote it said it was about when "I went to the Crown and Anchor [a Las Vegas pub] and my girlfriend was there with another guy."

I'd agree that part of the song's magic is that it's not only about a girlfriend cheating on you, though. Most of it works very well with any kind of jealousy, and with envy. IMHO it even works well with unrequited love; other than the "alibis" bit the lyrics could be about someone realizing he probably missed his chance with a girl he never had the guts to make a move on. His attempts to reassure himself that "it was only a kiss" then sound like a man trying to be rational (she hasn't definitely fallen for his rival) rather than one trying to rationalize (she just did a little infidelity where I could see it!).

Yep.

When I was at the age I was most in touch with the song, the "And it's all in my head, and she's touching his chest now, he takes off her dress, now" line mainly resonated with me because there were women I was eyeing and either they were already in relationships or got into one shortly after my feelings arose, so the image of her being intimate with THAT dude, a guy who was now receiving something I dearly want, were constant and unavoidable. The jealousy was the primary feature.

I mostly interpret it in terms of semi-mutual 'rejection' where both the singer and the female subject are aware of the other, but after some casual interaction (it was only a kiss!) the sparks that might have burst into a flame of passion are dying as she goes into some other dude's arms and the singer resolves to move on even as he's wrestling with the surprising emotional weight of the events. I prefer this interpretation because if its just some random chick the guy knows and fancies but has never even talked to, the singer is kind of pathetic.

This is not a song where the guy is openly professing feelings, or making plans to win her over, or going over to her place with romantic intent...

He's mentally checking out of the situation but admits the extent of his emotional distress, although perhaps realizes it will fade out over time.

This fits with infidelity, but that explicit interpretation is easiest to detect if you're viewing it through that specific lens, maybe as you've experienced it yourself.

Huh, interesting, guess I've been wrong all this time.

IMHO it even works well with unrequited love; other than the "alibis" bit the lyrics could be about someone realizing he probably missed his chance with a girl he never had the guts to make a move on.

I always took that as a girl saying so and so was "just a friend." Which works regardless.

Isn't it against the rules? When I suggested to do something like that, I was booed. But it's just me.

Btw, your sample is likely to be even more volunteer biased than Aella's

I'm broadly in favour of surveys on here. I want to find out more about our weird little community.

While these type of self-reported surveys may be reliable in the statistical sense (eg people will respond the same way no matter how many times they're asked) in validity terms I wouldn't expect much (eg I wouldn't expect to learn what it is you may be hoping to learn, whether and to what degree folks are cheating cheaters) even with the stated clause that responses are anonymized. For all the same reasons as Aella's "research."

I would be at least mildly surprised if we didn't have at least one or two trolls dropping giant infidelity bombs to set ripples going. People aren't honest or particularly good at self-reflection, and often even when they are, aren't truthful.

The above is my opinion of course so who cares, but decades of indecipherable noise in survey research suggests I am not simply cynical.

It's not against the rules.

Though I suppose I would have preferred it go in the SSQ thread.

Noted, if I ever do one of these surveys again.

I’ll say I didn’t have any real reason for that; hence the approval. But we’ve always been vaguely bemused when people want to do top-level posts. Odds are you’ll get better visibility this way, at least?

I was of the mind top-level posts were solicited, that we wanted more top-level posts. I presume people don't do standalone posts because it puts you out there. Like standing up and dinging your fork on the wine glass, as opposed to just commenting at length on some esoteric point like Uncle Fred during the meal, which would be the comments in the usual Weekday Whatever threads. That the mods are "bemused" by top-level attempts is interesting to me. Why would that be?

So there are a couple main groups of post.

  1. Regulars who want to do something different. This is welcome, even encouraged, subject to the “CW in the CW thread” rule.
  2. Rat-adjacent posters who want to repost their own substack, or occasionally a related essay series. Less encouraged, since there’s a real risk of engagement bait and general unsavory tactics. It’s much harder to enforce the CW and politeness rules in a one-off interaction. Still, we approve a decent number of these, especially from users with any sort of presence in the SSC community. KulakRevolt or felipec would be examples.
  3. Complete randos who want to post their (usually AI-heavy) manifesto. We have flirted with these before, since posters tend to appeal to the spirit of free debate. This has rarely panned out. The current policy is not to approve.

The catch is that there are an order of magnitude more #3 posters. Excluding outright commercial spam, 90+% of what we get for top-levels are people asking to debate their earth-shattering new theory of everything. When we see someone known and respected like @FtttG in the queue, we’re a bit surprised. “Wait, people actually use this thing?” Then we check for CW, etc., and most likely approve.

I see. Not how I had read your post. Thanks for the clarification.

known and respected

Aww bae <3

Isn't it against the rules?

If it is, mods feel free to delete.

Btw, your sample is likely to be even more volunteer biased than Aella's

I have no intention of using this as hard data, it's just a bit of fun.

I don't think it's hard data to universalize to gen-pop, but I'm curious because I'm curious about my own community.

If it is, mods feel free to delete.

Stand-alone submissions start removed by default. If anybody other than the submitter can see it, it's already been approved by the moderators.

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