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rmunn • today at 6:12 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Read Anna Karenina sometime. Tolstoy shows both the aspect of a society in which rich men having affairs was considered the norm, and the destructive effect it has on people. (And also the double standard by which women were judged much more harshly than men for having affairs). And he also, by comparing the two main relationships in the book (Vronsky's affair with Anna, and Levin's marriage to Kitty), said "It doesn't have to be this way, you can have healthy relationships if you just reject society's advice to have affairs and instead stay faithful to your wife".

I didn't like the book when I first read it (mostly because I seriously dislike Anna, and the book naturally spends a lot of time being told from her POV), but in retrospect, it's brilliant. Tolstoy has, without a single bit of moralizing, presented one of the best arguments I've seen in literature for being faithful to one's spouse and not engaging in affairs.

P.S. I should add that I don't think Tolstoy was inventing the "rich men having affairs was considered normal" aspect for the purpose of the book. I think that was what Russian society was really like at the time, and he took that aspect of society and wrote a book criticizing it, highlighting the negative effects that that attitude would have on people.


Replies

gramie • today at 2:13 PM

I think that "rich men having affairs" has been considered normal for most of human history. Of course, in China there were official (and unofficial) concubines, and many cultures have accepted and endorsed polygamy.

In South Africa, men marrying multiple wives is still accepted as long as they are "traditional". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygamy_in_South_Africa.

Most Muslim-majority countries currently allow polygamy. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

nozzlegear • today at 4:24 PM

> Read Anna Karenina sometime. Tolstoy shows both the aspect of a society in which rich men having affairs was considered the norm, and the destructive effect it has on people.

The person I replied to said "men," not "rich men." It is interesting that Russian aristocracy liked to bone down, but "rich people don't have affairs" is not what I was arguing. Having an affair is and has always been deeply frowned upon by human society as a whole, and society has always reacted by shaming the people who've been caught doing it.