Infidelidades: representações femininas e masculinas

Abstract

Love wakens pleasant memories, feelings and emotions that are associated with romantic stories, which hardily mention the conflicts that are spread through love relationships. Love is daily lived and told not only from the beautiful but especially from the conflicts that produce disharmony. Love experienced in conjugality is ruled by monogamy, which is fostered by the desired ideal of fidelity as an option. However, many people establish sexual and affective relationships out of the conjugal bond, awakened by sexual and affective dissatisfaction, lack of tenderness, love and care, or perhaps desire, pleasure, passion, vengeance or competition, considered to be socially undesirable behaviors. This work tried to unveil how relationships of infidelity are daily lived by eight women and five men in Belém, Pará, which have agreed to share their stories and secrets about the subject with the researcher. As there was a circularity of ideas in the narratives, the informants allowed finding many visions of and innumerous justifications to the practice of affective or sexual infidelity, as well as different nuances that inform the feminine and masculine representations about infidelity. This gave the opportunity to read the limits that structure conjugal relationships, because infidelity – thought as a disarrangement element – is in general juggled and serves as a strategy for the love game, assuring sometimes, when it is undiscovered, the maintenance of the couples bonds.