It turns out that marriage isn't easy and the first year sure as shinola ain't no honeymoon (after the honeymoon, that is). Over at Women's Health, they're reporting about an unhappy new trend of recently married men cheating. While it's impossible (if you're a quitter) to get statistics on this trend (though Ashley Madison's honcho says that 500,000 of his 3.3 million (about 15%) users are newly married), anecdotes and some advances in cheating technology have made some sort of uptick of infidelity inevitable.

The Women's Health article focuses on male cheating, which, given the numbers, is far more likely. (Theses day a basketball team of men under 35 would have one cheating man in the starting lineup (though with a pro team that number jumps pretty dramatically, unless they have AC Green).) They go on to prescribe solutions and enumerate features of a cheater. Which is well and good, but is it even possible to identify someone who might be a cheater? Is it possible to preemptively nip something in the bud that you can't possibly see coming?

We all know Facebook, Craigslist and probably Twitter and the iPhone make it easier to cheat, but one point mentioned really seemed sort of novel to me: uncertainty. Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle postulates that you can only know for certain one of two things about a particle: (generally) where it is or how fast it is going. To modify this slightly, a lot of times a guy (or possibly a gal, I would have no way of knowing) can only be entirely positive of who he is OR where he's going. So maybe he knows he is going to get married but hasn't given a whole hell of a lot of thought to who he is, how he fits with his future wife and what the hell they're going to do after the wedding. There's a great Spanish proverb that warns against this: "antes te cases, lo mire a que dire"* (literally "before you marry, look at what you've done.")

But he doesn't feel like a different person after they leave the chapel or after the wedding night or after they get back from the honeymoon or while he's doing his 15% of the thank you cards or after the first year of wedded coexistence. At that point, dude's like , "Dangnabit, maybe this was a mistake. I didn't plan for this. Am I really supposed to want to still have sex with other women? Would I get caught? What kind of underpants is that Olive Garden waitress wearing? Is it something exotic that I've never even heard of?" and so on.