What does this say about me?

I'm a fidelity-loving kind of girl. Not a serial dater, or a serial cheater. I'm a person who values trust, honesty, virtue. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the "player" type of guy or girl. In real life, that is.

On soaps, on the other hand, the long-standing, perfect, twu wuv couples drive me nuts. I find myself rooting for the plot-device temptress to steal the hero away from his just-married bliss. It's boring to watch two people be perfect for each other day after day. It's far more entertaining when they mix it up, throw obstacles in the way of happiness, hold a little information back so that it can be used to separate an otherwise "unseparateable" couple.

In the interest of full disclosure, and because I've basically admitted to an extreme case of "shallow-itis" already, I record three soaps everyday on my DVR. I've watched As the Word Turns and Guiding Light for years. I recently added General Hospital to the mix. (And that doesn't even cover the soaps I have a pretty good working knowledge of, the ones I catch from time to time).

I love a good drama. And I can appreciate soaps for what they are: mindless, fun and diversionary. I don' t like it when they tackle "issues." (They aren't meant to be deep, and I don't like it when they feign to be). I like them best when they are high on melodrama, teeming with scandal and letting the love of a good woman redeem the otherwise unredeemable. Unlike some soap watchers, I realize it isn't real, there really isn't a Port Charles or an Oakdale and that the choices these people make don't hurt or help people in the real world.

On General Hospital right now we have a couple, Jax and Courtney, who just got married this summer (which in soap time could possibly have been 1994, as things seem to fly by or go slow at the will of the writers), and are already separating due to their inability to get pregnant and then their inability to withstand the pressures of hiring and supporting a surrogate to carry their baby (a surrogate, by the way, who used her own egg in this process, which just seems implausible and wrong on so many levels. . . but it is, after all, a soap and not real. . . so I'll follow my own advice and suspend disbelief). Suddenly, Courtney was thrown into the path of a male character (Nikolas Cassadine, a Russian prince who lives in Port Charles, New York. Yeah. And whose wife was raped by his doppelganger [and she can't get over it. How dare she.] while Nik was in prison for allegedly killing his evil grandmother who tried to kill his young bride earlier. I know!) constantly and they shared "woe is me" stories and laughed and understood each other and convinced each other that their spouses were wrong for them and they were right for each other and BOOM, two marriages, not even a year old in one case and barely two months old in the other, were over.

And I loved it. Isn't that horrible? I loved the furtive glances and the crying and scandal and hurt feelings. I didn't even think twice about it. I loved that they were mixing it up. It didn't have to make sense. It was just good drama.

In so many ways it feels like this is what my father warned me about when he said that TV and movies would "numb" me to the sins of the world. That things like cheating on a spouse or lying or any of the other preached against sins would start to seem "okay" if I watched them enough and accepted them as the actions of someone I was rooting for.

I understand this logic, and I see where those who use it are coming from. But at the same time, as I take stock of my current beliefs and core values, I find that I still think cheating is wrong, I still don't think lying and stealing are okay past times. I won't be any more likely to marry someone and two months later run off with a Russian prince when my husband and I can't conceive. If anything, it reinforces the idiocy of poor choices and the negative consequences associated with them. It's just fun to watch it all happen. What do you think?