He’s the kind of guy who considers all the angles, takes the time to write out the facts and solicits other points of view in order to gain some perspective and doesn’t hit people without provocation. In other words, a decent, rational guy.
Close friendship is over. You may be able to stay somewhat distant acquaintances… I guess.
And yeah, tell your wife. She’s your wife FFS! Obviously, ex-friend can no longer stay in your house, since at minimum he can’t be trusted to not snoop in your stuff, let alone not be disgusting with your wife’s intimate items. So, don’t you think she might be curious as to why he can’t stay at your place anymore? Yeah, so tell her now, rather than next time ex-friend wants to stay. And if she ever finds out about it and realises you didn’t tell her and that she wore the underwear again after that happened, you could be in for a lot of grief (or maybe she’d shrug it off, since they got washed anyway… but do you want to risk it?)
There’s no angle, and nothing decent and rational about justifying a jerk off rifing through your hamper and cumming to the scent of your wife. All under the guise of friendship, of course.
A decent, rational guy wouldn’t even think twice about how his wife would feel about having this pervert in her home.
You have to tell your wife. I mean, let’s say you continue like nothing has happened, and then in a year there’s another incident, either involving your wife or that you hear about through the grapevine. You wife comes to you 'Can you believe . . .". Now you are in a spot. Yes, you can believe. But your choices are to either 1) pretend you are shocked, which goes beyond “not telling” and into “active deception” or 2) be honest about your lack of surprise, which will lead to you revealing that “oh yeah, honey, a year ago I caught him jacking off into your panties and didn’t want to upset you”. Either choice is awful. Don’t get in that spot..
He wasn’t jacking off into your wife’s panties because they were panties–he can get panties. He was jacking off into your wife’s panties because they belong to your wife. He was thinking about her when he did it. And he was so eager to do this that the minute you walked out the door, he made a beeline for the bedroom. Whatever the two of you talked about before you left? During that conversation, he was covering up his eagerness and his impatience for you to leave. All he was thinking about was for you to hurry up so he could get back there. This wasn’t a boredom thing. Your wife needs to know about this.
If we only had good photos of the actors I am quite sure we could determine guilt or innocence.
Please post asap.
OK I know it’s a stretch, but… sometimes when you wash sheets together with other stuff, small items get caught up in the sheet and you don’t notice, you only notice when you are asleep under the sheets. Yeah, I know unlikely, but it happens.
Other than that, I think you should tell your wife. You have made it clear you already know how she would feel, so keeping it back seems dishonest to me. Then just tell him that you are not comfortable having him to stay anymore as you don’t feel you can trust him around your laundry. You can still hang out with other friends, he just can’t stay at your house anymore. That’s what I’d go for.
I say that as a person who’s shared flats before with people with whom it was fine to take their clothes out of the dryer and fold their knickers for them, so you could put your own load in the machine. I’m not a prude about knicker-touching among friends, but this guy clearly crossed a line. And he knows it too.
This would worry me. Did he stay because he wasn’t ashamed at all, or because he was ashamed and thought a better cover up would be to act as if nothing had happened?
I’d be curious as to how much shame he feels. If he feels enough shame, he might never do anything like that again. It could be he distances himself from you.
How good a friend of yours is he, anyway? Would you lose something valuable if you lost him as a friend?
To put this in perspective, I can’t find a cite at the moment, but I remember having sex with your best friend’s wife or girlfriend is in the top-five of most mens fantasies. Still, doing something about it like your friend did.. at the very least, it shows a lack of boundaries, impulsiveness, and bad decision skills. I wouldn’t trust him anymore, not because I’d think he would do anything to your wife, but because he might set the house on fire with his impulsive behavior.
One last disconcerting thought: what if he saw your lack of a reprimand as an implicit approval? Maybe he thinks you are waiting for him to propose a threesome with your wife?
Eh, he’s got plausible deniability. He didn’t actually see him choking his chicken. He could have been mistaken about the garment on the floor.
Unless he wants to completely cut this guy out of his life forever – and if he did, he wouldn’t be asking for advice – it seems everyone will suffer if he tells her. Some things are better left unsaid, this is one of them.
If I found out my husband knew that one of our friends had been interested in my underwear, and he told me nothing and allowed the friend to keep coming over, I’d be pissed.
It sure sounds like the guy has an impulse control problem. All the ladies already think he’s creepy. Maybe it’s because he’s, you know, creepy. Dude, it is NOT normal to run off to a friend’s guest bedroom and pull out his wife’s panties as soon as you’re alone in the house. Toss him. You can find other friends.
It’s possible they were his fiancee’s panties and not your wife’s, and that possibility is worth exploring before you kick the perv the fuck out of your house forever. Because you are going to kick this perv the fuck out of your house forever if those were your wife’s panties.
Because sooner or later your wife will find out about this, and if you didn’t kick the perv the fuck out of your house forever, she will have your and his heads (both sets) on pikes.
Yeah, nuh CrazyCatLady:
And Antigen, totally agree with everything you’ve said.
Good choice of phrase, there 
I don’t think it’s good policy to avoid telling your wife things she’d want to know and has a legitimate interest in simply because you won’t like her reaction.
If, in a year, she runs up to him and says “OMG, you won’t believe what I just heard. [Creepy Guy] was in [mutual friends] bathroom jerking off into her panties”, it’s going to be clear that the OP is not surprised and the whole thing will come out. “Plausible deniability” is not going to be much of a defense.
Put it this way: if he had been clearly jacking off into the panties, would you change your position? Is it really the plausible deniability that makes you think it’s better to just not mention this?
Let’s look at this from a perspective of priorities -
Which take priority? Wife or Friend? Sanctity of home or Friend?
I really don’t see any question what the answers are.
Time to start thinking like an adult.
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In your shoes, with Xmas coming, I’d find a reason to give him a gift wrapped package in front of friends and family. He’d open the package and find the panties. Let him explain.
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And as an unrelated aside, I loved this episode:
[QUOTE=Seinfeld]
“You mean, the panties your mother laid out for you?”
[/QUOTE]
Tell your wife. She deserves to know what kind of perverts you hang around with for her own safety and sanity (and what this particular pervert did in her own house, with her own panties). I’m guessing she will want to throw out those panties, not keep on wearing them. Your friend was waaaaaaay over the line.
“Plausible deniability” might work in a courtroom or international politics, but I doubt it’ll impress a pissed off wife very much.
Me, I’d level with the wife. Not only does she have a right to know but from a practical perspective as others have said the husband is just setting himself up for a domestic disaster. Plus who knows what else he’s doing rummaging through his & her stuff?
Der Trihs: Yup, now I’m wondering if those two have any sex toys stashed in their bedroom and not under lock and key… :eek:
And speaking as a woman and wife, not only would I want to know ASAP so at the very least I never touched that pair of undies again, I’d probably want to burn them. Preferably while pervy friend was wearing them.
I understand that everyone has their peccadilloes, but when they can’t control it and it involves a family member, even if it’s indirectly, that’s a deal breaker. I think the person is crossing a huge line. I say this proudly as a pervert in good standing. Tell your wife, and ask her if there’s any chance she left the garments out.
The following is a devil advocate view and not the official viewpoint of Simple Linctus. Simple Linctus makes the following statement purely with the intention of provoking some thought in the OP:
Look at things from his point of view. If he is a utilitarian, he could easily come to the ethical conclusion that it was perfectly fine to sniff your wife’s panties (which includes sniffing them while masturbating, but not masturbating with them) because no harm would be done to either your or your wife, but he would experience great pleasure. Thus it would be an ethical act - perhaps if taken to extremes a duty.
Of course this analysis would have been flawed for reasons made obvious in your OP - the chances of you or your wife were not non-zero and the harm done there is so much greater than the pleasure he would receive, almost any probability of him being discovered renders the act unethical.
But is it necessarily fair to punish someone for acting in good faith, if he really thought he was doing good*? Humans are notorious for underestimating risks.
P.S. You mention parents that are clearly demented when it comes to sex. We are all products of our upbringing and he could also .
*And the argument doesn’t require him to have performed a formal ethical analysis. Simply reasoning “I will like this, and it will harm no one” - which I’m sure he did - could be enough.
If there’s no legitimate reason for her underwear to be in the room, then … there’s no reason for it to be there. At that point I’m not sure the details of why it was there are important. The retrieval is the creepy part.