For the zillionth time in a tv show/movie came the scene of the irate wife confronting the ‘other woman.’ Attacking her for ruining her marriage and demanding to know why she didn’t think of the children she and he had. This time the other woman is apparently pregnant as wife goes on about how she is not going to take money away from her (wife’s) children to support this bastard child.
Now, I get that the wife is mad, and since she apparently wants the marriage to go on she wants to shift all the blame to the other woman. What I don’t understand is that the Other Women in virtually all the these scenes just stand there and take it. Instead of pointing out what seems so obvious to me: Okay, there was one person in this affair who was breaking faith with the wife, who owed consideration to the welfare of his children … and that person WASN’T the Other Woman.
Actually, does someone contemplating sleeping with another person OWE anything to existing mates/children? On a practical level, if you, potential Other Woman/Other Man, are looking to get married or hoping for a long term relationship, a married man/woman is not a sensible choice. But what if you are out for a purely physical fling? Just looking for some fun, without thought of creating an ongoing thing? Do you have a duty to quiz the potential lover about other relationships/commitments he may have made?
Do I have a duty to know if my love interest is married, engaged, polygamist? I’m going to have to go with yes.
Why do fathers scream at the boy who impregnates their daughter? It takes two, right?
Because when people are angry they aren’t thinking that straight. Duh.
Also, are you assuming that the wife doesn’t also go and rip into the husband too? Because in real life that ain’t how it works. Just like, eventually the father is going to blame the daughter too!
But for first reaction this seems par for the course. Being circumspect takes a little time for most people when they’ve been betrayed.
Deflecting the blame from the person who’s actually at fault. No, the hypothetical lover of my hypothetical lover owes nothing to me. Presumably, he thinks my lover is/would be happier with him than with me, and my happiness is going to be a very, very distant second to his and our common lover’s happiness.
Besides, what’s the point? You can’t force people to be happy with you, to love you, to stay with you.
Of course the married person deserves the lion’s share of the blame. But you don’t always think rationally when you find out your spouse is having an affair. It’s a lot easier to blame the other person instead of the spouse you presumably still love.
But knowingly sleeping with a married person is still a pretty rotten thing to do, IMO.
True, but you can require that people act morally - as in, break up with their current love interest openly & honestly before switching to a new one, rather than sneaking some in on the side.
Encouraging someone to act in bad faith towards others is I think wrong. It isn’t that you “owe” them anything, more that you owe it to yourself not to encourage bad behaviours (as a purely practical matter, they may rebound negatively on you in various ways).
You owe the same thing to them as we all owe to everyone, and it’s the same as our guiding rule here at the Dope: Don’t be a jerk. Knowingly hurting someone, or knowingly helping someone else hurt someone, is being a jerk. It doesn’t matter if the person you’re helping hurt someone would just go find another co-jerk if you refused your assistance–the fact that someone else is going to be a jerk with you or without you does NOT absolve you of jerkitude. Like I’ve said before, the fact that your friend was going to rob that liquor store with you or without you doesn’t get you off the hook for driving the getaway car.
Possible additional thing, the cheated on wife is going to have a lot of time to express her hurt and rage to husband even if they are divorcing she’s going to likely have more than a few shots at it. The encounter with the other woman though might well be a onetime thing. Even if the other woman is a co-worker you probably want to get it all out and never address it again.
I agree with the answers so far, but another “possible additional thing” is the old stereotype (which is fortunately less common nowadays than it used to be) of women as the sexual gatekeepers: men, according to this stereotype, are expected to be always horny, with uncontrollable libidos, always wanting sex whenever it’s available, and it’s the woman’s role to control the supply. That’s why “loose women” and prostitutes are so dangerous, and why it’s the Other Woman’s fault for tempting the man and making herself available to him.
The psychology of “blaming the other woman (or man)” is relatively simple. It is far easier for humans to misdirect their fear, anger, angst to a third-party instead of toward the person with whom they’ve (usually) decided to remain in a relationship.
“What I don’t understand is that the Other Women in virtually all the these scenes just stand there and take it.”
They have similar emotional/psychological “issues” as the irate spouse.
“Actually, does someone contemplating sleeping with another person OWE anything to existing mates/children?”
Not on a practical level, but arguably a moral level. It depends on their value system and what they consider acceptable behavior both in themselves and others.
“Do you have a duty to quiz the potential lover about other relationships/commitments he may have made?”
No. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea, depending on your own value system or interest in avoiding what can often happen if/when the relationship is discovered.
“Knowingly hurting someone, or knowingly helping someone else hurt someone, is being a jerk.”
But one is not obligated to presume what the spouse does and does not care about; that is the other spouse’s job.
"Like I’ve said before, the fact that your friend was going to rob that liquor store with you or without you doesn’t get you off the hook for driving the getaway car. "
Not the best comparison one might’ve made. We’re not talking about criminal acts (even where there is still criminal statute on the books with regard to adultery and no longer prosecuted, it’s also best to keep in mind that the laws were largely created to punish women who dared fuck anyone outside their husband).
No one has a duty to quiz a potential fling about their relationships, and it would be a valid point for the Other Woman to tell the wife that she didn’t know.
As **CrazyCatLady **said, though, you do owe people the courtesy of not purposely hurting them. If you choose to have a fling, knowing that it would hurt someone else, then you deserve to get yelled at.
I think people are over-thinking it and it isn’t even a gender issue. The cheating spouse does already get punished in a myriad of ways, but social ostracism is the only legal avenue by which the homewrecker can suffer any consequences. There’s no shame in being angry at the homewrecker, any more so than being angry at a drug dealer.
High on the winner scale, even in our supposedly enlightened sexual age. Poontang as commodity that women have, men mindlessly want and any relationship failure is because a woman has the strings too tight or too loose on the purse.
Everyone has a duty to learn about a sexual partner’s relationships. Hopefully, this information would emerge in a gradual manner, as you get to know them. But if you insist on jumping straight into the sack before you even know such basic things, so quickly that there’s no way to know short of “quizzing them”, then yes, that duty does mean a duty to quiz them.
The “other woman” (or “other man”) does not bear the entirety of the blame, nor even the majority of it. But they do definitely and unambiguously bear some share of it.
Toward the end of my previous marriage, the Other Guy offered me a free punch. I told him I thought he was a stupid creep, but he wasn’t the one who betrayed me. I suggested he make the same offer to his wife, however.
Putting all the blame on the other woman isn’t a universal thing. The philandering husband is also frequently looked down on by society. The Nero Wolfe novel “Too Many Clients” featured the murder of a wealthy married man who was discovered to have kept a secret love nest where he entertained numerous ‘other women’. Once that turned up in the investigation, the police didn’t much care about finding the killer of ‘that satyr’. After all, he deserved it. Even Archie couldn’t understand why Nero took the case.
Because TV shows / movies do not reflect real life. Why would you expect them to?
They mostly reflect the need to have drama; vastly inflated and nearly continuous drama.
To be sure, cheated-upon spouses in the real world get pretty hostile. But the one thing that very rarely happens in any real world argument / angry conversation on any topic is for one person to deliver a set-piece soliloquy in complete sentences and paragraphs while the other person just stands there nodding. Reality is a shout-fest of partial ill-considered sentence fragments and continuous mutual interruptions.
And as everybody else already said, the real-world cheatee also eventually gives an earful to the cheater. The third party may never even be known, and even if known is often never confronted.
