Didn’t you ever watch Jerry Springer?
“You betta stay away from mah man!”
“What ever! If you took care of him, we wouldn’t be looking nowhere else!” Fight
I always thought it was the hallmark of trashy Springer people to immediately go after the rival and ignore the cheater while he/she just stands there smirking. I understand misplaced anger, but it always seems like the cheater gets off the hook (at least until they get home, because then boy is he gon’ get it!).
I know a woman who had an affair with a married man, and he divorced his wife and married her.
Surprise! Six years and two kids later, he had an affair with someone else, divorced her, and married the third woman. I have no idea what happened after that. Except that the wedding and start of the honeymoon were scheduled for his weekend with the kids, and he just assumed their mother would take them. She refused, and told them they were his responsibility that weekend, not hers. I don’t remember what happened-- his parents took them, or something, so it worked out, but it was last minute scrambling.
I don’t know if any of the adults learned anything, but I was a teenager, and I sure took note.
I didn’t shake his hand but I did congratulate him and help him mover her stuff out of my house. He did me the biggest favor of my life and I knew it. No kids involved.
She/anyone has the right to ask and to do due diligence.
But lets be very clear and point out the road’s edge where the obvious guardrail is sometimes missing or conveniently over looked: there is Never ANY justification for Stalking.
Or, at the least a separation. Otherwise, how do you really know you’re in a love story and won’t get tossed aside the moment you want to become the only, instead of the other.
You can have as progressive a woman as you like, but if she is cheated on by her SO the default cavewoman assumption/attitude is that men are effectively mindless free range penises, and that it’s ultimately the woman’s choice to allow the man to betray his spouse or not. Fair or not women often see other women as the primary enablers and “deciders” in that dynamic not their cheating men.
“Blame the other woman?” I think. I could be reading it wrong.
That’s probably the best summation this mindless, free-range penis is gonna be able to come up with, though.
Thirty years ago she slept with my ex-husband when he was my fiancee. I forgave them both, married him anyway, and then divorced him because he really didn’t change his spots.
Sometime after that she married a friend of mine - and cheated on him. That marriage ended.
A few years ago - twenty five years into our “relationship” - she slept with the husband of my girlfriend. And that was the last straw. She - despite having a somewhat complicated relationship with my in laws (she had dated my brother in law long ago and her and my mother in law are still close - which is one of the reasons I’ve tolerated her) - is now persona non-grata in my house.
Its bad manners. I don’t deal with my ex or my friend’s ex either. They certainly are NOT blameless - and if anything have the greater share of the blame. But you don’t sleep with someone else’s partner unless you are pretty sure the terms of their agreement permit it - bad manners. And you don’t do it over and over again. I trust my husband (and besides, he finds her physically unattractive), but I really don’t need to facilitate her meeting other married men by allowing her into my house for a party.
As to why she is to blame when you are the one cheated on. There are two things - one is if you do choose to forgive your spouse, you generally need to blame SOMEONE - its human nature. She becomes the scapegoat. The siren who lured your husband away. Without that, its MUCH harder to forgive and move on (says someone who forgave in her first marriage far more often than I should have - and forgave both parties more than once). And if you do choose to blame your spouse, she gets to share the blame as well - providing she knew he was married. Sleeping with married men (outside open relationships) is simply NOT DONE. I wouldn’t be eager to forgive someone who came into my house and shit in the middle of my living room - even if my spouse told her that it was OK or was egging her on - or even that it was something I wanted.
Hmmm…my concept of a relationship involves sex. I hadn’t even considered that you could not have sex until the divorce, in fact.
And upon further reflection, it isn’t realistic for most people that they would meet someone, fall in love, wait for divorce and then only have sex in this day and age.
And finally, I’m not sure how this ending in a divorce would be any better for the cheated on (or not cheated on as the case maybe) spouse.
In any case, it doesn’t answer my question : sex or not, do you have a duty to make yourself miserable so as not to make the third party miserable (either because s/he cheated on or because her marriage ends up in a divorce)? Have you a duty to give up on your love interest because s/he already in a relationship?
I think that it in addition to the other reasons here, it is a way to avoid blaming oneself for marrying such a creep. So you think, “he would have never cheated on me if it wasn’t for this crazy homewrecker,” When you are really thinking, how could I make such a mistake and marry such a jerk who can’t even honor his vows?
The cheating spouse is clearly the bigger offending party here, but it makes perfect sense that the wronged person feels anger towards the third wheel. That applies regardless of gender. For someone to blame the other party only and let the cheater off the hook would be irrational. Of course, people can be irrational.
I’ve seen time and time again where a man who cheats regularly gets incredibly pissed off when his wife or girlfrend cheats on him. I thought that was idiotic, but then I read a little sociobiology. Well, it’s still idiotic, but it’s pretty much programmed behavior for many people (especially men). That doesn’t let them off the hook! It just shows that there might be an evolutionary basis for this kind of behavior. We must choose not to be ruled by our instincts, though. It might be instinctive to kill the offspring of a new partner too, but that wouldn’t make it excusable in the least.
So, now, when I see this behavior, I still roll my eyes, but instead of wondering WHY they’re so silly, I just want to say “Uh, dude: hypocritical much?”
Bingo. Cheating is being a jerk, regardless of which role you’re playing.
Yes, unless you want to be a jerk.
According to people I know who’ve been cheated on, they’re unanimous in that they’d far rather the marriage ended first. When the cheater says “Well it wasn’t working anyway” the obvious response is “Gee, it’d have been nice to discuss that first!” They’re especially incensed by the fact that their sex partner is having sex with someone else concurrently, for both emotional and health reasons. Cheating on the current spouse isn’t absolved by playing the “IT’S TRUE LOVE!” card.
It’s cheating if and only if the two people in the relationship have an agreement (possibly tacit) not to step out. If you have an agreement, and you break the agreement, then, well, you’re being a jerk and breaking the relationship. You may feel that exploring this possible new relationship which MIGHT be TRUE LOVE is worth the risk of being a jerk, but it doesn’t make you not a jerk: it doesn’t save you from breaking the agreements. Of course, that applies to the married party.
You get to decide whether to get with someone who’s breaking their agreements. It’s that simple. Generally, when you abet someone else in breaking agreements, you’re being a bit of a jerk, though certainly not as big a jerk as the one breaking the agreements.
BTW, I may sound hostile, as though I’ve been a wronged party. Nope, not ever. And I’m not the jealous type either. This isn’t an emotional reaction on my part, just basic ethics 101: keep your agreements, and don’t abet others in breaking theirs. Unless you want to be a jerk.
Actually, my uncle swears before all the saints that this is what happened with him and his current wife–that he was never once physically unfaithful to his previous wife. And I’ll tell you, that divorce was UGLY. He wanted the divorce pushed through as fast as possible and tried to throw money at my aunt to make her go away faster, which just pissed her off on top of everything else. If he’d just come to her before and said “I’m unhappy and I want a divorce,” things wouldn’t have been nearly so ugly.
Well, if it’s twoo wuv between you two, isn’t there going to be a divorce anyway? Aren’t you going to want to be together instead of relegating your relationship to the back burner of one of your lives? The only thing anyone gains by dragging their heels about leaving a relationship before finding a new partner instead of after is that the putative cheater doesn’t have to risk potentially being alone. The new partner doesn’t gain anything from being the piece on the side rather than the primary partner, and the current partner sure as shit doesn’t gain anything from being the backup plan in case the new partner doesn’t work out.
You have a duty to behave as honorably as you can, and to require that the people you associate behave as honorably as they can. That means that if your love interest is already in a relationship that he or she won’t leave, then yes, you have a duty not to be complicit in their shitty cheating behavior.
Yes, you have a duty not to start a relationship with someone who’s already in what’s supposed to be an exclusive relationship with someone else. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to meet someone, develop a mutual interest and wait until they tell the person that they’re committed to that it’s over before having sex with them.
As **CrazyCatLady **said, it seems like a divorce is going to be happening anyway, and as **LearJeff **said, people need to know what their spouse is doing for emotional and health related reasons.
You’re probably going to be miserable anyway. IME a cheater is most of the time not a good choice for a mate. That doesn’t mean I condemn every person who has ever cheated, just that he’s probably not going to leave and cleave to you above all else either. And his wife gets all of the important dates and all of his real life. You just get the dregs.
It seems to me, just as it’s wrong to pretend it’s the other woman to blame, it is equally foolish to pretend the other woman is blame free, and it’s the guy that’s to blame. Plenty of blame to go around, it seems to me.
I’m wondering if some of the ‘confusion’ over what is and isn’t acceptable/culpable/jerkish comes from how different our lives are versus what they were probably like for most of humanity’s existence?
For example, pretty much every week day I interact with at least a dozen new men who I know absolutely nothing about at first beyond their name and that their employer has a need for something from my employer. If I were to find one of these guys appealing enough to want to consider something further, I would have to deliberately start asking ‘casual’ questions about his life if I wanted to be sure he was ‘free.’ (Not coming up in my life, I’m an old happily married woman, but if I were younger and looking…) And the odds are vastly in favor of my not knowing anything about his wife as a person, either. She’d just be some ‘theoretical’ person, and while you shouldn’t set out to hurt anyone, it wouldn’t be as strong a deterrent as if you were setting out to hurt ‘Jane who I know at least a bit from seeing around the neighborhood.’
OTOH, humans spent millennia in small groups, whether nomadic or settled, in which you basically never saw a stranger. You didn’t have to wonder about Person X, you already knew by osmosis a whole lot about him. In fact there were probably a whole mesh of casual ‘ties’ linking you to him/her: maybe your aunt is in the town choir with his sister, maybe his cousin is the town miller who grinds the wheat your father grows, maybe you and he are actually second cousins. Whatever. The thing is, you undoubted know if he is married, likely you came to the party celebrating his marriage, and you have the same sort of random ties to his wife.
In those circumstances, for you to get involved with a married man DOES mean you are callously setting out to hurt his wife (and maybe children) and thus much more worthy (IMHO) of the sort of blame heaped on ‘homewreckers.’