In real life, there is no guarrantee that a one-night stand will be kept a secret forever. The world is small. People talk. I’d much rather be told by my spouse than a stranger. I’d much rather learn about it sooner than later. And I’d much prefer for it to come to my attention without me first having to endure weeks and months of nagging suspicions. I’d be more inclined to believed that somebody was a one-time only cheater if they confessed to me on their own, apologized, expressed remorse, and then faced the consequences.
That’s a fair point. I’m not really comfortable with your scenario.
It’s all hypothetical, obviously. I’m saying that for a variety of reasons, I’m almost positive that I couldn’t get over infidelity. There are crazy hypothetical circumstances though in which I can see myself helping to hide the body rather than calling the cops.
There were several instances of child abuse in my family (I wasn’t abused) and when I was 11 or 12 I gave some pretty serious thought to killing a couple of my relations. I didn’t because I was scared of prison. I’m a more reasonable person now but I’d still dance a little jig if those people suddenly dropped dead.
I’m not arguing that I’m correct or moral for feeling this way but I can understand murder in some situations.
Except that if the cheater gives herself a free pass the first time, why would you think that she’d “grow up” the second (third, fiftieth) time? She’s demonstrated that she’s not a grown up. Thinking that she’ll suddenly change at this point is ridiculously unrealistic.
If someone shows you who they are, it’s your job to see, as the saying goes.
There’s probably some very fundamental difference between us because I do not grok what you said here. AFAIC, it is by definition not a good thing to be misled by someone who doesn’t respect me. Being left ignorant of their disrespect only compounds their dishonesty.
If someone doesn’t respect me enough at least to be honest with me about what they did, then the relationship is toast anyway. Even if I never find out about the cheating, the disrespect is going to eat away at the foundations of the relationship, resentment will build, and the thing will collapse (whether I understand why or not) sooner or later. No one can hide contempt forever, even if they never explain why they feel that way. It’ll bleed over into all of your other interactions with each other. I can’t imagine anything more toxic and damaging to myself.
Well, yes. Which is why one shouldn’t cheat in the first place. If you respect your partner, don’t do that to them. Fix your relationship, or end it, before you go get your 15 minutes of jollies, if said jollies are so damn important to you.
It would at least show me that they still had a little respect left for me, anyway. And that there might be at least a little character left in there, too.
“Oh Missy, how you let me down/ Lies won’t break my fall, lies won’t break my fall” - Richard Thompson
In the nth installment of Autolycus is a giant asshole, I’ll contribute a personal anecdote. I once cheated on a girlfriend of mine. It was a drunken indiscretion that had no connection to how I felt about my girlfriend. It was the first and only time I’ve ever cheated. The morning after, I decided that admitting my mistake would do nothing except hurt my GF irrevocably. I felt like a real shit-head but decided that I’d just treat her that much better in the future.
Well, a few days later she found out. Turns out she counted the number of condoms in my drawer and noticed the small discrepancy. I didn’t try to deny it. I made a weak denial briefly that was about as big a lie as a child with his hand next to the cookie jar and a mouth full of chocolate chips denying that he had any cookies. Anyway, it was bad… Throwing things, screaming, crying uncontrollably, grilling of every sordid detail relating to the event, getting shit-faced drunk and more and more and more crying…
She forgave me but things were hard. Gradually they got better, but it was always there in the back of things. There was always the occasional random phone and email check, the suspicion of all my female friends, the random middle-of-the-night punches because she dreamed i cheated on somebody… I deserved all of it, making it even more gut-wrenching… that combined with the knowledge that any sadness I felt she was probably feeling 100x as much. All I could do was apologize and comfort her as best I possibly could.
I’m not really sure if this anecdote has any real influence on the argument either way to be honest. She was angry about me covering it up, but only very briefly. It was a mere blip on the radar of bad times. I explained her to why I didn’t confess, and she understood… Not that it changed anything.
In any case, I didn’t see any benefit arise from the truth coming out. I doubt it would have arisen if I had been forthright either. We didn’t become stronger as a couple by working through the issue. We didn’t break up over it either, but … well I digress. The crux of this thread seems to me to be that some people feel a moral imperative to confess, where-as some don’t.
Sigh… One drunken mistake… It really showed me how life-changing that can really be.
That’s a very good point. I came to this conversation with one perspective and it’s taken a lot of posts to get me to consider the situation from other angles.
I qualified the shit out of my hypothetical and still failed to account for the lasting effect on the cheater. At this point I’m basically saying, “Yeah, if it happened in a vacuum.”
What you said resonates, there’s no way to even hypothetically move a relationship past infidelity, at least not without honesty and I’m still positive that I couldn’t sustain a relationship in the face of such a betrayal.
It’s not about any benefit of the truth coming out. The truth coming out is going to be destructive. It’s not about making you stronger as a couple. It’s about letting your partner know the truth so they can make their own decision.
The truth-keepers seem to think that there is some sanctity of the current relationship and anything that might break it up should be supressed. That’s crap. There are lots of people in the world and your partner should be able to have to opportunity to create a new relationship with a new person if that’s what they desire. Keeping the truth from them is about you having your cake and eating it too.
And I don’t think being drunk gives someone any sort of pass. I expect people to have the same morals when drunk as sober. If someone’s morals are compromised enough when drunk to have a ONS, they probably shouldn’t be drinking. Drinking doesn’t strengthen one’s character. Sober they may be able to resist, but the more they drink the weaker they will get.
Why *wouldn’t *she grow up? Do you feel this way about everything, or is cheating the one thing that is impossible to do only once?
For me, if someone does something shitty, I assume they will do the same thing again unless I have reason to think otherwise. I’m not going to assume they’ve changed until there’s evidence they’ve changed. The default is that they haven’t.
Plus, it’s not like fidelity is like learning how to play tennis, where you just accept that you’re going to miss the ball by accident, no matter how hard you try, until you’ve had some amount of practice. One does not fuck someone by accident. They choose to. You learn a lot about a person by the choices they make.
As I said above, if someone shows you who they are, it’s your job to see. If you go into anything thinking that the other person will change for you, you’re being very foolish.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone is saying this.
Okay…
All right…
Yes?
So let me get this straight: Cheating is obviously a deliberate, dishonest action, therefore…? Therefore if someone cheats, he is irredeemably bad, or he believes that cheating is irresistible, and will take years of training to avoid? You never answered my question. When you ask what makes us so sure that a cheater won’t do it again, is this a concept you apply specifically to cheating, or do you share that level of uncertainty of the possibility of learning/reform from all wrongdoings?
Because it’s a choice the cheater finds acceptable/can justify to himself/rationalize/however you want to phrase it.
Someone who’s value system includes “it’s okay if I cheat” is unlikely to suddenly become a completely different person with a completely different value system that says it’s not.
This applies to cheating and anything else that relies heavily on a person’s fundamental nature. e.g. I wouldn’t try to convert gays to being straight or straights to being gay, either.
Really, I’m just rehashing what jsgoddess and I have already said, at this point. I go with the data I see before me and make my decisions based on that. In this scenario, I have evidence he cheats, since, you know, he did. I have no evidence that he does not cheat. Therefore:
I don’t see why that’s so hard to understand.
Let me ask you this:
Have you ever (as an adult) done anything, anything at all, that you believed at the time or now realize was wrong? Cheated on a test, punched a guy in the face, deliberately been cruel to someone, stolen anything, done something extremely irresponsible or reckless? Anything at all?
If your answer is “no,” if you’ve actually been morally correct for your entire adult life, then I offer my congratulations and suspect our conversation must end, because you are an exceptional individual and one to whom things are actually as absolute as you maintain.
If your answer is “yes,” some follow-up questions:
- Did you ever repeat the transgression?
- Do you still, habitually, repeat the transgression on a regular basis?
- Do you think that a person who learned about your transgression would be correct in assuming that you will certainly do it again since you did it once?
As an adult, no, I don’t deliberately hurt people.
I’ve certainly made mistakes before, but that comes about because I act expecting one result, and end up getting another. Or circumstances where I’m faced with only shitty options, and I have no idea which will end up being least shitty (making medical decisions, for example). I don’t act deliberately knowing I’ll hurt someone I care about.
And in case it must be said, no, cheating is not this kind of mistake. It’s not exactly ambiguous that doing it will hurt your partner.
In any case, it’s not about absolutism, it’s about pragmatism. It’s like staying with someone who beats you, then apologizes and promises never to do it again. Well, sure… maybe he actually means it, maybe he’ll change the fundamental nature of who he is for you. But really? Odds are very much against it, and it’s far more likely that he’s lying to you to keep you under his thumb (in other words, to benefit himself at your expense). Do you really want to stick around to find out if he’s the one-in-a-million who changes his spots?
If someone is going to claim that they will fundamentally change who they are for me, frankly I’ll believe it only when I see it, and see it consistently, over a long period of time. And I generally have better things to do with my time than playing babysitter to an adult.
I think this goes to MOL’s question about whether the “yes” folks feel this way only about cheating, or about other activities, as well. In all of your examples listed above, if I had been operating under the assumption that my SO was not the sort of person who would do any of those things (and the SO also did not think she would ever do something like that), and then one day, she does do something like that, that’s information I’d want to know.
Under some circumstances, some people can’t ever resist temptation. Some can resist temptation sometimes. Some can resist it almost every time. And some can always resist temptation. The cheater/puncher/thief/irresponsible person just eliminated themselves from one of those categories. It’s relevant data. Doesn’t mean the relationship is over, or even that anything has to drastically change. But if the one party keeps the information about that transgression to himself, the two people in the relationship are now operating under different assumptions. For me, that creates an imbalance in the relationship.
That is obviously OK for 67% of the people voting in this thread. It doesn’t work for me. Hopefully, 100% of us are able to communicate freely enough with our significant others so that the two parties are on the same page and know what works for the other person if something like this ever arises.
I don’t see what’s so “exceptional” about not deliberately hurting people, btw.
Really? You are a saint compared to me. I’m a decent human being - for the most part - but sometimes I lash out in anger or frustration. Sometimes my emotions get the better of me. Sometimes I don’t THINK things through. Sometimes I deliberately hurt people a little because its better than bigger hurt that will happen later (this is a factor in parenting, where I’m always ‘hurting’ my kids through my disappointing, non-indulgent parenting and making them miss a sleepover because they didn’t do their homework. I’ve been known to say that once you are a parent, its much easier to tell your employee that there isn’t a raise for him this year, but he still has a job. Once you can disappoint your own kids, you can disappoint anyone.).
I have never cheated on my spouse, and don’t think its a likely foible of my own - I’m not terribly lust driven at my pre-menopause stage of life and don’t have many opportunities that would tempt me (my business trips tend to involve guys who bear NO resemblance to George Clooney AT ALL, I suspect I can have all the Michael Moore lookalikes I want though). But that is just because I don’t find random sex tempting. I know other people for whom sex is VERY tempting and for whom it takes a lot of effort not to stray. For some of them - to the best of my knowledge - they have never screwed up despite a continual struggle (for some of them, its lack of opportunity at this point - you get to be a 50ish year old overweight guy and 23 year old hot babes aren’t necessarily tripping over themselves in the bar for a taste). But these guys have good marriages - I know them and I know their wives (in one case its a woman and her husband). IF they were to trip up, I’d think it would be a shame to let that hurt the marriage.
Its a little like a recovering alcoholic. If you marry someone who drinks heavily and then gives it up - is one slip up enough to throw in the towel? Or, if they regret it and get back on the bandwagon and reestablish sobriety, is that one slip up forgiveable?
Without directly addressing the OP…Am I the only one who thinks “Prudie’s” advice would have been different if the person asking for advice had been a man? A woman writes to ask whether she should reveal a (minor) episode of infidelity and the advice is* “Oh, that’s all right dear. Just keep it secret, go your way and sin no more”.* If it had been a man asking the word would likely have been; “You cad! you don’t deserve this woman, better get on your knees and beg forgiveness”.
All right, I’m exagerating, but only a little. And it seems like a lot of the well-known advice columnists display this bias…Margo Howard, Ann Landers (RIP), Amy Dickenson, Carolyn Hax. Woman writes about hisband’s drinking; “Divorce the bastard and set yourself free!” Man writes about wife’s drinking; he’s told to seek counseling to discover what he’s done to cause her to drink. And so on.
It would be easy to ascribe this slant to the fact that the above-mentioned columnists are themselves female, but I’ve heard male counselors do the same thing. They’re supposed to be fair & impartial, but it’s hard to take them seriously.
Surprisingly, the only advice guru i can think of who doesn’t show this bias is one that I personally can’t stand to listen to, Dr. Laura Schlessinger. She’s equally nasty to everybody.
SS
Ditto. Have y’all read “Do You Think What You Think You Think?” by Julian Baggini? It is a philosophical book that tests how logical and consistent you are in your beliefs. I was remarkably, albeit not perfectly, consistent. People, in general, are emotional, illogical creatures. Maybe it is exceptional, after all.
I suppose it’s a matter of perspective to a certain extent, but I don’t consider this to be deliberately hurting your children (and from the tone quotes I’d guess that you don’t really, either, so…??). As a parent, it’s your job to teach them that actions have consequences – and they’ll learn this in the real world whether you teach them or not – so preparing them for adulthood is helping them, not hurting them.
I’m not talking about minor foibles and disappointments here. That’s life. I’m talking about intentionally acting in a manner you know will hurt (real pain, not just short-term disappointment) your partner, for no reason other than you wanna.