Count me with those who say that pursuing the relationship is a bad idea.
Basically, a person who is friends with someone whose marriage is on the rocks should be working to help repair the marriage, not get romantically involved with one of the spouses. The proper thing is to get them to counseling together. Indeed, said person should become friends with both spouses, or with neither, IMO.
Unfortunately, you’ve crossed the line and now have “romantic” feelings for each other. Talk to any marriage counselor, and you’ll find that the feeling of euphoria will fade eventually for anyone. If root problems aren’t addressed, there’s no reason that the cycle will continue–that in your case, if you pursued a relationship with this woman, that N months down the line, you’d be in the same situation as they are now.
Urge them to go to counseling together, and get away from the relationship, before you do it more harm. If you were still “just friends” I’d see it as reasonable for you to stick around and be moral support for the counseling, but that’s not an option anymore IMO.
Or perhaps it was not–we don’t know the terms of this particular marriage, do we?
But in the absence of knowing otherwise, I’d assume that a promise had been made, pertaining to things such as fidelity and exclusivity. (Silly practice, but a common one nonetheless).
I think it is immoral of Chelsie, at least, to toddle off to bed with Superdude without telling Bill that those promises are null and void, that he cannot count on fidelity and exclusivity from her. (I do not think she needs his permission, nor does she need to tell him when, where, with whom, or how often).
I don’t know if it is necessarily immoral of Superdude to toddle off to bed with Chelsie if Bill is not told, but, speaking as a guy who doesn’t do marriage and doesn’t respect it as an institution, and who HAS been there–it ain’t dignified! Believe me, if I ever again have sex with a married woman, she has to renounce any prior vows of monogamy and faithfulness and etc beforehand.
Particularly Ann Landers. She doesn’t believe in sex outside of marriage, even in a committed relationship where no adultery is involved. When a yound woman wrote to her asking for contraceptive advice, Ann lambasted her for daring to even think of doing to horizontal lambada before she’d signed a marriage contract.
Ironically, Ann Landers has a rather open-minded stance on homosexuality. So I guess in her mind, it’s OK to have sex outside of marriage IF your partner is the same sex as you. :rolleyes:
These seem to be the acts of a man who is worried his wife may be having an affair. Which might make him seem paranoid if you weren’t here asking us if its ok for you to have an affair with her.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone who tried this and it worked before I read Feynn’s post. I have heard plenty of stories of people who spent years waiting for someone to break up with their spouse, being strung along.
That is not what I am saying; I am saying that all moral decisions are, necessarily, made by individuals (and this would include the individuals attempting to define a corporate morality). Whether morality exists objectively,
independent of the individual, is what that other thread is devoted to. But the individual makes the decision to follow his or her ethics or not, in the last analysis.
The interesting implication of your post, which I’ve seen elsewhere when Christians are discussing ethics with non-Christians, is that absent God’s commands and social pressure, one would be justified in lying, cheating, stealing, killing, adulterizing, coveting, and for all of that making graven images.
This led me once, when questioned if I thought we Christians were special for having had experiences of God which others did not, to react that maybe we needed it more than most.
There are a lot of ethical atheists, agnostics, and Neopagans here. Somehow they’ve evolved a morality not based on commands from on high.
Think it through. Then come give us your perspective on that other thread.
It’s wise to remember that one can behave according to one’s conscience and still do really horribly bad things. Cites: many nazis; Saul when he stood by and watched Stephen be stoned to death; etc. Our consciences can easily be wrong. All I’m saying is, bear that in mind.
And I’d like to half-assedly address the marriage thing. There are many bad marriages (I mean really bad), there are many divorced Christians. My own Pastor divorced and remarried. As far as I can see he’s still one of the most solidly Good men I know.
However I do still believe that it depends on how far you’re prepared to go for God. If you take a vow for life, He’ll make it possible to turn a bad marriage into a source of strength. One may be lonely, of course, horribly lonely, and grace is grace, and adultery is all over the place, so of course divorce isn’t an unreachable option. But from a Christian point of view, something really beautiful can come out of any suffering. I’m not saying don’t marry her, or anything - that’s your call. But if she really wants to go for God, maybe her prayer life would be awesomely improved to a world-changing level by her being forced to draw near to God all the time for affection, or something like that. These obediences are the things that make saints. I’ve been that faithful, that trusting, maybe once in my whole life, and it was like a spiritual afterburner. You just end up on a totally new level. If she doesn’t want to go for God the commandments are the wrong place to look for advice. Maybe a solid, genuinely sold-out priest/monk/minister/rabbi could give better advice than I.
Personally I’d probably do the adultery in a distracted moment and use it to justify divorce and remarriage. But I can still see what I should do.
First, to answer the OP - the Commandments still apply, but since you claim to be “not religious” why do you care?
The point by justinh is probably the most to the point here. Her child from a previous relationship - was marriage involved? Now she is married and thinking about cheating with you. Are you OK with the near certainty that when she tires of you, she will cheat with someone else? It seems clear she doesn’t regard serial polygamy as “cheating” - how do you feel, Superdude? Because you have asked if it is OK for you to cheat with her, the concept of cheating is real to you. So, again, how will you feel in a few months, years, when Chelsie becomes bored with you?
<dismounts from High Horse>
Regarding my last … I do not know Chelsie, and so have no place to characterize her, well, character. After, all, as the T-shirt says, ‘sometimes you have to kiss a lotta frogs before you find your Prince’ … Superdude, here’s hoping you are her Prince. Just cool it until after Chelsie and her husband are twain.
God aside (gosh is that heresy to say that?), a lot of our “morality” comes from the desire to create a stable family for the sake of the children. So while you and Chelsie are “in love” with each other, you simply cannot enter a mature relationship without considering the repercussions on the people around you. Bill, for one, who is perhaps an innocent person in the relationship. Your family. Will they love and accept a new divorced woman with a child from yet another relationship? And, of course, her daughter. Because regardless of the fact that Bill isn’t her “biological” father, he is her father-figure nonetheless. He has provided a home for her. He has cared for her. And now you are planning on taking his daughter from him and tearing the foundation out from under her. Again.
I had a relationship with a married man a few years back and it ended badly. He didn’t have children but he did have a wife who loved him and who was innocent of wrongdoing. In my utter self-absorption it did not occur to me that I could be responsible for wreaking such havoc on people and it saddens me to this day how heartless I was to disregard his wife entirely. The look on her face when I told her we were involved will haunt me until the day I die.
So, superdude, I appreciate the fact that you love this woman. However, her track record isn’t spotless and if you continue down this path, you WILL cause pain to Bill and their daughter. And any joy you feel by being free to marry Chelsie will be tempered by self-loathing and a sudden suspicion of her. It happens. And please, don’t kid yourself that Bill has no feelings for her, or that his lack of attention (her side of the story, btw, not HIS and I’ve learned the hard way that people you trust DO lie. Hank told me that he and his wife never made love. He LIED.) is some sort of absolution for you.
Good luck to both of you. Well, actually to all 4 of you.
Hey Superdude, after you and Chelsie are married for a while, would you mind if she and I sneak around behind your back and have an (emotional or sexual) affair?
Wouldn’t want it done to you?..then don’t do it to others dude. I’d say that’s a simple rule of thumb.
My first marriage was to a cheater. With distance, I’ve come to the following opinion on the morality of the situation.
His girlfriends made no promises to me. He did. They barely knew me, he did. My husband was not my property (slavery having been outlawed some time ago), and was a big boy capable of making his own decisions. To the best of my knowledge, he was not raped by any of his girlfriends. Therefore, as much as I’d like to blame them, I feel that their karmic debt load is significantly lower than his.
As Krispy has said, there is the who “do unto others” thing, so they don’t have a clean slate. But they, you, and PunditLisa are not the one responsible for keeping vows.
Chelsie on the other hand, in in the karmic manure pool. She did make a vow, her husband is laboring under the impression that vow is still good. At the very least she needs to communicate to him that the terms of their marriage have changed. She could do this by moving out, by serving papers, or by having a conversation (“Honey, I know our original marriage vows included fidelity, but I’m going to boink Superdude. I’d like to stay married to you and keep living here in the meantime, though, or at least until I get up the nerve to leave.”)
Best wishes. BTW, if this does work out, watch out for the disappointment on the other side. When the relationship no longer has the sneaking around and the stress, and when you have something to yourself that you formerly didn’t have, sometimes it can be a real letdown. Daily life with someone is never as exiciting as what you are going through right now. Make sure you are really, truly interested in Chelsie, and not the excitement of the situation or the thought of saving her from a bad situation. And make sure Chelsie is really interested in you and not just in you not being Bill.
Have you any first hand knowledge of the goings on? Or are you relying solely on her accounts? You say they do not make love. How do you know? Has HE told you this? Have you had any interactions with him?
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?
A common scene. A man meets a woman. They have an attraction for each other. The man is married. He complains to her that the marriage is a loveless sham. That there is no intimacy at all. Hasn’t been for years. He reaches out to her and they get involved. There is talk of him leaving the marriage soon, when economic factors are more favorable and what-not. A few months pass. Turns out later that he was less than honest about the state of his marriage. There was, and is, considerable ‘intimacy’ going on. His wife was under the impression that they were a happy couple, and the man has no real plans for leaving his family.
I’m not saying this is what is going on. I’m saying that unless you know him pretty well too, it’s possible. Maybe she’s telling the truth. Tell her to bite the bullet and leave him, then take up with her.
