Ah yes, the herpes. And I suppose having to pay child support for the baby resulting from a spouse’s affair would also be pretty sucktastic.
Since they have kids, I think it’s best to try to get the husband to call off the affair and get back with Cathy. This is a fixable situation. It can be done. It will be difficult, but it is possible.
This is way too complicated of a situation to solve simply. I would recommend going to the Surviving an Affair forum on marriagebuilders.com. (The forum is down atm for maintenance). She can post her situation there and they will be able to walk her through breaking up the affair and repairing her marriage. (This is not a shill. I’ve just seen their techniques work).
What I think you should do is tell her about the affair. Not in email. Either do it in person or on the phone. She will likely freak out or be in denial. Remain calm and assure her that the situation can be fixed.
Whether you remain friends with her should not be a consideration. They have kids. You should do whatever you can to help this family heal so that the kids can grow up in a good home. If that means she hates you and never talks to you again, oh well.
That’s really sage advice. The fact that you’re asking us dopers is an answer itself. If you don’t know what to do, you should probably do nothing.
If it’s someone you know well and who you consider to be a real friend, then you probably wouldn’t need to ask the question. You would already know: “Cathy would want me to tell her/Cathy would not want to me interfere!”
I would welcome that, because we could go from there into me telling her what I know (I wouldn’t lie regardless, but I might not volunteer things that wouldn’t be welcome and aren’t my business) or indicating that she needs to listen to her instincts and do a little detective work. If she opens the door to this discussion, that is different from me just dropping a bomb on her.
I hope to never be in this situation - there really is no good resolution.
To be honest, the philosophy that says it’s wrong to tell because “nothing goods comes out of it” never made sense to me. Does anything ever good come out cheating? If she finds out through you or she finds out some other way, it’s going to plain suck for her. At least if she finds out now versus later, the less time she’s spending in ignorance that could possibly make things worse later on.
If you report on what you’ve seen and it turns out they have an open relationship, then no harm, no foul.
If you report on what you’ve seen and it turns out you were wrong and there was no cheating, then I could see why it would be wrong to open your mouth. But if you are 100% sure that your perception of events is true, then the risk of a false accusation seems to be far outweighed by the ethical dilemma of sitting on information that is in the interests of your friend.
Might she end up being mad at you? Sure. Could this anger threaten your relationship? Yes, it could. Is that possibility more important to you than resting peacefully in the knowledge that she knows the truth? Only you know the answer to that question.
There’s nothing stopping you from sending an anonymous note.
I’m going to hell and you owe me a new keyboard.
Ask yourself: would you want to know? Answer honestly, then act on it.
It’s deeper than that, though. I don’t want to get to hijacky up in here, but I gotta admit, I have always believed everyone* cheats…in different ways.
When it comes to flat out sexual affairs, I always raise an eyebrow at those that say they never knew their husband cheated. I bet they did, on some level. My husband and I know what is up with our relationship more than any of our friends. If I don’t know that he is straight up sleeping with someone, I do know that our connection at the time is such that it is a possibility. Fuck dragging my friends into all of those intimate layers of our relationship. It is not her job to let me know that my relationship that I had deluded myself was locktight is actually not. It is my job to spot that. Not the actual affair, but the state of affairs of our bond or communication. The actual affair is just a manifestation of that.
Also, there is the whole emotional affair thing. Is that any better than a physical affair? Not to me, it isn’t; to me it’s worse! But I have had the kind of emotional affairs that would make my husband’s head spin, if he knew every single aspect. He doesn’t know every aspect, but he damn well knows that our marriage is the kind of marriage that leaves the possibility for emotional affairs. No one has to fill him in on that.
I mention emotional affairs because I notice that women are more likely to have one of those (I personally think they have many more physical affairs than they admit to, but I will save that for another thread). Many women I know don’t seem to think that the emotional affair they have with the guy at work counts as cheating, but maybe her husband thinks it does count. Are his friends obligated to point it out to him that his wife seems mentally stimulated and emotionally happy under the attention of her boss at work? Where does the buttinski shit stop?
So, I don’t think the question is ‘would you want to know’, but rather, "don’t you really already know what’s up with your marriage’?
*I don’t mean EVERYONE. I’m sure there are people that don’t cheat.
I’ve never understood the “don’t tell” mentality. This guy is endangering his wife’s health and emotional well-being, for what? Physical pleasure? A sick control high over getting away with it?
She deserves to know. If I found out that my man was cheating and anybody who knew how to reach me didn’t tell me, I’d be utterly pissed at that person.
It’s like if you knew the brakes were about to go on someone’s car. You’d be karmically (not legally, but morally) responsible for the resulting harm if you didn’t at least make an effort to tell them. If they choose to go on driving with bad brakes, well, OK, you are out of it now. But IMO you have responsibility to let them know.
In the day of AIDS, you need to tell her. Do it by an anonymous note if you need to. Or just send a printout of his e-mails to coworker. But tell her, fercrissakes. The poor woman. She can’t make the right decisions for her life (and the lives of their kids) if she doesn’t have all the information.
It’s certainly your business as a friend and even just as a fellow human being to act as moral guardians when they fail to be moral. I suggest that you immediatly tell your friend and also suggest that she start looking for a lawyer just in case.
Yeah, but this means that being a little clueless or in denial about how loving and faithful your partner is - or trying to be patient to get the partner to come on back to you - could potentially be fatal. Someone in the other thread mentioned getting a STD that caused scarring internally and (IIRC) affected her fertility.
But no one ever has all of the information.
And AIDS isn’t really at issue. Unless we have gone from suspecting someone of cheating on his wife to suspecting someone of being a callous cold blooded spreader of killer diseases by sleeping around unprotected in this day and age.
ETA: Ferret Herder, I am glad I noticed that post that you posted as I was posting, because I see now that my AIDS comment to TruCelt may sound a bit flip.
I am saying that when you decide to have sex with anyone, including your spouse, you are at risk of getting a disease. Condoms work very well. I think that cheating is an entirely different bag of fruit than being the type to sleep around unprotected and then come home and sleep with your spouse. I would liken a physical abuser to someone that would cheat unprotected before I would liken an unprotected cheater to a ‘regular cheater’.
I suggest telling, but do it as cluelessly as possible.
such as “hey - I didn’t know you and hubby knew co-worker, he came by and picked her up for lunch the other day” It may end badly, but at least it was becuase you were trying to be honourable.
If you had knowledge of an acutal crime (say that somebody was embezzling money) you would / should report it right?
Also, ending this particular affair is basically meaningless - Trey will just go and crap somewhere you can’t see him
Trey is such a big fat liar, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cathy had no idea he was cheating. He tells women what he wants them to hear, and unless she’s already caught him lying, how would she know? Some people are such good liars, you’d never know they were lying.
I have never understood why the cheated-on person takes it out on the messenger.
I would most definitely want to know if I was being cheated on and would appreciate the messenger.
Send a message to the husband. ‘I know your cheating on your wife and don’t even know you. It’s only a matter of time before she finds out. I’d suggest coming clean with her before I or anyone else informs her.’
You know, I always hear about these women who go with married guys, but I’ve never actually seen one. I think it’s just a bunch of cryptozoological malarkey, myself. 
I used to work with a woman who had been seeing a married man for years. She would come in on Monday mornings crying about how he had stood her up once again over family obligations, and how crappy of him it was. Once he was to meet her on a corner, and she said she stood there alone for over an hour waiting for him, only to be stood up. How could he do that to her, she asked. How could he put her in such a situation? We were all astounded by her cluelessness.
I suspect there’s a subsection of the population that is not fine with their spouse having affairs but is also not looking for major upheavals in their lives, and as such would prefer to pretend to themselves that no affair is taking place, or at least to avoid contemplating it. When someone else brings it to their attention that option is out the window. Such people may resent the outsiders who put them through it, especially if they end up making up with their spouses and (thus are inclined to minimize the transgression retroactively. Blaming the friend for stirring things up is then a way of shifting some blame off their spouse).
Having been on the cheated on side by my ex-husband, I tend to agree. To some extent sometimes I knew about the cheating. But when I did having people tell me “you deserve better” would have been nice. And when I didn’t, being the last to know was not fun.
And there are a lot of ways not knowing might hurt her. If he starts hiding assets in order to leave her, she is going to get stuck. If one of his extramarital relationships tries to push him to commit via pregnancy, she is going to find out in a way that is going to be more hurtful for her and the kids.