I'm fairly sure my best friend's wife is cheating on him. What to do?

In My Humble Opinion
81

It’s not about “plausible deniability” it’s asking a question when you’re concerned, without making a serious but potentially erroneous accusation.

I’d be worried if there were indications that my best friend’s wife was putting him at risk. I care about my buddy, and part of being his best freind is watching his back. If it turned out that his wife was cheating on him for months or years and I didn’t say a word, that would be betrayal on my part. A question would put my mind at ease. And I would hope/assume there was a logical explanation.

When I was a kid, my dad took a family friend to a function. A few weeks later, a friend of my mom’s asked how my dad knew “Sally”… his “date”. There’s three reasons why my mom’s friend would ask a benign question: 1) She was concerned for my mom. 2) She wanted reassurance. 3) She was warning my mom that the rumor mill was churning.

My parents aren’t stupid. You can totally assume that their friend was wondering about the gossip just as much as the next person, but at least she asked a question that assumed there was a logical explanation for seeing my dad out with another woman. My parents weren’t pissed, no one thought it was shit-stirring.

If I know for 100% damn certainty that my buddy’s wife is cheating, I’m going to tell him. If I’m just seeing stuff that I think is really weird/suspicious, then I think it’s better to ask a question about it. If everything is on the up-and-up, then no worries, I’ll be reassured without insulting his wife by jumping to conclusions. If it’s not on the up-and-up, then he can look into it privately, still without me insulting his marriage.

ETA: If I wanted to let him know and totally be “cunning” about it, as you say, I could mail an anonymous letter.

82

She saw a car parked somewhere. That is all that the OP knows. Everything else is supposition or fabrication. That is precious little evidence on which to go accusing somebody who he calls a friend i.e. the wife of adultry. Seems like a pretty shitty friend to come to that conclusion so easily and on such little (2nd hand!) evidence.
Regardless, it isn’t his marriage to attempt to save or destroy or anything else. What happens between a married couple is their business alone. Not best friends. Not sisters of best friends. Theirs.
Any time somebody starts a conversation by saying to me “You know, this may not be any of my business…” I immediately reply “You’re right. It isn’t So STFU.”

But I could be wrong. What if it’s Hitler she’s dating? I guess you’d have a moral obligation to tattle on somebody who was committing adultry with Hitler, wouldn’t you?

83

You’re right, what happens between a married couple is their business. However, you cannot always assume that one partner is fully aware of what the other is doing.

They may have an open marriage. Or, she may be cheating on her husband. As his best friend, who probably knows the situation pretty well, I think he has a good enough handle on the situation to recognize a red flag.

As most of the posters who have been cheated on have noted, they wished their friends had said something.

84

And given that he doesn’t know anything, really, that’s justification for him to go blundering into their intimate private lives with his nebby sister’s grubby suppositions?

85

Is it their business alone if a man regularly beats his wife and she is too afraid to do anything about it? What if she is slowly poisoning him? In those cases it’s clearly not just their business. So why not? Is it just because those two examples are illegal?

Do you see it as black and white? That anything one of them does to the other no matter how increasingly wrong is only their business until suddenly the action in question is illegal?

One way of looking at it is that marriage is a social and legal contract. Almost all wedding vows have the statement that they will be loyal/faithful in them. So by breaking those vows the wife is, in a sense, breaking the social contract she’s made with her husband. So any rule about treating them as a private union is damaged.

Think about the possibilities. If she’s cheating on him and he’s unaware then he’ll be glad to know about it! If she’s not cheating then why would he get bent all out of shape over your concern. No matter how many times you use words like “fabrication” it’s still very suspicious behaviour by any normal standards.

86

No, it isn’t. He also knows it’s a distinct car belonging to a male mutual friend who parks right outside their house when he visits them, and it’s consistently parked overnight half a block down the street from the house whenever the best friend happens to be out of town on work. Sure, there’s some supposition involved in suspecting cheating, but the facts at hand, evaluated in combination, support that supposition rather strongly. “A car parked somewhere” doesn’t begin to reflect the information available.

87

Unless you are party to a contract, whether the terms of it are abided by or not is none of your damn business. The OP is not. His sister absolutely is not. You can drag in as many red herrings and straw men as you like, wife beating for eexample, and that won’t make him the OP a partner in the marriage. He, therefore, has no stake in whether the contract is followed. He and his sister need to butt out.

88

Thanks to everyone for their input.

Ok, a few things:

My sister saw him walk from the house to his car each morning. Now did she actually see him leave the house? No, but it seems to be beyond a reasonable doubt to me. It’s unlikely that he popped out of a manhole right beside their house.

And just a note: It’s not like my sister is hiding in the bushes like a spy. It’s just that the way her kitchen is set up, she has a plain view of the street. And she’s in the kitchen during the mornings.

He’s my best friend. If my best friend was in danger I would do my best to protect him. And vise versa. If his wife is cheating on him, then yea, he’s in danger. Even from a practical sense with regard to STD’s he would be in danger.

So, is his wife cheating on him? I don’t know. But it kind of looks like it. So, it kind of looks like he is in danger. That gets me interested.

See, now to me a ‘shit-stirrer’ is someone who likes to wind people up like toys and put them on the floor and watch them run into each other. Are you implying that this is my intent?

First of all, I’m not inserting myself into anything. I don’t want to be a part of this. I got handed some information and now I have to decide what it means, if anything, and what to do with it.

It is a fact that this guy (there is no doubt it is the guy) is parking his car a half a block away (there is no doubt it is his car) when he could have parked right in front of my best friend’s house like he usually does. It is a fact that the car is parked overnight and that he walks from my best friend’s house to his car and leaves early in the morning. It is a fact that this behavior only occurs when my best friend is out of town. It is highly likely that he is actually leaving their particular house and not popping out of a manhole or a space portal.

And, again, it is not like my sister is playing super-spy and hiding in the bushes. She happens to know of my best friend and his wife. She happens to know of their friend with the car. From her kitchen, where she lives all morning, she has a plain view of the street and its length. She happened to plainly observe what I’ve described. That’s all.

Hell, I don’t know. Hence my trepidation and my posting on this board to pick your fine minds.

Yes.

89

My examples were not straw men. I was making the point that there are certain things that can go on between a married couple where the importance of having a private relationship is over powered by the wrongness of what is being done. It’s too simplistic to think of things as just black and white where it’s ALWAYS right to stay out of it unless it’s something illegal. There is a gradient of appropriateness in “butting in” depending on what’s happening and what’s at stake.

90

As with the thread about the wife getting sexually harassed at work, this thread is a pretty good example of how different people see their marriages (or marriages in general). As a full-on partnership, as a provider/provided for pairing, as one of many strong relationships in each member’s life…

91

Shamozzle,

I was in the unenviable position of finding out that my step-mom was likely cheating on my dad. I debated if/how I should tell him what I suspected was happening. I decided if the situation were reversed, I’d want him to tell me.

I ended up telling him. It turned out to be true. He also chose to (eventually) reconcile with her.

I’m glad I told him (as hard as it was to do so) and he’s glad I did (as hard as it was to hear).

92

Depends what you mean by “stake.” If my best friend’s partner was cheating on him, and that fucked up my friend, that would definitely be of great concern to me. I don’t know about you, but my best friend is the closest person in the world to me, outside of my husband and my father. And he is certainly privy to things about me that they are not by virtue of our decades of closeness predicated on total honesty and mutual sharing of information.

I could not keep something like this from him, because while Shamozzle has no proof, ie., he has not seen them fucking, the circumstantial evidence is definitely something worthy of concern. It would feel so incredibly wrong to me, disloyal and craven, to avoid telling him. I would try to tell him in the most non-prejudicial way possible and let him do what he wanted with the information.

And yeah, I know how he would react. He had a boyfriend who I thought was emotionally abusive of him and possibly unfaithful. When my suspicions reached critical mass, I told him. He listened, but still dated the guy for another year, then wound up getting totally fucked over by him. I helped him pick up the pieces.

At the risk of sounding corny, that’s what friends are for. You are honest with them and then accept whatever they do with that information even if you don’t understand it or like it. If that’s really your best friend, he will understand that your motives are not to stir up shit but are in the interest of loyalty and full disclosure. If the shoe were on the other foot, I’d hope that my friend would tell me.

93

You said you’re also friends with the wife. Maybe you should talk to her before you go to your best friend with your suspicions.

FWIW, if I knew for certain that a friend was being cheated on, and the cheater was also a friend of mine, I would go to the cheater and tell him/her to fess up and that if he/she didn’t, I would tell my friend everything.

94

I’m not so sure. If you read the example I gave on page one of this thread, I’m in a position where I truly would rather not know, and I didn’t seek the information out (he telephoned me) and I’ve been agonising over it and holding off over it.

95

I’ve thought of this.

I thought my angle might be that it is grossly unfair to my best friend for her to do what it seems she is doing. I would suggest that if she is unhappy (which I assume is the reason most people cheat) then she needs to handle it some other way. Maybe they could get some counseling or maybe the relationship needs to be over. I don’t know.

I definitely would be very non-threatening if I approached her. I certainly wouldn’t give her any ultimatums or try and force her to do anything. I think that would be dangerous territory. The best I would try for would be to talk some sense into her.

96

Fine, I’ll give you that at that point in the thread.
But since then the OP has re-assured us that he’s certain that it’s the same guy and the same car and that the hubby is out of town.
If this guy was your best friend how long would you wait to talk to him or how much evidence would you need to be convinced? Why would he park down the street unless something weird was going on? I’m sure they’re not having overnighters planning his 40th birthday party or anything like that while he’s gone.
He’d park in the driveway otherwise.
The wedding contract is likely being broken by her at this point. Now it’s bros before hoes. That’s a binding contract between best friends that’s secondary to the wedding vows.

97

This is fair. In a slightly altered situation, if Mrs Kravits was asking if she should contact her neighbor (whom she doesn’t know all that well) about the weird behavior, we would say to butt out. She doesn’t know enough about his business on her own to make that call.

98

I can’t help but feel that we’re talking at cross-purposes, especially with the mention of shit-stirring.

Someone who stirs up shit is deliberately trying to create drama or conflict for their own gratification. Of course that’s wrong, and in my little world, it’s good reason to end a friendship. No one needs a friend who thinks making groundless accusations of infidelity against your spouse is a good way to start the weekend.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Shamozzle has verifiable information from a source he trusts. The behavior shown is questionable and suspicious. Certainly, there might be other explanations, some of them completely innocent, and those explanations should be taken into account.

I’m not advocating that Shamozzle, or anyone else for that matter, storm in, screaming “J’accuse!” Instead, I agree with the approaches offered by Eureka and tdn. Tell your friend what you know, but don’t draw any conclusions. Leave that part up to them. That isn’t stirring up shit. That’s giving your friend what they need to take care of themselves and their marriage. If your friend then tells you to butt out, that’s what you do.

All I can think is that the “friends” who betrayed me when they heard my boyfriend, his lover, and her boyfriend talking about the fact that he was cheating his employer out of his wages and spending his days with them, exploring twosomes, threesomes, and bi-sexuality, is that they were enjoying the drama too much to disrupt it. Perhaps that’s not technically shit-stirring, but it’s a close relative.

They could have told me. I would have taken a much harder look at my boyfriend’s behavior, and I would have gotten myself tested. I might very well have been able to prevent the bout of PID I experienced.

The consequences aren’t always a miserable breakup or an angry friend. He could have, for instance, given me an incurable STD, like herpes or AIDS. What he did do, because he chose to have unprotected sex outside of our relationship without my knowledge or consent, was compromise or perhaps eliminate my ability to conceive and carry a child to term safely. PID has a nasty habit of causing scar tissue, and that scar tissue can block the fallopian tubes, causing complete infertility or a greatly increased chance of a tubal pregnancy.

It would be a lot easier to face the fact that I might not be able to have children if I knew my friends had at least tried to protect me. But, because they didn’t want to be labeled “shit-stirrers” or put themselves in the uncomfortable position of eliminating my illusions of fidelity or risk my anger, his anger, or their anger, or maybe even give up some fun-fun drama, I never had the chance to protect myself.

So, now, if I even want to consider getting pregnant, I have to go through an extremely painful, expensive procedure where a doctor injects dye through my cervix and into my uterus to determine the extent of the scar tissue my boyfriend’s infidelity left me. If I want to get pregnant, I will have to, literally, chance severe hemorraghing and possibly death from a tubal pregnancy.

Those are the consequences of silence.

99

phouka, I hope you can understand the difference between your situation and the OP’s question.

Your so-called mutual friends KNEW that your SO was cheating on you. He freely admitted it in front of them and they shared that you were being kept in the dark. Those so-called friends still chose to not speak up. Those were not your friends. I cannot imagine the pain that you felt knowing the betrayal that these “friends” caused.

In the OP’s situation, he has some third-hand circumstantial evidence that some dude is parking his car a half block away from his best friend’s house. That’s all he KNOWS. Does it look suspicious? Hell yes. Is it enough for him to run to his best friend and question his wife’s fidelity? Well, we obviously have a lot of different opinions on that point.

My general advice is to mind your own damn business. You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. You are not a party to their commitment (or lack of) to each other. Unless you are 100% positive, you have no right to insert your little drama into their lives.

I do believe that there is an innate nature in people to get involved where they have no business. Whether it’s a twisted desire to feel important or they are just plain old Drama Queens or Shit Stirrers, there seems to be a great human need to get involved.

You’re right, we do come from different places. I’ve been on the wrongly accused end of infidelity. Some “well meaning” friend went to another friend with her “suspicions” about me and her partner. All were unfounded but being the Shit Stirrer that she is, I think she took great pleasure in watching it unfold in front of her and then try to insert herself as a “Knight in Shining Armor” to ride in and save the day. The relationship that I was accused of being in the middle of was rocky before the accusation and remains rocky today. But a lot of friendships were lost along the way.

There’s obviously no right answer because each situation is different. The OP will have to decide if the information that he has is worthy of mention.

100

I think Judge Judy says it best; if you can’t prove it, it didn’t happen. My best advice in this situation would be to go to your best friend with only the facts that you know and let him go from there.