Not to mention the child support that may be involved - if my husband has to start paying money to another woman, I damned well want to know about it.
For a moment, I thought you were writing about this Dear Margo letter.
I mean, it’s basically what the post is about. Her opinion would be pertinent here, too.
I think it’s ALWAYS the right thing to tell the cheatee. If he/she doesn’t mind, you’ve done no harm. If they didn’t know, they needed to. No matter who you are, or what your role or lack thereof, if you know someone is being cheated on, they deserve to know too.
If you are the “Partner in Crime” and the cheater engages in unprotected sex, (or you have an STD) it becomes a moral obligation in my view. “Your spouse cheats and has unprotected sex.” Is information every human being deserves to have.
*What they choose to do with the information *is what’s none of your business.
Pretty much exactly what I was going to say. If the non-spouse cheater is interested in doing the ethical thing, they dump the chump immediately. The only reason to tell is if some harm can come to the non-cheating spouse from not knowing, either from a paternity or STD, and even then the cheating spouse should be the one to inform the non-cheating one.
A friend of mine was cheating on his wife, which obviously is not a good thing. But the girlfriend got pregnant and told the wife. My friend and his wife had a huge argument, she threw him out of the house, and my friend went out and killed himself. I don’t think anyone involved wanted this outcome.
My tendency is to stay out of other people’s business, but really that would involve not getting involved with the cheater in the first place!
Assuming I am the other man in this scenario, motive really does count. Do you want to just hurt the cheater? No, that is not an ethical motivation. Do you want to warn the spouse about the cheaters behavior? It can be an ethical motivation, especially if there is more than generic “your wife is a jerk” warning (an upcoming financial commitment that puts him at risk if the cheater is less committed than he thinks, diseases, etc).
I think not knowing that the cheater was married changes things too, and makes it more acceptable to spill the beans, if for no other reason than you have some moral high ground.
A more interesting question: what if you are completely a third party, not involved with the cheating at all, but find out about it? That changes the dynamic completely. I am not sure what the appropriate action would be - it feels like it would depend on how close you were to each of the parties.
It’d be wrong to snitch. And two wrongs don’t make a right.
Of course, sometimes two wrongs cancel each other out 
Thanks, I was looking for a good metaphor to describe my reaction to this thread. It wasn’t okay to begin with–why would it be okay now?
My gut reaction is that it’s wrong if you go into the affair knowing the other party is married. You knew what you were getting into.
As for someone who doesn’t know, that’s a bit trickier. Frankly, I have a hard time understanding how someone could not know that for anything more than a short fling. I guess it would depend on why you want to tell the spouse. Revenge for a broken heart doesn’t work for me since the spouse wasn’t the one who hurt you. Why hurt them? I suppose if you got pregnant then the spouse would have to know. Likewise, if you contracted an STD, the spouse should be warned. Other than that, I don’t have many situations where it would be acceptable.
I’m thinking that if it was difficult for you to do, it might have been the right thing to do. If it is easy or enjoyable for you to do, it was probably the wrong thing.
You know, we’ve gone around on that topic many times here, and I don’t think there is any topic that I’m more ambivalent about. I honestly don’t know if I would tell or not if I were the third party. I really feel like the cheated-on spouse should know, but I also really feel that it isn’t my business to tell.
Harriet, your criteria made me chuckle a little - that is sort of how life goes, isn’t it?
Non hypothetically…
When my ex was cheating, I found out about it from his girlfriend (now his wife). He didn’t want to “hurt me” by telling me. She had no such compunction.
So I got out of a bad marriage sooner. They married and are still married, and I was free to find and marry my husband of 15 years.
Her motive was to free my husband from my clutches - which she accomplished. She also freed me.
I don’t know if the ends justified the means (the ends are four happy people - or I assume they are happy, I rarely bump into them and hear only the faintest gossip through the grapevine). And it would have perhaps been preferable had my ex had a backbone. But not every husband who gets ratted out shoots themselves.
My gut tells me the only time it’s ok to tell is when your motives are truly pure, e.g. you know for a fact that the person sleeping around has an STD and has refused to tell his/her partners.
The whole situation is just bad karma all around!
I’ll also go with the “Bad Karma” thought on the situation and let the offending parties get what they deserve on their own. Assuming there are either 3 or 4 people (spouses, knowing or not) involved who would be the only ones involved, who have the right to say anything, I’d keep my mouth shut. I can come up with one scenario where I may ask a leading ‘what if’ question. If the unknowing spouse and SO were in the process of buying a new house, and I knew for certain this cheating was going on.
later, Tom.
I wish the “other woman” had contacted me and told me, but my husband lied to her and said he wasn’t married. She didn’t even know. My husband, on the other hand, told me he told her we were “seperated”… (God, this is sounding awful). After I did find out of their phone/email romance (possibly more - both say they never met, but I have suspicions) I decided to contact her and drill her. She was not willing to give up much information at ALL. I pried and pried, got really evasive answers, etc. It’s been over a year, I still ruminate, I still feel that there was more to it than I know.