Hey! You just took the story of my college life and stole it for your OP, didn’t you?!
Actually, I’m ashamed to say I was Mary, although my Jack had the added feature of lying to me about the relationship with Jill - he assured me he had broken up with her. Yeah, not so much…And yes, it was wrong, and I should have known he was a liar and I’m terribly sorry for all the hurt I caused and that relationship was one of the primary reasons I chose to go polyamorous with my later life - much better to be honest about such shenanigans, I think, if you don’t want to stop having them!
Anyway, yeah, Jill should know. This wasn’t “it just happened” (to steal a phrase from another recent thread.) This isn’t going to go away until it’s dealt with. My recommendation is for the person with the most balls (and this might be you, Hazel) to confront Jack, give him a deadline for telling Jill, and let him know you will clue her in if he hasn’t. Otherwise, you’re not a single one of you really her friend.
If she’s just some girl you kinda sorta know but you don’t care about, by all means stay silent and enjoy the drama from afar. Y’all can even keep making clucking noises of disapproval in private. But unless someone actually steps up and does the right thing, you are all as guilty as he is of deceiving someone you say is your friend.
The first thing about being cheated on that hurts is the betrayal by someone you love.
The second thing that hurts about being cheated on is thinking about all the times between the cheating and the confession that you sat there grinning like an idiot, starry eyed in love, not knowing the truth.
The truth has a way of falling out, one way or another. Jack can’t change the pain of the first thing. He can control how much of the second thing he wants to heap on her. Sleeping dogs do not lie. They lie in wait.
I read the OP last night and then again this morning. The quoted paragraph really jumped out at me. I think this relationship is doomed.
It seems to me the problem isn’t so much that Jack cheated on Jill over several months, but that he’s still strongly attracted to another woman, so much so that (a)he’ll sleep with her given the opportunity and (b) he has to rationalize his faithfulness to Jill. What are his feelings for Jill? Why does he want to move in with her? It sounds like he just thinks he should be with her and not that he really wants to be.
Is Jack in his 20s? If so, he should just break up with Jill. She deserves better.
I agree, and if you are part of the audience in this humiliation–if, in retrospect, you are going to be one of the ones she saw as laughing up their sleeves at her for being a clueless, stupid bitch. then you are helping set up her humiliation. When she finds out all of “her” friends were really Jack’s friends that tolerated her–which is the truth, apparently–she will feel like you all thought she was a complete idiot and were having a good time at her expense. When this blows up, she’s going to discover there was a conspiracy to keep her in the dark, and I think the people involved are participating in something ugly. It doesn’t mean you have to cut Jack out of your life, or tell Jill, but I think it means you have to cut Jill out of your life. Right now everyone is pretending to be her friend but no one really is. Tell Jack that she’s not welcome because you aren’t going to tell her but you aren’t going to participate in decieving her. Let him explain it to her.
Yes, what Jill doesn’t know can’t hurt her, but Jack doesn’t seem sincere about wanting to learn from his mistakes. He might act like that’s how he feels but as soon as Mary’s ready for another roll in the hay his pants come flying off.
Well, maybe I didn’t state this very clearly in the OP - but none of Jill’s friends know about the Jack-Mary thing. Here’s a list of the people that know about the whole affair:
Jack
Mary
Peter (Jack’s best friend and roommate, also Jill’s friend from college)
some mutual friends of Jack and Mary
The only friend of Jill that knows what happened is Peter. Which is why it was even possible for this entire thing to happen in the first place - Jack, Mary, and their mutual friends are all part of a group that Jill is not involved in and has no contact with, apart from the occasional run-in at a party or something.
So, yeah. Jill will never know, unless
Jack grows a pair and tells her
Peter betrays his best friend and tells her
Mary decides to tell her, for whatever reasons
a mutual friend of Jack and Mary decides to make it their business and tells her
I suppose the first two options are the most ideal, but neither of them are likely to happen. The last two seem . . . inappropriate, to put it mildly. I mean, if YOU were a mutual friend of Jack and Mary and had only met Jill once or twice, would you tell her? Or even if you were Mary or Peter. Would you spill? I feel like everyone is damned either way.
Ah, well. There is no happy ending to this story. I’ve just been talking about it for so long with people involved that we’ve all lost all sense of perspective, so I was curious as to what outsiders would think.
Essh, but friendship change, especially in a new city. What if one of Jack’s casual friends becomes close friends with Jill? Which is entirely possible, lots of good friendships start this way. This is what’s sad here, friends shouldn’t have to pick sides like this, that’s no way to build a circle of good honest friends. If I were in group (4) thenI’m with LOUNE, I’d just back away from the whole thing for a while, but I wouldn’t worry to much about my return. There’s nothing wrong with recusing yourself from this kind of drama, and the world is full of drama-free people who need good friends.
Well, personally I think he should keep banging both of them until the whole thing blows up in his face.
The RIGHT thing to do is not tell Jill provided Jack does not plan to see Mary again. If Jack is still wants to be with Mary, he should be honest with himself and dump Jill. Even then he shouldn’t tell her why because what’s the point?
Jack needs to figure out if he really likes Mary or if he only likes her because she’s available and she isn’t Jill.
There’s no need for Jack to tell Jill. If they spend the next 20 years happy together, what would his indiscretion matter?
And of course Mary and Peter should just mind their own business.
Peter is actually forbidden by Guy Code from ever speaking of it.
I think I’m different from most people. If my wife fooled around with someone, but it was definitively over and there was no chance (for whatever reason) that an STD would be a factor, I would not want to know. At present, I believe that she is completely faithful to me, and if I am wrong, I’d still prefer the happy delusion to the sad reality.
For this reason, I’d resent forever an uninvolved person who decided to tell me of my wife’s hypothetical wandering. Not their business, not their place to decide what I want or what I need or what I “deserve.”
But I do think I’m different in that regard from most. Just putting it out there.
I agree with you, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. This isn’t a minor one-time indiscretion, or a weekend in Vegas that should stay at Vegas. This is repeated and long term (for a 20something, c’mon!) infidelity, infidelity that occurs again after he promises (himself and his friends) that it won’t.
Maybe it’s because I’m conflating the OP with my own past, but frankly, I don’t see this ending, ever, unless Mary leaves. And you know what, deep down in my blackest heart, I know that if my Jack were to call me this afternoon, I’d drive the three hours to his house tonight to fuck him again. It’s been 10 years, and his sexual “thrall” over me is that strong. That Jack/Mary post adolescent relationship is like an addiction - you say you want it to stop, you really mean it, and yet you jeopardize other relationships - not just with your boyfriend/girlfriend, but with your platonic friends as well - and possibly even things risk things like your job or graduating school to feed the fix the second it’s offered again.
I’ve quit cigarettes, and I’ve quite overeating. I don’t think I’ll ever really quit “Jack,” I just may never see him again before I die.
I’ve been cheated on, and one of the worst parts of the hurt was discovering that mutual friends knew what was going on and didn’t tell me.
It wasn’t just the thought that they witnessed the humiliation and betrayal inflicted on me. There were real, physical consequences. The woman my boyfriend slept with gave him an STD, which he then gave to me. I ended up going to the ER with pain in my lower abdomen, suffered through a humiliating exam given by an asshole ER doc, and facing the possibility that my fertility may have been compromised.
Someone has to tell Jill. If Jack doesn’t have the balls, then one of Jill’s friends should step up to the plate.
If Jack didn’t have the self-control necessary to avoid committing adultery - which he admits is wrong and bad - what makes you think he’d have the foresight, self-control, and self-honesty to have himself tested for STDs and ask Mary to do the same?
You really can’t eliminate them like that. The fear and the possibility have to be considered regardless of the actuality of infection. And Peter, knowing what he knows, has an ethical duty to tell Jill, UNLESS he knows that Jack has been tested and cleared.
Hm. I was kind of hoping that this thread could stick to the question of whether the wronged SO of a cheater would be better off knowing or not, rather than devolving into a discussion of the ethics of sleeping with someone knowing they have an SO. That seems to be a question that could spawn a thread of its own.
he wasn’t cheating with a particular person, but every night I wasn’t available, he’d go and find himself someone who was.
When I did find out it was from his own mouth - I did kick him out flat on his ass, but it never even occurred to me to get angry with his mother and sister (who’d been telling him “that worked with other girls but this one will kick you out flat on your ass when she finds out”) or with our common friends (whom I wouldn’t have believed).
So from Jill’s point of view… stop fretting and get some chocolate ice cream. Whatever the hell happens with Jack and Jill stopped being Mary’s business when she realized what a donkey Jack is. Maybe some day Jill will notice it too, maybe not - but it’s not Mary’s business.
shoves chocolate ice cream through the CD drive (swiss supermarket generic brand, it’s not very chocolatey but quite good actually)
PS: no, we hadn’t specifically talked about “is this an exclusive relationship?,” not with those words. But to me a guy asking me to be the mother of his children and marry him is asking for exclusivity… for him, it meant I was supposed to be exclusive but he wasn’t.
