How do any of them know he’s “trashing a great life”? How do they know whether the life is great or not? How do they know whether the life is “being trashed”?
They’re all being presumptuous. They’re deciding they know what his life is, what’s good about it, what would trash it. They’re deciding they know what his relationship with Sue is, what the conditions and terms of it are, what its state of being is, what would “trash” it.
They’re all getting way into his pocket. They’ve assumed the role of his penis police.
In their defense, they’ve all been friends since school. Their wives are friends. Practice (3 hours at least once a week, the band is tight) has been at Mike&Sues home. Yes, they’re making assumptions, but they mean well.
But since you all are that close, saying something or saying nothing, I don’t see how any of you can avoid the negative fallout (if any). ‘Way to go, Jim.’
I think it’s really weird that Sue never travels with the band. Honestly, I think it’s weird that the kid hasn’t sometimes traveled with the band. He’s 17. We started leaving our kids alone when we were out for the evening when they were, hmm, maybe 12 and 14. I don’t know if I’d leave a 17 year old alone for a weekend (I might have, I forget how old the kids were when we first did that) but surely he has a friend he could stay with, or who could come over? Or, you know, he could go with him mom.
There’s something else going on here.
What Annie said.
Also, they may have an understanding. Maybe Sue knows and is happy for Jim. And maybe Sue knows and isn’t happy, but doesn’t want to “officially” know. Maybe she wants plausible deniability.
It sucks that you have been put in this situation.
Taking the son to shows isn’t possible. The band plays bars, preferably dirty dive bars (their genre fits best) and they often are billed with several opening acts, making for long nights. All the shows are 21 and over.
Additionally, Sue sees the band play all the time, since she lives where they practice.
The son got into some trouble, the details I do not want to go into. Think straight A’s scholar getting nabbed with weed. He’s a good kid, and IMHO the parents are helicoptering, but he’s not my kid.
OP, I think you have to do what you feels comfortable for you. I am generally not the kind of person who goes on moral crusades or tries to involve myself in people’s private lives even when I suspect they’re doing things I don’t approve of. My typical response is to just start distancing myself from the situation and people involved. Some might say that’s weaseling out, but the reality is there are no good options.
I remember one time that I got pissed at a friend because he bailed on some of his roommates, two of whom were also my friends, without telling them and left them stuck with coming up with extra rent and utilities on the due date. One of our mutual friends (his roommate) approached me the next day and accused me of knowing about it and not saying anything, which I honestly didn’t. I knew he was planning on not telling our management team that he was planning to quit without giving notice, but I assumed his roommates all knew that as well. On that front, I asked him if he thought that was a good idea, but I figured that was between him and his God, so to speak.
I confronted him in person about it when I saw him a few months later. I said you know “A lot of us were surprised about how you left, and you kind burned your roommates. What was that about?” I could tell he was tense and wanted to squirm away from the question, but I just wanted to see what he’d say. It turns out he’d told one of his roommates that he was planning to do it and that this one roommate (there were like 4 of them, I believe) also kept silent about it, even after the others were fuming openly to me and other sabout it.
I still don’t think it justified anything, and I kinda stopped hanging out with him as much as I used to, and the friendship kinda died off. At the same time, what I took from that experience was that there is often a backstory, and there may be details you’re not aware of. Not that it fundamentally changes how you feel about the person’s conduct, but the details can add shades of gray.
I could imagine the answer being different in various cultures/sub-cultures including possibly a more traditionalist Western view than the one which prevails here, overwhelmingly % saying stay out of it.
Which doesn’t mean there is a good answer, I agree there is not. Personally, and lets say we make the sexes of the parties hypothetical, if I heard rumors that the SO of a very close lifelong friend was stepping out on him (it would be a him, realistically), an SO I knew only through him, I might tell him. Tell him what I knew, not, I hope obviously become judge and jury and process vague evidence like in the case given into ‘your SO is cheating on you’.
If it was ‘a couple my wife and I are friends with’, I would stay out of it.
I don’t think it’s too weird. There’s a world of difference between leaving your 17-year-old alone one weekend, and leaving him alone on the weekends (or dumping him at a friends) routinely. This sounds like it’s every other weekend at least.
Also, if she goes with the band, that totally changes the trouble and expense. Right now, it sounds like all the band members crash in a cheap hotel room. She’s not going to be willing to crash with them, so they have to pay more for a second room, and the other band members have to pay more for theirs. There’s also not much for her to do while they are setting up. He’s not on vacation, he’s WORKING. So she’d have to just sit in a bar or hotel room twiddling her thumbs while he did his thing. And then, who knows? And then she’s going to sit in a loud bar to watch him. If that’s her scene, cool, but if it’s not, that’s a lot to ask for moral support.
If she has never seen him play live, that’s odd. But honestly, even without a kid I wouldn’t expect her to travel with the band and see most of the shows. If she wanted to, great, but I don’t think in any way it’s a standard expectation that a spouse always go to watch the other perform. I mean, if someone is in community theater for a 3 show run, you might go to all three. But once it’s a job, once it’s something they do every day or even every week, I don’t think the expectation is the same.
I wouldn’t expect her to see all the shows, but I’d expect her to see at least a few of the shows. I guess if they often perform near home, maybe that’s when she sees them.
This is the kind of thing I mean when I talk about people making presumptions about other people’s relationships. There’s no basis for any to have any expectations along these lines about a relationship that you’re not a part of.
Likely due to the age of your students rather than the culture. Teens are all about drama and inserting themselves into someone else’s. Once they get older and wiser, that’ll change.
I see this question as sort of a Rorschach test for assumptions. There isn’t nearly enough information for any of us to have any idea what the best thing to do is. So everyone fills in the blanks in different ways. I presume the OP will filter the results through his knowledge of the people involved, and throw out stuff that’s irrelevant. I thought it would be more helpful to go in a different direction than what had already been said.
One of my fill-ins is that she’s resentful at having to stay home and babysit a 17-year-old while he gets to hang out in bars (and screw groupies?). I’m having a hard time considering it “work” since it sounds like they play once a week. I really hope she doesn’t get hurt.
I agree with what most people here are saying, that you shouldn’t say anything. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen. Spend some time with Jim, see if he wants to open up about how things are going with Sue. You’re his friend. If he’s not happy, you should be there for him.
Being close with both I’d likely say nothing unless asked directly. In which case I would answer that they should talk to the other. What I wouldn’t do is deny, cover or lie. Just the repeated referral will tell them what they wanted to know anyways.
In a slightly different scenario such as one where I see my friends SO in someone else’s arms, they’re getting notified.
They are the ones, then, who need to grow a pair and have a talk with Jim. “Look, dude, we like you and we like Sue. We’ve got a good gig here and and all of the drama forcing us to sit on this is likely to make the band break up.”
Jim is not making much of an effort to hide the affair from them so it’s rather like Dan Savage’s standard reply to a letter where someone (typically a sibling) writes to say, “He’s come out to me but asked me not to tell our parents, or other siblings, or our friends.” He’s not come out, he’s dragged you into the closet with him. Jim is forcing them to become accomplices in his cheating, assuming their assessments of a) He’s boinking Homewrecker and b) Sue doesn’t know and c) would not approve, are all correct.
No, he’s asking what advice he should give his friends, who are more directly involved.
That’s the part about this thread that’s annoying me a bit. Obviously kayaker shouldn’t get involved directly, because he knows too little, and only has rumors. But it sure seems to me that the OP is asking for what the bandmates should do, because they are asking him. Unlike the OP, they actually have to directly interact with the guy, seeing the evidence directly, and are in effect part of his cover story–the wife thinks he’s with them.
I’m not saying I have such advice, mind you. The closest I’ve been to this situation is a friend confessing to me she slept with a married guy she knew (while she herself was single and lonely). I also didn’t know the guy or his wife. I have no experience noticing someone is cheating, nor of being asked advice on what to do.
Would you have a word with a helmetless gorbie about to run a long class
IV, or would you keep quiet thinking “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
What if that helmetless gorbie was a dear friend of yours?
Some STDs such as genital herpes, human papillomavirus [HPV] infection, syphilis, and chancroid are passed skin to skin, including skin outside of the condom. Groupies are not known for their monogamy, so your friend is putting his spouse at risk even if he is wearing a condom.
It’s simple: if you truly care for the wife, make sure she knows what she needs to know to protect herself, even if it means you and/or the band mates confronting her husband or speaking directly to her. If she, or her husband, or the bandmates are so offended by this that they cut you cold, so be it. You’ll at least have a clean conscience rather than have whatever she catches laying on your mind.
If this leads to any or all of them turning on you, which is very likely, then find better people for friends.
i do not agree. If he were opening up about those things, then, sure, I’d be there for him. But that’s not how he chose to deal with it. Now that he is cheating, getting me involved means I’m involved with said cheating, and I’m not going to do that.
Now if he wants advice on how to stop, sure. But if he plans to continue cheating, then I can’t be there for him in this circumstance. I can still be friends with him (though it does strain that relationship), but I can’t be the guy who would effectively be justifying his cheating by accepting his feelings.
No matter how unhappy he is, the cheating is still a choice, and a repeated one, not a one-time slip up. I see other posts that seem to treat it like it is inevitable, a natural consequence of being a band popular enough to have groupies, or a normal part of relationships breaking up.
As much as I understand the “don’t get involved” advice, I don’t think what cheating actually is should be downplayed, or treated like it doesn’t matter.
