Scumpup and others: let’s keep things civil in IMHO, please. If the opinions of other posters piss you off, you’re welcome to discuss them as frankly as you’d like in the Pit.
sandra_nz,
I agree that there are many given reasons for cheating. Most of those are exaggerations or outright lies…things the cheater says/uses to help relieve their own guilt, or to save face when caught.
One thing that cheaters have in common is the character flaw that allows them to give themselves permission to cheat. This is true in every case, except where mental illness is involved.
DianaG,
I apologize. I think more people should make it their business when they have hard evidence. I think standing by and doing nothing is similar to watching any other despicable act occur and doing nothing. Your one small step from being as immoral as the perpetrator IMO.
Just get divorced first. Is it really too much to ask?
I can’t believe I typed “your” instead of “you’re”. I hate that!
I have a friend who was with this guy she really loved. He was getting more annoying by the day and she was being driven insane by how bad their relationship was getting but everytime she tried to break it off he pushed and pleaded until she wound up right back where she started. She ended up cheating on him partly because they hadn’t had any decent sex in months and partly because it gave her an out and she could say, “I’m sorry, I had sex with someone else and I have to end our relationship.” She tried to end it and couldn’t until she had an affair. There are reasons, though none of them are good, people have affairs. You seem to be unwilling to even try to understand that though it isn’t right there are reasons people do bad things other than that they are just bad people with character flaws.
Your friend couldn’t say, “I have to end this relationship” without cheating first? That’s a lame excuse. She could’ve left him at any time.
What she did was have an “exit affair”. Yes, it has a name, and it’s not any more justifiable than a quickie with a stranger in a public bathroom.
I contemplated having an affair out of revenge. I couldn’t do it. I walked in and caught her naked on my couch and I couldn’t do it. I don’t have that character flaw.
“Character flaw” does not necessarily equal “bad person”. It’s a flaw…a defect. It can be repaired in many cases, if a concerted effort is made to do so.
I’m sorry, but I can’t sympathize. I think cheating doesn’t make you a “bad person”, but I also believe you can be a good person & do a bad thing. Your friend may have loved that guy, but not being able to break up with someone because they beg is weak. Breaking up in not usually easy & sometimes you have to be the bad guy & just say “No, it’s over.”
I understand that good people need to rationalize the bad things they do, it still doesn’t make it right.
And just so I make my position on the OP clear…
I don’t think you should run up to every friend who’s SO flirts & say you suspect they’re cheating, but if you know, you know they don’t know and you are close enough to them to know they consider cheating a deal-breaker; should tell them. And for those of you who say you can’t know how your friends feel really about cheating, I’ve had this discussion with my friends & if they hate me for telling them something they told me they would want to know, I can live with that.
Telling someone anonymously sounds kind of cowardly to me. If you’re going to stick your nose into someone’s business, at least have the courage to tell them to their face. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, then just keep your mouth shut and mind your own business.
Nice. I get upbraided for being called a nasty SOB.
I mentioned you along with the others because the tone of your first post was pretty rude and got the thread off to a contentious start. That’s why you were included in those I asked to tone it done. That doesn’t excuse PharmBoy calling you names, which is why he was included in those I asked to tone it down.
Q: You see half of a couple that you are cordial with out with another person. The body language seems overly friendly. You Could be wrong, but it could be one of thos ‘oh sh-t’ moments.
On a message board I’d like to say I’d confront them or tell the spouse or be more assertive/proactive… but in reality what really ends up happening is I make sure we don’t hang out with those people until whatever shoe that may or may not be suspended drops & the dust settles. I’ve had enough of the he said/she said in my life, and I just don’t want to bring other peoples dirty laundry / drama into my home.
BTW- Isn’t ‘other couples suddenly not wanting to hang out with you anymore w/o explanation’ one of those ‘Dear Abby’ tell-tale signs that your STOBEX might be moonlighting as a CERTA mattress tester? (No, I can’t find the link, but I remember reading it a few years ago.)
I wish someone would have told me when my husband was cheating…or if they couldn’t have told me, have made it possible for me to find out for sure. And I’m pretty sure I’d still be friends with them. Just as long as they didn’t expect me to take a particular path after getting the information, and in a particular timeframe. Give me the information I need to make my choices, and then let me decide what those choices are.
What sort of overly friendly body language are we talking about? I have a few friends you might see me out with and see me touch, or touch me, or sit particularly close together. I’ve been at parties where one half of a couple was leaned up against someone else - in plenty of microcultures its appropriate to touch someone who isn’t your spouse, and frankly, I can be a little flirty with some male friends - but after 25 years of nothing happening, it probably isn’t happening now, either.
On the other hand, if overly friendly involved tonsil hockey or hands on asses or boobs - that probably - in my own circle - is an “oh shit.”
That’s one of the things that made my ex-husband and my situation so difficult. In a circle of flirty, touchy people the certainty of cheating can be difficult to establish. So plenty of people “knew” and wanted to tell me, but they weren’t “sure” - and sometimes I “knew” but wasn’t “sure.”
Googling on cheating will only show that people whose spouses cheated didn’t like it. I think we already agree on that. To return to the original topic of discussion, since I don’t know why a person may be cheating, I see no reason to take it upon myself to rat hir out. If two people have a diseased marriage, it is nobody’s business but their own. It took two people not working on the relationship for things to decay to the point where one of them started cheating. A third person acting as a shit-stirrer might make things fly apart more quickly, but is unlikely to improve their marriage.
Exactly. When you insert yourself into another person’s marriage, you’re asking for all kinds of trouble, and putting them in a bad position.
First of all, unless you have incontrovertible proof, you’re asking someone to trust you more than they trust their spouse. That’s pretty fucking presumptuous of you, and you’d better be in a position of trust already. That’s why I mentioned that there are maybe three people who I’d expect to tell me, or thank them for it. If my best friend tells me, I know that she genuinely has my best interest at heart, I trust her, and I’m listening. If some random acquaintance tells me, I’m just wondering why this person feels compelled to interfere in my marriage. So now, while I may in fact start paying closer attention to my husband’s behavior, you can bet your ass that I’m also suspicious of the motives of this supposed altruist.
Secondly, people are going to react differently to any problem that becomes public knowledge than they are to one they can work out in private. Pride comes into play here, and may end a marriage that didn’t really need ending. There may be no good reason to cheat, but there are a million good reasons to not dissolve a marriage because of infidelity, and I think that it’s exponentially harder to make your marriage work if you’re dealing with not only a broken heart, but public humiliation. For some people, the latter may be harder to forgive than the former.
Think about it… if you find out your spouse cheated on your five years ago, but it’s been over for that long and things are good now, do you still leave him? Probably not. And if you’re smart, you’re grateful that no one felt the need to put you in a position of having to make that decision at the time.
Different people, different strokes.
My great-aunt knew her husband went whoring every time he had a business trip to the big city nearby. How did she know? He talked in his sleep. Did she expect his coworkers to tell her? No, and she would have been very surprised if one would have. She decided their marriage was worth more than that, so long as it was paid women and not a “real other woman” - plus, she learned a lot of sex games through her interrogations of sleeping not-so-beauty which she wouldn’t have learned with another man.
My grandmother (SiL to that great-aunt) still thinks that Gramps never cheated on her. Grandma, I’ve got breaking news: Santa is the parents. How she’s managed to convince herself that a man who’s been known to try and take his 11yo grandkids to brothels never goes to said places without a kid in tow, or that a man who required sex every night he was at home did without for 60 days in a row (travelling salesman)? Well, apparently she’s decided it’s better to delude herself than to admit that every time she walks down the hall, the grooves in the ceiling get deeper. Even on those occasions when he’s grabbed another woman’s ass or breast in front of her, Grandma has managed to end up deciding it was the grabbed woman’s fault: she provoked him.
This board includes people in open marriages, whose definition of cheating is all about breaking trust, not about who puts bits into other people’s bits.
Wrong. The cheater put his/her marriage in a bad position, not the person with the morals and the nerve to inform the betrayed spouse. Obviously, you either need proof or you need to be in a position of trust. That goes without saying.
Once again, blame the cheater. You can’t work on a problem in private or otherwise of you don’t know it exists. Most cheaters will never offer a confession unless confronted with evidence, and even then many will deny, deny, deny, until the lies finish off the marriage. The only way most unsuspecting betrayed spouses will ever find out is through sheer luck, or through a concerned third party. The STD factor alone obligates those who know about the affair to expose it. Expose first, worry about the fallout later. In the end, most betrayed spouses will not only forgive you, they will thank you.
If you’ve ever been cheated on by someone you truly love, you’d know that no amount of public humiliation even comes close the heartbreak of a cheating spouse. They aren’t even in the same league.
Grateful? Are you kidding? Regardless of what you may think, you would not be grateful. You would feel betrayed by your spouse AND those who knew but didn’t tell you. Entire circles of friends are lost when they “mind their own business”. The betrayed spouse always has a right to make an INFORMED decision when it comes to living their life. They cannot do so while living a lie. Did I mention the STD factor?
Adolph, you appear to come across as a victim here. My experience has been that most people who cheat/have been cheated on are struggling with their marriage in the first place. It’s USUALLY not one spouse being the Best Spouse in the World and the other a scum sucking cheater.
I’m not advocating cheating but I can tell you that there may be nuances in relationships that everyone outside the relationship aren’t privy to.
Sigh.
Adolph, why do you ignore the fact that many of the people here who disagree with you, including me, have, in fact, experienced a cheating SO? Your experience, and your emotions, are not universal. Neither are mine, which is why I’m not telling you that you’re wrong, simply that you’re not entirely and invariably right.
For the record, your failure to recognize the experience and emotions of other people as valid may in fact contribute to your difficulties in relationships.
Of course there are likely other problems in a marriage where cheating is involved. That’s obvious. Both spouses are equally to blame for any problems the marriage had before any affair took place. No problem, however, justifies cheating. When discussing infidelity, Any pre-affair issues are irrelevant. Cheating is 100% the fault of the cheater, without exception. It is never because of any shortcoming the the other spouse. It is caused by a shortcoming in the cheater.
It is really quite simple. Stay faithful or get divorced. Seems easy enough to me.
There is no legitimate argument for not following this simple rule.