My wife has been very good friends with Person A for years and years. Person A then met Person B, and my wife became good friends with Person B as well. We have all been good freinds for many years now. A and B have been dating and cohabitating for a long long time.
Well, A has cheated on B, and B broke up with A. A has moved out.
My wife is questioning whether she should or can still be friends with A even though A cheated on B, but A did not directly violate my wife’s trust or friendship in A.
That’s a tough one. I think cheating is bad behaviour, and I don’t think I could retain a friendship with one, but like you say, A did not directly harm your wife. I once worked with two guys who became friends, and then one guy ended up cheating with the other guy’s wife, ruining two marriages and affecting four young children, and we all kept working together. It was awkward to say the least. It’s very difficult to just ignore the fact that A has stepped outside the bounds of what we normally consider good behaviour.
It’s my opinion that a person does not have to directly compromise my trust or do me harm before I’ll firewall myself from them. If it is behaviour that I find abhorrent, I can and have ejected them prior to them doing me harm directly. I once told a very close friend that we could no longer be friends simply because of his unsuccessful attempt to cheat on his girlfriend. My rationale is that, while it does me no harm directly, I do not wish to have in my inner circle those who would choose such things.
Interesting problem, which I think has only one solution and that is for your wife to pick one of the two to continue to be friends with.
I say this from a purely practical position and not from any judgement about party A’s actions.
Personally, if it was a good friend, them cheating wouldn’t bother me too much. Maybe a little of “what’d you do that for your goose”, but certainly not severing all contact simply because of what they did. (As per the OP anyway, when it didn’t directly affect me)
But if your wife tries to maintain friendships with both, even if and that’s a big if, one of them doesn’t arc up about how could you be still be friends with the other party, she will have to be extremely circumspect in either’s company whenever the conversation turns to the other party.
She basically runs a very real and very big risk of constantly being caught in the middle. Even if the parties don’t know she is maintaining both friendships. So if it were me, I know this sounds funny, but your wife should pick the party that she considers she has a stronger connection with and ditch the other one.
I have been in this situation and maintained a friendship with both. I think it can be done. The question is how strong was your wife’s friendship with A before he/she did the cheating. If she has a strong friendship with him/her, it is a tough call to just cut that off over one mistake, albeit a very big one. Has A apologised and/or expressed shame or whatever? That would make it even harder to then terminate the friendship.
B might be a bit mifffed that your wife continues to be friends with A at first, but will probably realise that her ongoing friendship with A does not constitute an endorsement of the cheating.
Is A a male and B female? IMHO, females stick with females when it comes to issues dealing with infidelity, even when the female is the cheater. At least in my case, that’s what happened.
Unless they cheated on her, your wife shouldn’t allow someone else’s bedroom antics to impact on her friendship. It’s like any other kind of relationship breakup - real adults don’t play ‘who gets to keep the friends?’; they both keep the friends.
If A is okay with lying to the person who is supposedly the most important person in their life, I’m guessing A is also okay with lying to your wife, too.
She’ll have to decide if she’s okay with placing her trust in a known liar.
Personally, I tend to find that liars screw me over, sooner or later.
Nobody knows the true details that pushed one person to cheat on the other. I say keep both friends. You can never know the dynamics of another couple’s relationship. Cheating might be a bad thing, but it isn’t the sum of the cheater’s existence.
My thought is “this is not the type of problem you solve by taking advice from strangers - you solve it by ‘going with your gut’ and doing what feels comfortable for YOU.”
I’m pretty forgiving and would almost certainly maintain a friendship with a friend who admitted to infidelity, but that’s just me. Even though what Standup Karmic has to say is harsh and alien to my own world view, I accept that this is a right answer for some people.
A related story: some years ago, a man whose friendship both my husband valued a great deal - call him Fred - revealed to me, when my husband wasn’t around, that he had met his current wife when she was married to someone else and approached him about having NSA sex. To the surprise of them both, the casual sex turned into love, and the woman divorced her husband to marry Fred.
Well. I can’t say I approved, but I also figured it was not my place to judge. However, I did NOT tell my husband (with whom I usually share everything) because I thought it would spoil his friendship with Fred. My husband is much more conservative than I am about such things, and I respect that.
A year passed, and one day my husband came to me and said “hey - funny story for you - guess how Fred met his wife?”
Turns out my husband found out anyway, and (since it didn’t affect him personally) it did not destroy his friendship with Fred. He was amused to hear that I had been keeping the story secret from him out of respect for his tender feelings.
I wouldn’t take sides. Hell, for all you know the cheater was cheated on first. You don’t want to know and you don’t need to know.
Remain friendly with each but a bit distant till the initial shockwaves pass. If/when some normalcy returns, don’t bring up the situation. If one does, tell him/her that discussions of the other and that situation are off-limits. One or both may push that, insisting you take a side or make a judgment, at which point you pull away completely. I.e. let each know the terms of the friendship at that point; it could be that they have plenty of other people to vent to and it won’t be an issue.
Sounds like a good plan. All that venting might feel good for the offended partner–although the cheater might have stuff to vent, too. But your wife might be pulled in, to the extent of agreeing with the complaints.
Which would be awkward if the couple manages to get back together.
It would be nice to have made few enough mistakes in my own life that I could afford to cut out all the friends who have done things with which I don’t agree.
My marriage ended because my husband cheated, so I have a personal bias.
However, I think his cheating was indicative of a character flaw that I should have recognised earlier. In a difficult situation, he attempted to cheat a business partner out of a large sum of cash and it was something I had a very hard time dealing with. The excuses we both fell to in order to excuse him were that he was driven to it, that it was out of character for him, that they were trying to cheat him in the first place, that it was done in desperation and that he’d never normally do such a thing and never ever ever would again.
Fast forward 6 years and he cheats on me with my friend, telling her that I’d driven him to it, that it was out of character for him, that I was trying to cheat on him too, etc etc.
Anyway, the lesson I took away from that is that a cheater is a person who will screw over anyone else to get something they want, even their loved ones. I would be reluctant to continue a friendship with someone who has demonstrated that they will lie, cheat and deceive if the circumstances are right. Each case should be judged on it’s own merits, but this is my rule of thumb.
As others have said, your wife doesn’t know all the details yet. She may never know. I abhor cheating, and I feel that Cazzle is right in that it often indicates an underlying character flaw, but there might be mitigating circumstances. And like others have said, maybe B cheated first!
I’d suggest maintaining friendships with both, but cooling things off with A for a while. She doesn’t have to end the friendship. If A is reasonable, he or she will understand why your wife is being a bit cool and B will appreciate her being there for him/her.
Over time, the right course of action will become clearer.
Unless A and/or B try to force your wife to take sides. In that case, she should dump one or both and try to strike up a friendship with C.
I think this decision may be up to the way she chooses to handle the situation. I was once the wronged party, and the friends I had in common, that I had known since college, chose to stick up for the ex and urge me to be kind and forgiving when I had nursed them through countless breakups and been endlessly loyal.
I dumped both those friends, and haven’t spoken to them until this day. I simply can’t deal with disloyalty, and if they wanted to stick up for him, so be it, but I didn’t have to hear it.
That’s not disloyalty. They didn’t trash you, they simply didn’t trash *him *either.
As for **Bearflag’s **situation, there are too many unknown variables to say for sure, but in my experience, the simple rule is… what’s most important to her? Is it being friends with both, or not running the risk of hurting B’s feelings?
I just tell them up front that I am not taking sides, won’t be an in between, won’t talk about what is said about the other so they can complain or blame all they want, does not bother me nor will I pass it on and if they can’t handle that from me, that is their problem.
I am friends to people because I choose to be, It is not dependent on if they are friends to me or not. It is always my choice.
