I’m in South Carolina and they sure do down here. If a divorcing party can prove - or even make a substantive case - for infidelity the unfaithful party can lose all marital assets, all custodial rights and be on the hook for alimony. It’s all a matter of how far the wronged party is willing to push it.
Jesus.
That’s some… well, it sounds really theocratic.
I share the hypothesis-- the old presumption was that while the married man was just being a common cad, the single woman having the affair with him was taking him away from his wife, and therefore depriving a fellow woman of her source of sustenance and social standing.
Would this be another case of sexism against women perpetrated mainly by woman?
Whenever you hear some belittling the other woman as the “homewrecker” or “tramp” or “hussie” it’s usually coming out of the mouth of another female.
I think if a guy cheats on his wife and you ask a few dozen men who they think is to blame you’re not going to get many pointing a finger at the other woman.
I have a suggestion to consider: ALL of the labels applied to everyone involved with infidelity are accurate and correct.
There ARE women who qualify as homewreckers. Women who purposely go after a married man just to see if she can get him to stray. There are plenty of men who do the same thing with married women. I don’t know which label applies to the males, but I’ve seen homewrecker applied to them as well occasionally. I think of both as ‘trophy hunters’ more than anything else. Never liked trophy hunters of any kind, myself.
There's another common human behavior that plays a part with this: once someone comes up with a fun snotty label for someone who they don't like, lots of other people are going to start dumping their disliked people into the same bin, whether they belong there or not. There's no need for the rest of us to get carried away with thinking it's all a plot to blame everything on ONE kind of person.For me, blame lands squarely on the one cheating. The outside person owes nothing to anyone (and you don’t know what they were told/what they know).
The one in the marriage is the one with the vow.
Also, it’s well known that all women instantly lose interest in sex once they get married, so how are they supposed to compete with a single woman who hasn’t gone through that transformation?
This must be related to the well-known fact that men are horndogs who can’t uphold their vows.
Theocratic? How so? But marriage itself seems somewhat theocratic does it not?
An aspect which hasn’t been mentioned (that I saw) is that it’s supposed in the example to be women criticizing women as ‘home wreckers’. This kind of makes basic sense IMO w/o requiring a round of the ‘who is the -ist/-phobe?’ game, if it’s their man. Assuming they might want the man back, or look back to a happy relationship with that man, the ‘other woman’ is the factor which has most apparently changed, so human nature I think to pile more criticism on that person. Also to some degree ‘home wrecker’ is a turn of phrase that just happens to be more often aimed at women. It doesn’t mean the cheated on woman is necessarily less unhappy with her man.
And further a lot of ‘-ist/-phobe’ accusations are about stuff which is pretty deeply rooted in many societies, to the point it’s not necessarily practically worthwhile IMO to debate whether they are just very pervasive social patterns or hardwiring in our DNA. Like the fact that men generally find it harder to say no to sex, that they should say no to, than women do. Call that observation ‘sexist’ if you like, but that’s different from establishing that it isn’t so in general.
Another comment was about women seeing a wife or serious SO as validating a man’s attractiveness. That one seems more ambiguous because at least part might be because a women assumes there’s more of a safety factor being friendly to a ‘taken’ man than a single one who might more easily overreact to any show of interest or friendliness. And it’s even potentially ambiguous where the women does seem to be looking for some kind of relationship. This happened to me a couple of times as young married. A woman in grad school then another in a later work setting were definitely pursuing me. And I never encountered such unilateral pursuit when I was single. OTOH it could be in part that I picked up on the subtle hints women (my wife for example) threw me when single and they would have gotten more blatant about it if I hadn’t responded, which I didn’t with the women giving hints after I was married.
Anyway I still tend to think women are more likely to see the existence of a wife or girlfriend as validating a man than men are to see a husband or boyfriend as validating a woman.
Yours, hers, or both of you?
I have also read from multiple sources that this is indeed the case; that many women find married/in-a-relationship men more attractive than single unattached men.
For that reason, even though most of the blame is on the man (when a man cheats,) I don’t think the woman is blameless either. Some women do seem to have a “relationship predation” complex whereby they see a man in a relationship or marriage, and think, “I want to prey on that”.
Men are typically attracted to women for reasons that have nothing to do with her marital status. If a woman is “hot,” men will consider her “hot,” regardless of whether she’s married or single. They wouldn’t think, “She’s hot now, single, but she would be even hotter if she were already married at the moment.”
I think that website is bogus.
Not really, marriage is and always has been a contract. If one party violates the contract then why wouldn’t they suffer for their breach?
Many states have gone “No Fault”, meaning that it doesn’t matter who did what in the marriage, because marriage is complicated. I hope all states follow suit.
It’s never come up.
Again, It’s never come up. My lawyer never asked. Her lawyer has never mentioned it. If Muffin reads this thread he might have some input. (In fact I think I’ll PM him.)
Agreed. I totally own it. I am completely guilty. After years of unhappiness (miserableness), one can weirdly justify things in one’s brain.
Mine. Totally mine. And hey, I know how that sounds, but… that’s not really who I am. I wonder if there’s a term for marital PTSD? Because I seriously was not in a good place after 5 or 6 years of marriage. It was horrible. The issue was that there’s no way I could see myself leaving the kids. I did too much for them and they meant everything in the world to me.
Look, I had a brief fling (months in length) and broke it off because I was seriously afraid of getting caught, and because I really didn’t like living a binary existence. It was some 8 years later that I left my email open on the computer, and she went snooping.
Does the marriage contract legally require not cheating on the spouse? I don’t understand why the court gets to decide what the involved parties should or should not have done in their marriage. Infidelity might be the worst breach of trust ever for some couples, but that certainly wouldn’t apply to all couples, maybe to some couples the worst breach of trust ever would be hiding money. I don’t like the idea of the court imposing some set of arbitrary values on a relationship.
Yes, marriage is basically theocratic and probably archaic and yes, I’m married (happily.) I think it’s silly for the courts to become involved in what is essentially a private agreement between individuals. Ideally, their job would be to divide the property and help figure out custody and stay the hell out of the drama.
It’s just PTSD, it would apply if the relationship was abusive. Abuse does not have to be physical.
“Stand By Your Man”
“Jolene”
“It’s my party”
“It’s Judy’s Turn to Cry”
etc…
There’s a really beautiful country music duet with Reba McEntire and Linda Davis called ‘‘Does He Love You,’’ which is basically moving back and forth between the perspectives of the married woman and the woman her husband is cheating with. It strikes me as fairly realistic, and sad, and humane toward both perspectives. It usually makes me cry.