Bolding mine, who is “Her” ? The wife?
I’ll assume that is a typo?
If we are saying “Men lack the ability to say no to a woman who is willing to have sex with HIM”
I will say what ever woman thinks that will be sadly disappointed to find she has greatly over estimated the value of her vagina.
I’ve never seen any of the above in real life.
I’ve walked into kitchens at parties where it was discussed that some neighbor got divorced… and the divorce (any divorce) was always 100% the man’s fault.
Never once have I ever walked in on a conversation where a woman was ever blamed.
Not even once. If she was with another guy, then her husband let himself go or couldn’t keep her or couldn’t change with the times (ie become magically 20 years younger) or couldn’t provide for her like her new guy could.
I’ve heard people actually say when it was found that 1-2 of the kids were fathered by other guys:
“…well if he could keep her happy in bed, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Have you seen how happy she looks?”
“Good for her…!”:smack:
PS- the Same Exact People… if the husband is with another woman now?
“Typical guy.”
“Preach it.”
“I’ll never respect him now. I don’t even want to know him.”
It was like the women involved all had “Get Out Of Responsibility Free” cards.
…or as some people call it, “West Coast Disease”.
Except in extreme cases, like abuse, it is a harsh reality that both people in a failing marriage are probably contributing to its failure in some way. It is the denial of that fact that often destroys marriages. The people you are describing sound unpleasant and I wouldn’t want to attend their parties.
I think when you’re the woman being cheated on, you have complicated feelings towards the man (assuming hetero situations here). You’re sad, you’re angry, etc. The Other Woman can be dehumanized and JUST the anger can be unleashed on her. You don’t have complicated feelings.
There’s also a feeling like a woman who gets with a taken man is betraying the sisterhood.
When I watch a couple from the outside and the man cheats, I don’t think of his partner as a homewrecker.
And the aftermath too.
HOWEVER, one of the unwritten rules about getting along in the world is that it is never acceptable, under any circumstances, to tell a woman that it may not have been entirely his fault no matter how obvious it is, reading between the lines or otherwise, that it wasn’t. :rolleyes:
Not entirely on topic, but how are there not lawsuits about defamation or invasion of privacy with regards to all those entries on the “She’s a Homewrecker” website by this point?
I really don’t know if one can make sweeping generalizations about gender behaviors from anecdotal evidence. There’s no way you can make controlled studies about those particular people without inventing a time machine.
In my case, I noticed that there were considerably fewer women who showed interest in me when I was married. There is no doubt a subset of women who do prefer married men, just as there are subsets of crazy men as well.
In 50 some years of my life, I’ve personally seen exactly one woman who targeted the boyfriend of her friends. Why she was allowed to remain in the group is beyond me.
The view of marriage as theocratic sounds like an American argument. Japan is more or less an agnostic country with organized religion playing no part in the lives of the vast majority of people, but marriage has a strong tradition. Likewise, adultery is seen as an act against the marriage, even though it occurs not infrequently.
In Japan adultery is one of the reasons for forcing the other person to agree to a divorce. People can easily obtain a divorce if both parties agree, but if one party doesn’t want one, it is difficult to convince the court to grant one.
The courts have set amount which they will award the injured party. A short term casual fling is seen differently than a long term, on going affair.
As Spice says, you need new friends.
Why wouldn’t the person outside the relationship also be struggling to have their emotional needs met?
Quoting your post again - and in a large percentage of those cases (I’ve heard about half of the time) the couple was just plain old so mismatched, they could never have had a successful relationship anyway.
The law differs depending on the jurisdiction. In bible belt South Carolina, yer fucked if you fuck, for if it can be proven that you committed adultery you will not get alimony unless your spouse is OK with you getting alimony. In heathen Canada, who the fuck cares – adultery will not affect spousal support. In Canada, the general approach is to share the parties’ post separation after-tax incomes more or less equally, regardless of adultery. In both jurisdictions, adultery is grounds for divorce, but they differ greatly when it comes to how adultery does or does not affect alimony/spousal support.
The property division laws are also different. South Carolina will adjust the equitable apportionment of marital property if there has been adultery, whereas there is no adjustment for adultery in the equalization of net family property in Ontario (Canadian divorce is federal, property equalization is provincial, and spousal support and child support are available both federally and provincially but mirror each other so there is little conflict of laws).
In very general terms, the South Carolina approach is based on rigid morality – adultery wrecks marriages, whereas the Canadian approach is based on practicality – wrecked marriages are what they are regardless of whether the adulterer came by it naturally or was driven to it by circumstances such as an abusive spouse or simply a dead marriage in which separation had been delayed due to the the kids not being out of the nest yet, so stop the carnage and get on with life. Fault v. No-fault. Some states such as South Carolina are fault based, whereas some states and all of Canada are no-fault.
I prefer the no-fault, suck it up Buttercup approach, for trying to apportion blame when a marriages fails is almost impossible in most matters, and often leads to emotionally and financially ruinous litigation that only deepens the wounds.
So yeh, Leaffan, it would have been odd for an Ontario lawyer to ask about adultery. If the parties had argued over adultery, it would have accomplished nothing, for the Court would hear her arguing that he was an adulterer and him arguing that she drove him to it because she was abusive and tried to burn him alive by chaining up and setting the sauna on fire with gasoline while he was in it and on another occasion stabbing him in the head with a carving knife while he was sleeping, and her arguing that he also committed adultery with a dog (a canine), and him arguing that she had transmitted HIV to him because surreptitiously she was a hooker, and her arguing that he tried to blow him up, and him arguing that she nagged so much that he blew himself up, and her arguing that he tried to sell thirteen year old daughter as a wife to his buddy, and him arguing that she drove her infant’s head down a floor drain, and, and, and . . . and then there’s the poor judge having to listen to this shit, knowing that the best he/she can do for these people is to get them apart and moving forward with their lives rather than let them exhaust their own limited resources and the public’s resources to obsessively chew on each other’s shins with their pointy little teeth while their fucked-up kids watch and learn to grow up to be just like their loving mom and dad. (No, I’m not making any of this shit up, although it is a blending of many matters rather than just a single matter.)
I don’t think it’s so much that women think men in relationships are “hotter”, it’s more like that they’ve already been vetted and found to be worth the risk. Being in a relationship is like having good credit.
The law on spousal support in Canada where both you and I reside is gender neutral, and is based on an after-tax equalization of net disposable incomes. In the aggregate, more support is paid by men than women, but that is simply a result of men in the aggregate earning more than women in the aggregate. It has nothing at all to do with blame.
The law on child support in Canada is also gender neutral. It is based on ensuring children are reasonably maintained in regard to the child support payor’s income. In the aggregate, more child support is pay by men than women because in the aggregate men earn more than women. Also more men are child support payors than women because after separation more women are the primary care givers of the children than men are simply because prior to separation more women are primary care givers than men.
When a support payor is paying both spousal and child support, there is a discount of spousal support that reduces the total of the combined support amount. Beyond this, there is a further discount if the payor is suffering undue hardship. Both of these are gender neutral, and in fact men get the advantage of them more frequently than women because more often men earn more then women.
Presently, the biggest problem is the 40% rule: if a person has the children 40% of the time, then that person receives child support. If both parties each have the kids more than 40% of the time, then each receives child support from the other, with the amounts being based on the respective payor’s income. Here again, men usually end up paying more simply because men tend to earn more than women. The problem with the 40% rule is that does not recognize that an access parent who has the children a significant part of the time (for example 30%) will still need a nice place for the kids to live in rather than just getting the access parent’s room while the access parent sleeps on the couch. Note that this financial issue affects men more than women due to men more frequently having less access time than women, with access time being based on the needs of the children for stability, such that access arrangements tend to follow the pre-separation parenting pattern in which more often than not, women carry the brunt of the parenting load.
Presently the 40% rule is being softened through judicial discretion, but I expect that we will be moving to a sliding scale based on the proportion of time each parent has with the children. That will still have men tending to pay more than women because men tend to earn more than women.
Tragically, as long as child support follows the children, parents will fight for custody so as to avoid paying child support, but no one has come up with a more equitable solution that still puts the kids first.
When a couple are married and raising children together, living paycheque to paycheque, their tight financial situation is not a result of blame. When they separate and are still raising children together, only now in two households rather than one, their financial situation gets even tighter. It has nothing to do with blame and everything to do with financial reality.
Note that none of this has anything to do with blame. It is simply not true that men get the brunt of the blame, for blame plays no part at all in determining child or spousal support.
A couple of points in response to other comments:
it’s possible that the perception that many women readily pursue married men, might be in part a result of the fact that many women dealing with married men are MORE FRIENDLY AND OPEN towards them. But that’s not because they are pursuing them (though many of the men may think they are), it’s because the women consider the man taken, and therefore they CAN behave in a relaxed way, WITHOUT making the guy think they are hot for him. Ironic, really.
although the person who goes after a married person may not be logically to blame for the married person’s choice to accept the advances, they are certainly to blame for knowingly refusing to respect the boundaries of the rest of the society. The way I see it, if you go after married people, you have no sense of personal honor. And THAT is more to be condemned than cheating, from a societies point of view. Societies are built on everyone honoring their standards.
[QUOTE=Chris Rock]
Women hate women. You get any two girlfriends in this room, been girlfriends for twenty five years, you put a man in between them … Guys are not like that. Guys actually think that there are other fish in the sea, and if a guy introduces his boy to his new girlfriend, and when they walk away, his boy goes, “Oh man, she’s nice, I gotta get me a girl like that.” If a woman introduces her new man to her girlfriend, and they walk away, her girlfriend goes, “I gotta get him, and I will slit her throat to do it.” Every girl in here got a girlfriend they don’t trust around their man.
[/QUOTE]
This is a wonderful example of sexist gender stereotypes and great insight into why women are often viewed as homewreckers! Good job.
I don’t think it’s anything so lofty as gender discrimination.
Women get pissed off at other women who threaten the family unit. Women put a huge biological and emotional investment into their families. It’s personal to them. This is especially true if the other woman/women are friends or family or even just mere acquaintances. It is a betrayal equal to the male’s betrayal.
Women have better ways of getting even with their partner - divorce, leaving the relationship, taking their partner to the cleaners - but there aren’t too many ways to retaliate against the competitor for your partner’s “affections”.
Other than that, I also agree with what igor frankensteen observed. Men often mistake openness and friendliness as sexual interest. And, I agree with the second point about personal honor. If your friend/relative/acquaintance is willing to betray you so easily and threaten family cohesion, then they should be trusted by no one.
I don’t know if I would go to the lengths of publicly humiliating an offender, but we publicly humiliate people for lesser reasons than that. It seems to be built into human nature.
Whereas I’m pretty sure I’m typical as a man in not judging the attractiveness of women at all based of whether they have a husband or boyfriend. It doesn’t mean I’d disregard my own relationship status or theirs in deciding whether to purse them, and neither would most women. But IMO there’s still more of a tendency for women to view men as more attractive because they have wives/GF’s (especially attractive ones) than for a husband/BF to change a man’s view of a woman’s attractiveness.
Infidelity can destroy a marriage even when it’s fictional.
About three years ago, Mrs. B. accused me of having an affair - not just a dally with a dolly, but one with all kinds of heinous consequences - and based on one thin thread of “proof.”
There was no affair, honest. Not even a suspicious other woman, nor mysterious gaps in my home time, nor questionable emails or notes, or anything else. Nothing. Didn’t happen.
But that didn’t stop her conviction that she was right from remaining for more than two years, during which the emotional acid slowly corroded everything else in our marriage, to the point where it I said it was a nice day, she’d pull up a weather map showing rain somewhere in 100 miles; if I said Eisenhower was a President, she’d Google and argue that he was a general.
And presto, change-o… two years or so later, and nothing left of what had been a very solid, committed, second marriage for both of us, with 15+ years supposed to be just the good running start. All because of one deeply-believed falsehood.
As a woman have you found that men pay more attention to you when you are in relationship? because as a man i can guarantee you it is something almost everyone of us experiences.
I think it’s that when a man is single, a woman goes out of her way to avoid “mixed signals” because if she’s not interested, she doesn’t want to have to turn down a guy who thinks she was trying to initiate something. When a guy is in a relationship, women don’t bend over backward as much to avpid the appearance of interest. Also, when a faithfully married man does think a woman is potentially interested/hitting on him, he never tests the proposition, so he can go on believing the most flattering interpretation.
Again I think that’s part of it, but not all of it. Which is what makes it such an interesting question, the two things superimposed and mixed together, to what degree each one?
a) the ‘safety’ (or hassle) factor of a woman having to be more careful not having friendliness misunderstood by a single man
b) that many woman actually do tend to view men as more attractive if they know another (especially an attractive) wife/GF has accepted them.