And a woman who gets drunk at a party and then assaulted. If they feel guilt, are they shitty people?
No, they’re damaged people who aren’t thinking straight. But you implied that your wife’s assault qualified as infidelity in *your *mind. If I misread that I apologize, and if I didn’t, well… that’s profoundly shitty.
I said no such thing.
Read the quoted text that I was responding to.
You may need to pull your head out of your ass to do this.
I don’t understand how these women are getting drunk at parties without their husbands (or friends) around. IMHO, it’s outrageously foolish (at best) to get incapacitated-drunk if you’re by yourself-- married or not.
Disclaimer: I’m not blaming the victim. I’m just wondering how this happens to adult women.
Maybe their fiends are around.
I’m not going into the sordid details.
DiosaBellissima said they did not understand the hatred to the person who has an affair with a married person. Obviously the marriage had problems to begin with for that person to be able to have an affair. I am disagreeing with this. And giving a few examples from my personal experience.
So do you think that men who hit on married women or women that hit on married men to be worthy of hatred or not?
That is what we are talking about.
And you may need to pull your head out of your ass to realize that an *assault * on an unwilling person is not the same thing as initiating infidelity. You clearly *are *equating the two, if perhaps not in the way I’d first thought.
Somebody physically assaulted your wife, and you’re perceiving that as primarily disrespectful to your marriage? I’m sticking with fucked up and shitty.
What I’ve never understood: If you are so unhappy with your marriage/relationship why not get out of it? Obviously there are a lot of issues if you feel the need to cheat. Wouldn’t it be easier to find yourself single again and then sleep with whoever the hell you wanted? I have never cheated and I couldn’t bring myself to, but I have been cheated on before plenty of times. Shame on the cheater, and shame on the person who’s willing to help them shit on their relationship.
Some people really suck.
You’re right, someone who is cheating on a spouse would never lie to a complete stranger…
I think the person knowingly sleeping with a married person is equally responsible for the breach of contract. Assuming the marriage included a sexual exclusivity clause.
And some people, particularly the women, cannot get out of their marriage until they have some place to go. Especially if there are children still at home. Everyone getting up on their high horse about the “sanctity” of marriage are why some women stay in abusive marriages because she can’t even look around and see if she can establish a relationship with another man before ending her marriage. For some reason, it’s more noble for her to run off with the kids and the clothes on their backs, live in poverty or on the gifts of others while she tries to get skills/a job, than for her to leave her kids someplace safe (assuming he isn’t abusing them) while she tries to set up someplace to go.
Which of course is an extreme example, but in many cases of cheaters the marriage is already over for one or both, but there really isn’t any incentive to go thru the hell of a divorce. It isn’t until one gets caught or decides they want to live with whoever new they’ve found that the condition of their marriage goes public. Tho with many, we can tell from the outside.
There isn’t? I thought that I Like Pie’s point, which I tend to agree with, is that if you’ve decided that your marriage is over and you’re unhappy staying in it, then that’s your incentive to go through divorce.
I agree that it’s a shame that even in this day and age, it’s still all too common for women to be unable to afford to leave a miserable marriage. If cheating in order to form ties with a new breadwinner is really the only way they can manage to get away from the old breadwinner, that’s appalling. Still, it just reinforces I Like Pie’s point that leaving a previous relationship before forming a new one is far preferable to the other way around, if you can manage it.
Because sometimes when your marriage is over emotionally, it’s not day to day misery. It’s not always horrible enough to be a crushing force on your daily, it’s just blah, and grey, and boring, and unfulfilling, and all other kinds of words that suck but don’t mean you’re in pain about it all the time. Rarely do marriages blow up, they usually just fade away until you’re no more than roommates. That situation isn’t exactly incentive to go through the incredibly emotionally tumultuous and painful experience of divorce. Ask me how I know.
But why not go ahead and get the painful and tumultuous process over with so you can start being happy as a whole again? Why sacrifice your chance at happiness to stay with someone you don’t love and consider to be a roommate? That’s what I don’t understand. Yes, divorce is an arduous process; yes, people get hurt in the process and it’s huge step to take. But wouldn’t you rather have all that behind you and not have the guilt of cheating following you around? Then, you can openly see people and have an actual chance at finding someone who lights your fire again.
[quote=“Quasimodal, post:1, topic:648779”]
I have stolen away a partner from someone else
You can’t steal someone(except kidnapping), they have to want to go.
Thinking about it, I would guess (and as a happily never-married person, this is hard for me to wrap my head around, but it does seem to be a common attitude) that many unhappily married people just don’t believe it’s possible to be single and happy. So unless there’s already a new love waiting in the wings, why leave?
They could find the incentive to leave an old relationship if they had a new relationship all prepared for them, but they don’t see much to choose between being unhappily married and being unhappily single. Especially if they think their chances for finding a new romance are pretty slim.
I was in an affair once! Everybody hate on me!
Well, with the caveat that she was already separated from her husband and planning to divorce. Which she did. And then we got married. And still are.
But I like having been in an affair once. It gives me a dark side.
Sorry to dim the glamor, bup, but I for one wouldn’t count a relationship with a person who’s officially separated from a spouse and who has explicitly disavowed fidelity to them as an “affair”, even if they and the spouse are still technically married at the moment.
If some divorcing spouses feel it important to remain celibate until the ink is dry on the divorce decree, that’s up to them. But I think that once a couple have officially declared their intent to divorce and stopped living together, they have essentially renounced their vows of marriage and the concept of infidelity no longer applies.
Nobody who cheats on someone else deserves to die, but they do forfeit any and all emotional support from me, even if lack of said support would lead directly to their life ending. Or to put another way, why is he the one who has to “get the fuck over” betrayal, and the betrayer is not expected to “get the fuck over” whatever problems she’s considering killing herself over? I’m sure that isn’t what you meant, because it’s fucking stupid, but it’s sure what it sounded like.
Just a question but, have you ever been married? Or divorced? If not, it’s actually kind of hard to explain the power of inertia and how it affects your decision making. It’s also very hard to explain how “I want a divorce” is a very difficult conversation to have. It’s different when you’re just dating someone, because there isn’t this whole mess of social expectations that go along with what you are “supposed” to do with your marriage. Because there is a lot more guilt for ending a marriage for any reason, even a good one, than there is for staying in it, I can tell you that for sure.
It’s very easy to just stay in a shitty situation. Sometimes it takes a very long time for you to even realize it’s shitty, and sometimes the only reason you figure out how shitty it is is when you find someone who makes you feel good again because you’ve felt blah for so long. It creeps up on you and you don’t really expect it when you finally realize your marriage is over.
I’d say that the most difficult part is the realization that it’s over though. You keep saying “well why don’t you just leave” and the problem is it takes a very long time to decide that you want to leave, even if you realize that you’re not happy. A lot of people just live with it for so long, they never take a moment to step back and say that they’re not happy anymore. The other part of it is that culturally we are somehow told to believe that maybe part of marriage is being unhappy all or most of the time. It’s this dichotomy between the Leave it to Beaver / Married With Children depictions of marriage. Either everything is perfect all of the time, or you’re miserable all the time, and even if you are miserable all the time, well that’s just life so suck it up and deal with it.
I experienced this very acutely when I was going through my divorce, even though it was not a spoken expectation. When people would ask me what happened, I felt like the explanations I was giving somehow weren’t sufficient to justify us splitting up.
Yes, in retrospect, it’s easy to say “Well I should have left at X point” but in the moment there’s not really a clear breaking point for most people. It’s the frog slowly boiling to death in a pot of water, and it rarely goes according to how everyone thinks it should.