My apologies. I misunderstood your post. My only position is ‘don’t out him’. I thought you were opposing my position when you told me to ‘get real’.
Butt the hell out would be my suggestion, which doesn’t change my opinion that what this kid is doing is a really shitty and stupid thing to do.
It’s shitty because, well, duh. It just is.
It’s stupid because 1) there are other ways to get a family and children if you want it that badly (look to NPH for example) 2) DADT may be repealed as early as next year. Why the rush to cover yourself for the military’s sake?
Is this post some kind of a joke? Did you really read my response as “You have specific knowledge that everyone in the universe is a fraud. Is it now your duty to expose the world?” I hope to the gods I’m being wooshed, but if not, one more time for you: Whenever you come across a person, any person, or even a group of persons, who you happen to know are frauds, is it your job to expose them as such?
No, it isn’t. That’s a huge leap in logic there. What you are doing is arguing from the specific to the general, and rather poorly. Just because I may behave in a certain specific case where fraud is an element does not mean that I would behave the same way in every case where fraud is an element. There are other factors involved. Again, I am surprised that this is not obvious to you.
He was my friend. That doesn’t change the fact that he did a shitty thing to my other friend, and I wasn’t going to lie for him. If he hadn’t been drunk at the time he wouldn’t have been my friend after doing that.
This appears to be an oxymoron. Whether I would or not depends on what you consider an “emotional cripple”.
I’m not saying he’s going to be unfaithful. But he sees his marriage to her as a tool to evade suspicion. Keeping Abby in the dark about the nature of their relationship isn’t fair to her.
Sorry, what’s going on in your mind is not obvious to me. Nobody’s making any jumps in anything here. I’m trying to figure out why you think it’s okay to intervene in their relationship because he’s lying to her. Is it always okay to butt into your friends’ or relatives’ relationships because one of them is lying to their partner? Is it okay up until they’re getting married? Or does the lie have to be about sexual orientation? What?
Perhaps I should have made my hypothetical clearer. Pretend your friend has a girlfriend who you do not know very well, and your friend is making out with another girl at a party. Do you tell your friend’s girlfriend, who you hardly know, that your friend was making out with someone else?
You know, I don’t really think they have a relationship. I mean, I see people saying, “Live and let live, because it’s their business if they want to have a sham marriage,” etc. Except there really is no “they” in this situation. If both of them agreed, yes, we want to have a sham marriage, then that would be cool. But actually what is going on is that one of the people involved fully believes that she is about to get married to her life partner, until death do them part, and that this man finds her sexually and otherwise desirable and that this is a love match. The other one is surfing gay porn and hoping not to get kicked out of his job. (OK, maybe not re the gay porn, although frankly I wouldn’t be surprised.) I don’t really see this as a “live and let live” type of situation.
I agree, but I also don’t think it’s my place to get involved… unless I am the mother of the gay man or the “straight female stranger” is not so much a stranger. Tribal ethics, I suppose; the more close the relationship, the more inclined we are to butt in, right?
Like I said, I do think the mom of gay son has a responsibility to point out to the son exactly what kind of damage could occur if he continues his present course. She knows what he is and who he is, and I’m sure any mom would be disappointed that her kid shows no more personal integrity than to con some poor straight woman into becoming his beard. Surely, she raised him better than that.
But I fail to see how me running to the straight female stranger would accomplish anything. If she’s a stranger to me, then why would she have to give anything I say to her any credibility at all? What should make stranger listen to another stranger, “Oh, your fiance is gay. Sorry.”? That kind of message has to come from someone who is more intimately involved… like gay son’s momma, for example.
Caveat Emptor baby… some of you sound like the audience of Ricki Lake quick to grab the mike and give a suggestion or two. “Read Todd the riot act”… Look Todd is a grown ass man… he knows what he’s doing… yelling at him isn’t going to change one thing or another. You could reasonably express your disappointment in his decision but after that…
This scenario pretty close to fact came out recently on a radio show here in my city. Long story short… Family is Mormon… they don’t know their oldest son is gay… he attends school here… meets a guy has a LTR with him over 1-2 yrs… Breaks up with the guy due to clinginess and jealousy issues. Couple of years later his sister moves out here… ends up “meeting” his ex… and they hook and plan on getting married. The guy was asking should he tell his sister… he did… it worked out as badly as you could expect and his father physically attacked him. His sister still married the guy who denied it… and later back in cally he got a text from the guy saying. " you thought you got me out of your life huh"…
MYOB.. sometimes you have to hope things work themselves out for the best..I’m sorry for being unclear and for coming across more hostile than I intended to. What I meant was that the idea that they are “one unit against the world” or a “union of trust” is fundamentally false here. I would consider it a material misrepresentation (after 15 years in the biz, I tend to think in insurance terms). He is lying about a basic issue here. It’s not like he’s pretending to like her meatloaf to avoid hurting her feelings, he’s basing their relationship on a lie.
There is no way if I were close to the situation, like Brenda, that I wouldn’t let him know exactl what I thought of it.
Go to Todd first. tell him if he doesn’t tell this girl he’s gay that you will, and that you’ll also nark him out to the military. That will get his attention. If she still wants to agree to get married simply to be a beard and to provide little beard babies, then that’s her business, but I wouldn’t just stand around and watch the guy ruin this girl’s life (and if he gets her pregnant, she’ll be tied to him for life) through deception. It’s clear he doesn’t love her, and she deserves to know that, if nothing else.
I couldn’t allow a family member to be hurt that badly. And if he marries this girl, then she becomes family. Telling her myself would be my absolute last resort: It’d be much better for him to man up and do it himself (either tell her he’s gay and let her decide with that information, or to break it off with her for whatever reasons he wants to give). And I absolutely, under no circumstances whatsoever, would not actively help him in covering it up, if he does go through with it: This last would be true even if I had no family ties involved.
If I were just some bystander, and not family, then I would still talk with him about it, and would still not help him cover anything up, but I probably wouldn’t volunteer any information to her, either.
Yeah, pretty much. If I see somebody defrauding somebody else, I feel a moral responsibility to tell the victim. You don’t?
Sure. Tell him what you think. I think that’s great. And, you don’t have to apologize about being curt with me, I’m a tough cookie.
I think marriage really is a ‘union of trust’ and ‘forsaking all others’ and all of that other corny shit. I believe that an adult makes a decision to trust their partner to be a good spouse and to trust themselves to be a good judge of a lifelong partner. If one of those partners is an asshole who violates that trust from the gate, it doesn’t negate the idea of what marriage is…ideally.
My friends have always known that I’m no ‘one man woman’. If they had embarrassed themselves by making sure my husband was going into his marriage with ‘informed consent’ it would have been hilarious. He made his decision based on his connection with me, his bond with me, his time with me and my family…he would not have appreciated any detective work on the part of those who felt he had the right to know information that they felt he didn’t have.
There’s no detective work involved in simply telling somebody the person they want to marry is lying to them in a fundamental way.
LOL, defrauding. You make it seem like he’s going clean out her checking account. This is being dishonest with someone in a romantic relationship; it happens all the time. I don’t meddle every time a man somewhere is lying to his wife.
The real “Brenda” is somebody I don’t have any influence with, I just know her, and I don’t know Todd & Abby at all, so it’s not seeking personal advice for the actual situation. It’s more of a case of “what would you do in a similar situation?”
If both parties were informed I’d have no problem. I had a friend who entered into a marriage of convenience with a gay guy so that both of them could change their student financial aid profiles to ‘married’. The reason they did this was that because of how financial aid was mininstered at that time (I’ve no idea if it’s changed) you were not ‘independent’ until you were 25 or married and thus your parents had to apply for parent loans and fill out financial papers before you could get government loans in your own name; neither of them had any contact whatever with their parents and received no financial support from their parents and felt it was ridiculous that in their early 20s and having been on their own for years they had to ask mom & dad for anything, so they married, applied for financial aid in their own names, never lived together and divorced soon after.
I never felt any problem with this because 1) they both knew exactly what they were getting into 2) they both got what they wanted and 3) the only conceivable entity hurt by the matter was the government and that’s because of a stupid rule.
Except in this case, this won’t be a “union of trust”, since Todd’s lying out of his ass, and using her as a beard and a broadmare. He’s not even a guy who’s in denial about his sexual orientation – he KNOWS he’s gay. Todd just wants someone to hide that fact and so he can breed. And poor Abby is being lied to – she doesn’t know that she’s being used.
If that “doesn’t negate the idea of what marriage is”, I don’t know what does.
Marriage, particularly if there will be children or if the marriage were to fail, is usually the single greatest financial decision a person makes in his or her life. People change or quit careers, people take on familial financial responsibilities, and people very often merge assets by law or equity.
Todd gets sat down and explained to that what he’s about to do is deeply shitty. He is then given one week to tell Abby himself, after which point I am going to tell her.
If somebody wants to marry a gay person to help that person stay firmly seated in the closet, that’s their own business. But it should be their own free choice, not something they were tricked into.