The children that will result from this unholy union will be your blood kin eventually, too. And won’t it be such fun to watch them go through the trauma of having their parents split up and the ensuing court battles and custody disputes?
Yep, *some *of your scenarios work the same way, my point being that his gayness will out and will destroy this girl. Some of your other examples could possibly be things a person could cover up and get away with.
No no no I’m not endorsing any of that, obviously. The point for me is less an ethical issue - yes, he’s being a shit but that wouldn’t give me an excuse to intervene - but more that this disaster will strike and could be averted. I’d rank it with your ‘Married to another woman in another state’ and ‘Dying of an incurable disease’ examples.
Sure. I have good friends who’ve cheated on their significant others. I wouldn’t betray their trust either.
Excuse me. When I said “family” I should have said “people I care about”.
I thought the OP was asking us what we’d do in Brenda’s position, not the OP’s.
Why do you “care about” scumbags who ruin other people’s lives enough to help them do it?
The thing that would make me dubious about outing him to his fiancee (beyond the selfish, “oh lord do I not need to be in the middle of this mess” impulse) is that, however soon we expect DADT to be repealed, it hasn’t been repealed yet; if he gets publicly outed, he could lose his career. And there’s no telling just how his fiancee will react to the warning; there’s at least some danger it will be in some way that will lead to him being exposed.
Are you implying that I don’t actually care about my friends?
There’s a line that they could cross, sure, but cheating is nowhere near it. Maybe that makes me a scumbag. Oh well. I love my buddies and if I were to stop associating with anyone who’s ever cheated on a SO or shoplifted from a store I wouldn’t have any friends.
Let’s focus here, people. The topic is faking out your fiance into a sham marriage even though you like banging dudes. Not, cheating on your spouse in a non-sham marriage. Or even in a sham marriage. This cheating thing is a sidebar.
I’ve written a lot about the number of “queer pawpaws” you meet in the south: old men who are obviously and sometimes flamingly gay but who grew up in a time and place when that wasn’t an option so they married and had families. Some seem to have reasonably happy family lives, some are disgusting trolls who prey on any gay guy who’s too polite to tell them “fuck off” at first meeting, most are probably in between.
The difference between these guys and young closet cases is the outside world of course. To a guy who married his wife in the 1960s and not in Berkeley or NYC but in Alabama or small town Delaware being openly gay just wasn’t always worth the risk to them (almost certain professional ruin [if you’re not in the arts especially- look at how hard J. Edgar Hoover and Rock Hudson worked to keep it secret] and if your family did still acknowledge you you’d feel like the drug addict or imprisoned son who brought shame on them even if it wasn’t something you did). Also the outlets for same sex partners just weren’t there- most “respectable” men wouldn’t go to gay bars if they knew where they were and they certainly weren’t every where, most men are above restroom hookups and the like, and besides which after years and kids together they have a bond with their wife since while sex is very important it’s not the only thing that makes a marriage.
Today however there’s hardly a city of 50,000 people or more that doesn’t either have a gay bar or isn’t within a <1 hour drive to one and the internet makes gay porn and anonymous gay hookups so easy that gay guys married to straight women have OPTIONS where there gay uncles and grandpas just had FANTASIES. I don’t know if any studies have been done on it, but my guess would be that the infidelity rates for gay men married to women have skyrocketed over what the infidelity rates for those who were the same age in the 1970s or even 1990s would have been. I don’t personally know ‘Todd’ (I’ve met him once and exchanged 'how do you do’s but that was it) but the fact he’s young and good looking and in shape make me think the likelihood of his cheating is going to be damned near 100%, and if I knew ‘Abby’ (who I’ve never met, just know of) my main concern is less STDs (most guys know to wear condoms at least) but the humiliation, and as a gay man myself I still think it’s probably a lot more humilating when your husband cheats with another man than if it were another woman.
In fairness I should say I have had friends and acquaintances who I knew were unfaithful in their marriages or relationships. I never snitched but I never helped them hide it either.
All right. If someone I cared about was tricking a stranger into a sham marriage I wouldn’t confront the stranger and tell them. I would try to convince the person I cared about to rethink their plan but that’s about it.
Which is why there is a middle ground. Slapping TODD upside the head with the clue by four and saying “this solves nothing and is going to create a long term world of hurt which will destroy the very things you are trying to get out of it…you potential children and your career.”
I have no idea what sort of soldier Todd is, but my understanding is that certain things are expected of military men in order to have successful careers. Being relatively trustworthy in all aspects of their lives seems to be one of those things. Even if DADT gets repealed, being “the guy whose wife divorced him because he didn’t tell her he was gay when he got married” isn’t likely to get you a lot of promotion recommendations.
I’m implying that you don’t care what your friends do to other people.
That’s a problem of his own creation. He doesn’t have a right to wreck this girl’s life over it.
Agreed.
I certainly do.
We’re horrible people, you and I.
Not enough to actually do anything about it, according to you.
You’re absolutely correct. And I’m glad that I have friends who would do the same for me.
Us scumbags have got to stick together.
He already said he would try to talk to his friend about it.
But then stand aside and watch all the same, if the friend was non-responsive.
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Try to reason with Todd. Explain the huge potential his plan has for backfiring, and the moral evil it represents (what he’s planning is in fact EVIL in my book).
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If that doesn’t work, tell Brenda. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Gah. Some comments in this thread led me to believe I’d misunderstood the OP. Now I have to start over.
The only person you (i.e. Brenda) know is the gay guy, right? So he’s the person you’re going to have to be dealing with, at least, at first. It needs to be brought up that what he is doing is essentially rape. Since he has reason to believe that she would break up with him on knowing he is gay, then he is getting sex from her without her informed consent.
You know, I’m not one for lying, but I wouldn’t think threatening to tell her if he doesn’t would be bad, even if you never get around to telling her. But I sure would tell her. I have the ability to change the rape into consensual sex. If I don’t take it, then I share some of the blame for the rape.
As for the side issue between Dio and Mean Old Melon–what more can you do besides telling the person what they are doing is wrong? You can’t force them to do something. And it’s up to you to decide what is bad enough to end a friendship. I know I have a friend who cheated with her friend’s boyfriend, but, from what I can tell, it was in the heat of passion, and the guy was quite predatory (although she doesn’t see it that way.) There was no way I was dismissing my long term friend for that, even if it took her a while to feel unambiguously sorry for hurting her friend.
If I had a black-and-white morality, I’d probably had to call off the friendship, as what she did was unambiguously wrong.