As we get back to post-inauguration blogging, I’m turning to an email I got from a woman last week. “Tara” wrote another in the series of missives from young (21) year-old women contemplating a relationship with an older (36) man. The trick on this one is Tara is interested in a married fellow, one who claims, as so many do, to be in a less than fulfilling marriage. Tara asked me a couple of other questions, but finished with this one:
…do you think that the decision to cheat lies within the hands of the involved person, or does it share a weight equally with the “other woman”? am i bound by ethics and decency to his wife, even if he is the one who makes that decision (as to whether a sexual or emotional affair happens.)
The simple answer is that cheating is cheating, and that anyone who knowingly enters into a relationship with someone who is pledged to another through marriage or another sort of monogamous arrangement gets a full and equal share of the blame. That’s perhaps the response of our age, though a history of adultery and its prohibitions reveals that that has not always been a universally held position. In different times and places, only the married cheater has been blamed, or only the woman. And some folks like to parse out differences between what is “adultery” and what is “infidelity”, even though most of us use the former to refer to the extra-marital subset of the latter. But while the history of Western law and religion makes clear that our sense of what kinds of extra-marital or pre-marital sex are wrong is a moving target, the modern received consensus is that having sex with someone who is pledged to another is bad.
For many of us, the real offense of infidelity (I use the term broadly, to encompass emotional as well as sexual affairs) lies in betrayal. The very word means to “break faith”. To be cheated on is painful enough, but to be lied to is, in a very real sense, worse. While most cheaters cover up their behavior through active lies or lies of omission, the real deceit lies in the betrayal of the original promise to be monogamous. Whether as part of a marriage ceremony or simply an informal agreement to “not see other people right now”, most (not all) relationships make their way towards some sort of mutual pledge of fidelity. To cheat is to break that pledge unilaterally. And once we’ve cheated, we’ve in a very real sense called into question every other aspect of the relationship; our pledges of fidelity aren’t just about what we promise not to do with our hearts and bodies, they are pledges about the effort we intend to put into this particular bond.
When I was going through the Twelve Steps with a strict sponsor many years ago, the subject of my many infidelities in my first marriage came up. I offered to Jack my “reasons” for cheating on my first wife. He snorted at all of them, and explained what I have come to see as the modern way of understanding the problem of infidelity. “Hugo, it doesn’t matter what your reasons were. You need to understand, when you cheat on your wife, you’re not just betraying her, or any God you happen to believe in. The greatest problem with cheating is that it turns you into a liar; on a soul level, every time you sleep with another woman behind your wife’s back, you know you’re breaking a promise you made. No one can break his own promise and be happy.” I was in a pedantic mood, and snapped back that that sounded less modern than Aristotlelian, to which Jack — who wouldn’t have known Aristotle from Adam –replied that it didn’t matter what it sounded like, it was simply true. And of course, Aristotle was right, and Jack was right. One of the great tragedies of infidelity lies not in what it does to others but what it teaches us about ourselves — that we are fundamentally untrustworthy. And it is hard to be happy while living with the dissonance between one’s language and one’s life.
Promises of fidelity can be ended without betrayal; a mutually agreed divorce or break-up serves notice to one’s partner and one’s community that a particular bond has reached the end of its usefulness. Though the Church may teach that sex after divorce is still adultery, that position misses the whole point of the offense. A negotiated end to a pledge is worlds away from a secretive betrayal. When both parties (or the courts) have agreed that a bond no longer binds, then that bond has lost its power. If one’s spouse or partner no longer has any reason to have faith in one’s commitment, then “infidelity” is impossible because there is nothing left to betray. Promises made are constitutive — they help create the reality of a relationship; promises mutually ended are also constitutive — they create a new reality in which each partner is free to seek new forms of happiness.
But what does this have to do with Tara’s question? If I were more of a communitarian sort, I would argue that Tara has a moral obligation to respect the pledge made between this older man who has captured her interest and his wife. I would argue that a healthy society functions best when we respect not only the agreements we ourselves have made, but we do our best to help those around us uphold their own contracts and promises. After all, in many wedding ceremonies, it is customary for the minister presiding to ask the congregation if they will collectively do all that they can to uphold and sustain the newlyweds in their marriage; this recognizes the importance of community in nurturing seeminly private relationships. I would challenge Tara to consider this notion that others’ bonds are our business, at least to the extent that we do wrong when we actively seek to undermine them.
But I think a more compelling argument can be made from a more individualistic perspective (albeit one consistent with Aristotle and Jack). If Tara cares about this married man, then she surely wants what is best for him. While she may not recognize any obligation on her part either to his wife or to the bond between them, she presumably feels some tug of loyalty to him as a person. If she has an affair with him, she becomes an instrument through which he breaks a pledge he made not only to his wife but in a very real sense, to himself. When he promised his wife fidelity, he made a statement about his own identity: “I am not a cheater and do not wish to cheat.” When Tara sleeps with this man, she participates with him in his own “self-betrayal”. Whether or not she feels obligated by a promise in which she didn’t participate is irrelevant — her bond of concern for her prospective lover ought to include a regard for his happiness. And whatever protestations he may make to the contrary, deep happiness is radically incongruent with oath-breaking. When she sleeps with him, in other words, she is helping him to become what he pledged not to be.
None of this should be read as lifting the burden of fidelity off of the shoulders of those who are actually married. If we cheat, it is our fault, and not the fault of those who may deliberately or unintentionally tempt us. In the end, as adults, we are sovereign over our choices, and men have the same capacity for self-control as women. But it is also reasonable to suggest that whatever our feelings about monogamy as an institution, we have a responsibility to those we love and care for to help them make choices that are congruent with their values — and their pledges. Tara may owe nothing to the woman to whom her older man is married, but she ought to let the affection she feels for him — and her desire for him not to betray himself — to act as an influence upon her.
All of what you say is true. She would be participating in the cheating.
Getting involved with a married person is a fool’s errand anyway. I’ve done it twice: once, when young and I was crushed that she stopped seeing me and stayed with him. The next time, I was older and knew the score and knew not to get my hopes up, and it was I who broke it off.
I’m glad both situations ended. A married person who is willing to cheat, at least in our culture, is in a bad, bad relationship. It is far better to stay away. And there is the possibility that if he’s lying to his wife, he could even more easily lie to *you*.
am i bound by ethics and decency to his wife, even if he is the one who makes that decision
It blows my mind that someone familiar with the concepts of ethics and decency could be wondering about this. What she is asking, is it okay to hurt somebody you don’t care about? And when you go into the various ways she might also be hurting the guy she does care about, that is all true but I am afraid it legitimizes the wish to regard the inconvenient spouse as a non-person to whom she owes no decent treatment. Talking about a responsibility not to undermine other peoples’ contracts is missing the point just as badly–she, like all of us, just has a responsibility to not be vicious and cruel, even if it would make her feel really good.
Apparently some people are happy to seriously consider being vicious and cruel as long as they can comfort themselves with the knowledge that hey, they’re not cheating on anybody. And she wouldn’t be. But human decency isn’t just for people we love, or people we’re married to. Deliberately hurting people is wrong. Deciding that strangers don’t count because we haven’t promised not to hurt them is pretty depraved.
A warning to “Tara”… to this day, as a 40 year old married woman, I feel guilty about how I may have contributed to screwing up TWO kids via an affair. I was 16 when I started a relationship while in (Catholic) high school with a senior whose ex-girlfriend got pregnant before we became involved. He married her – which was culturally expected and they had another child – but we continued to see eachother for several years. I finally broke it off my sophomore year in college but I still carry the shame with me. My “girlfriends” thought our relationship was romantic, no one was there to tell me I was doing anything wrong (not an excuse). I tell my husband that if something should ever happen to me and these kids should ever try to get in touch to tell them how sorry I am.
Sophonisba, I agree — my whole goal was to make a point in a way that Tara might not have considered, and from an angle that might not have resonated with her. But indeed, of course, human decency is about how we treat those we don’t love as well as those we do.
Anyone who willfully enters a relationship with a cheating spouse is as ugly as the cheater. Tara should realize that if he can cheat on his wife, he can lie to her. Making the question, why would she deliberately inflict such an immense pain on another person? I would argue that if she (or anyone) does that knowingly (and says they don’t care because the victim is a stranger) then she is compromising her character (making her no better than the liar/cheater/betrayer) and she deserves to have that cruelty returned to her if she proceeds. Fyi everyone, it’s relatively easy to get divorced. So if someone isn’t divorced, it’s because they don’t want to be.
I’ve always hypothesized that, most of the time, the cheater is just looking for opportunity, and you’re not, sadly, special or perfect or whatever you want to believe, you’re just willing where maybe someone else is not. Sometimes, yeah, there’s a real connection, but mostly it’s just about some kind of validation for the cheater, IMHO. Steer clear.
I think the argument that she doesn’t owe a duty to the wife is that SHE’S not hurting the wife, or being cruel to the wife. If someone is, it’s the person who made a promise that he’s breaking. No one can fully understand another person’s relationship. Friends understand better than strangers. Engaging in an affair when you know the wife, and know what her expectations are for the relationship is different than engaging in an affair when you don’t know the person at all and don’t know what is going on between the two of them.
So count me among those who do not think the “other woman” is as bad as the cheater. She may be deluded, she may be uncaring or inconsiderate, but she’s not betraying anybody.
However, I completely agree with Hugo that if you care about the person you’re cheating WITH (or contemplating cheating with) then you shouldn’t do it, because you are just becoming a means for them to betray their spouse and themselves. Not to mention that presumably you’d like to have respect for the person you’re in a relationship with, and it’s hard to respect someone who is doing something you think is wrong to one of the most important people in his life. I think it gets a little trickier with a one night stand kind of affair, because really, the “other woman” may not really care about the guy much at all. But that doesn’t seem to be where “Tara” was coming from, or what inspired this particular post.
What Emily said.
Tara is 21 and the man is 36, so there are other things going on — flattered that she’s hanging out with real adults, authority figures, perhaps lust — that might be clouding her mind and I wouldn’t be too hard on her.
I think that my view about the “other woman” not being as culpable as the cheater is also rooted in seeing anger/blame directed at the “other woman” as a very common and misogynistic way of letting the guy who actually made a promise that he’s betrayed off the hook. So many women get mad at the other woman, direct all their anger in that direction, and just sort of slide by their partner’s responsibility for what happened.
I was cheated on (granted, it was high school) and I didn’t feel betrayed or upset with the girl. Maybe moderately annoyed, it made things a little awkward between us, but my boyfriend was the one who violated my trust, and he was the one responsible for his actions. I think anger directed at the “other woman” is often anger displaced.
“I think anger directed at the ‘other woman’ is often anger misplaced.”
True, though I don’t think it’s necessarily due to misogyny. A man (like me) whose wife was cheating would similarly be more angry at the other guy, and would want to desperately get my wife back. At least that’s how I felt when it happended to me in a nonmarriage context.
The displacement might be a defense mechanism to deflect the shame at being cuckolded (to use an old term).
I understand the desire to cut the “other woman” a break as a response to the too common tendency to blame the “other woman” more. I’ve felt that, myself, when I’ve sat through movies about adultery with my grandmother, and listened to her stock response – “she’s no good” – while countering in my head, hey, he’s the one who made the vow. If you have to blame one party more, it seems more ethical to follow the rule of blaming the married cheater more (regardless of sex) than to follow the rule of blaming the woman more (regardless of which one is married).
However, that said, I still land mainly on the “both equally at fault” side. I’m with sophonisba – you do have an obligation not to hurt even people you don’t personally know and like. “No one can fully understand another person’s relationship.” doesn’t cut it with me here, because you don’t have to understand all the ins and outs of the other person’s relationship to know that he has no business making a promise of fidelity and then unilaterally, secretly, going back on that promise. If he were dating some other woman and Tara didn’t know he’d agreed to monogamy with that woman, it would be one thing, but he’s married, she knows it’s not an open relationship, she knows her place if she went for this would be to be his secret bit on the side.
Also, if you get a decision to do something hurtful to another person, or not, then it’s your business to hold yourself fully responsible for that decision. Maybe in some wider view of things, the man is a little bit more responsible, as the one who’s older and should be wiser, as the one who made the vow, etc. But Tara doesn’t get to make his decisions, only hers, and her decision should be to let this guy go – both for her own sake and not to do something hurtful to the wife.
If the guy’s that unhappy with his marriage, he can either talk to his wife and try to work things out, or ask for a divorce. There’s no excuse for cheating on her.
Just an observation: while I hope my understanding of fiddelity, and its importance in relationships, has continued and will continue to grow, I didn’t come to anything close to my current understanding of it until I had some experience of a long-term faithful and committed relationship. For that reason, looking back, I would hold myself to a much higher standard at 36 than I would at 21, simply because I experienced fidelity as something I had to learn.
If the guy’s that unhappy with his marriage, he can either talk to his wife and try to work things out, or ask for a divorce. There’s no excuse for cheating on her.
Indeed. And Hugo, if perhaps Tara would be more motivated by concern for herself instead of the man or his wife, you could point out that cheating itself is a defense mechanism – rather than being real with himself and analyzing why he feels tempted to stray and what he should do about that (couples counseling, divorce, etc.), he’s just running and hiding from reality in Tara’s arms. Which means she’s setting herself up to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t have mature conflict resolution skills and likely won’t have any more luck with her than he’s having with his wife.
Eh, I’m still not swayed by the idea that Tara has much of an obligation to the wife. We all do things that hurt other people all the time. We accept promotions that someone else really wanted/needed; when I decide to go home rather than work another hour, it hurts my clients; there are millions of ways that we hurt strangers, and there’s no way to avoid it all the time. We’re not perfect, and there are times when our own self-interest is going to hurt other people. We don’t have a duty to be 100% self-sacrificing, so where to draw the line? We do the best we can, and draw it where we see it. We can’t be everything to everyone. You could always do more/be less selfish.
With every relationship there are nuances, and I do think there’s a difference between someone pursuing a married person and/or taking advantage of that person at a vulnerable time (emotionally vunerable, drunk, high, etc) and being open to the advances of a married person.
I guess there are times when I would blame the third party equally to the person who made the committment, if he/she was really persistant in pursuing a relationship, wouldn’t take no for an answer, took advantage of a known vulnerability in a friend/colleague, etc. but that didn’t really seem like Tara’s situation. Tara is pretty clearly on the receiving end of advances from an older, married man. And while I think there are good reasons to advise her to stay as far away from this guy as she can get, I don’t think she’d be equally responsible to the wife if she had a relationship with him.
Oh, please. If I buy a plasma TV cheap that I know was burglarized from somebody’s home, I may not be a thief or a burglar, but I’m profiting from the burglary, rewarding the burglar for his crime and deliberately benefiting from it.
Which is to say, Emily, when you’re falling back on vague, hand-wavy stuff about how ‘we all hurt others’ and ‘nobody is perfect’, you’re making excuses for Tara. Of course the married person is the one who is committing the real wrong, but their lover (if they know of the marriage) is also doing something wrong. They’re helping somebody else commit a wrong and hurtful act and benefiting from it.
Certainly, there can be situations in life where we ask “where do I draw the line between self-sacrifice and selfishness?”, but there are also situations where it’s pretty obvious that we’re being assholes, not merely protecting ourselves and incidentally harming someone else. Burglary or buying stolen goods are one of those situations. So is having an affair with a married person.
There’s also a false dichotomy being presented here: in order to get away from the sexist view that the Other Woman is at fault for luring away the husband, who being a man is of course helpless in the face of seduction, we won’t blame her for anything.
Hugo, I suppose this wouldn’t be a mythago post if I weren’t cynical, so I’ll say that I translated Tara’s question to you as “I really want to sleep with this guy and I know it’s not the right thing to do, but isn’t there some loophole I can use to persuade myself it’s OK?”
Interesting topic. Personally, I’d stay away from the married man, with the concern that how he treats his wife will be the way he’ll treat me. To twist the topic a little, Hugo…how would you feel if the other woman doesn’t know that the man she’s interested in is married? Say, for instance, if he advertises himself as “single” on an internet dating website? Would you still hold her accountable?
how would you feel if the other woman doesn’t know that the man she’s interested in is married?
That actually did happen to someone I knew in college; she told me that she had gotten engaged to a man and then found out he was married. Given that we were both college undergraduates when she told me this, and she would have been even younger when it happened, it’s hard for me to see how she should have been savvy enough to catch a liar.
Right – there’s a difference between genuinely not knowing (even if perhaps a more suspicious person would have figured it out), and “lalalala not listening”.
Nothing wrong with this, at all, people should get it more.