Couple months ago I met a woman who works at a dispensary I visit about once a week. We hit it off really well. Despite trying to just keep it casual sex, and that only, I ended up developing some feelings for her. She confessed the same to me. I even introduced her to my teenaged daughter, for fucks sake.
I ran into her this evening at a gas station, with another guy, who turns out to be her husband. They’ve been married five years, and have two children together, ages 4 and 2. Finding out they have kids just made me feel disgusting.
So, I told him. He didnt believe me until I described a tattoo in a somewhat intimate place on her body. I had no fucking clue she was married. I think I ruined someone’s marriage. Or at least took part in ruining one.
I feel guilty. I am sorry for what I participated in. Am I a bad person?
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there is a non-trivial chance that this woman now gets battered because of OP. he could have not acted emotionally and taken steps to ensure that wasn’t a possibility.
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blaming the woman for the theoretical actions of her theoretically murderous husband, nice. not engaging with this misogynistic nonsense. tbh women in cishet relationships cheating is basically nbd anyway, couldn’t care less.
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Stalin definitely fucked though
Also, no offense but please, touch grass and consider the human element of things. Cheating generally sucks but there’s a whole world of circumstances out there (many of which are far more common than you’d like to know) which would excuse or even justify it in varying degrees, and even if we’re to assume uncharitable things, they’re still human beings (who have messed up in doing very human things).
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Idk, I’ve been in pretty controlling abusive situations and it’s taken me a long time to be open about them, even to my therapists. I don’t think that’s a level of duplicity that means my abuser is right for abusing me. That sort of situation makes a person cagey as hell and terrified of losing any social connections outside of the abusive relationship.
It might be nothing, maybe the couple actually do this all the time and nothing untoward is happening at all, but it happens often enough that it’s worth not jumping the gun.
Talking about this in terms of social contract theory is really sidestepping the morality of the issue. Would you say that her lying entitles OP to punch her in the face? Surely not, two wrongs don’t make a right, punitive justice is bad, etc. What OP should do is investigate the issue with her not because she “gets to” tell her side or has a right to, but because he doesn’t know what the consequences of telling the husband would be. For all he knows, the husband is abusive and would beat her for this transgression, transgression though it is. The most likely outcome is, of course, that the husband is not abusive, but the most likely outcome of a round of Russian roulette is that you go unharmed. In either case, there is a real risk that is severe enough that it’s worth checking, even if it’s substantially less likely.
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That only makes sense if you completely discount the husband as a moral patient. While I’m arguing that he’s been slightly over-emphasized, I am by no means discounting him and in most possible scenarios believe he should be informed. If he has no history known to his wife of probably 4+ years of being an abuser to her or others as far as she knows, it’s pretty unlikely that he is. Making the decision to not tell him anyway on the very, very unlikely chance that he, as a historically normal dude, snaps and blows her head off with a shotgun, is completely discounting the guaranteed outcome of him being wronged by being left in the dark about this.