http://www.privateaffairs.com/your.php
This article is especially for those philanderers who know how it feels
to be the 'third party' in an affair: to be the lover of someone married
or with a similar primary attachment. The question I want to consider
is this. What might be your moral responsibilities, if any, to the wife or husband of the person with whom you are conducting the affair?
I recently conducted a small and informal survey of some of the people
whom I know to have experienced this interesting moral dilemma. The
overall feeling seemed to be that if the wife or husband is a close
personal friend of yours then you should respect that friendship and
stay out of a sexual relationship with their partner. However, if you
have never met your married lover's spouse, then (I am told) you owe
them nothing special and can proceed more or less without guilt.
The idea that you have a greater responsibility to the people you know has a certain intuitive appeal.
However, I am not convinced that the argument stands up
philosophically. To take an analogous instance, most people have a
moral objection to robbing people's houses. Burglary is treated as an
immoral behaviour pretty much without exception. Thus, burglars do not
expect to be treated more leniently in court just because they have only
ever robbed the houses of people they haven't been introduced to. This
being the case, I am not sure that we can justify an extra callous
attitude towards the cheated-on wife or husband just because you don't
happen to know them at the time you begin sleeping with their partner.
Surely, in the interests of fairness, the cuckolded spouses who are your
friends and those who are strangers ought to be treated with equal
consideration.
What then, should this consideration entail? Ask yourself: what are the
minimum responsibilities you feel (if any) towards the husband or wife
of your married lover if you have never met them - and perhaps don't
expect to? The folk I asked tended to suggest the following as general
guidelines:
(1) Don't entice your married lover to leave home; they may be cheating
on their partner but that doesn't mean they want a divorce.
(2) Warn your married lover if you are carrying a sexually transmitted disease.
Of course, even these basic rules are debatable, but for the present
purpose I will take them as the minimum conditions of moral
responsibility towards the husband or wife of your married lover; a
basic code of politeness if you will, which can and should be extended
even towards spouses whom you don't personally know.
So far, so good. But we are now left with a morally interesting
situation. If you are not going to extend special favours towards those
husbands and wives whom you do know (in the interests of
fairness, as I suggested above), then these two basic conventions of
'polite' affairs are all that can be expected from you. No matter who
is involved. No matter if you are sleeping with your sister's husband
or your best buddy's wife. No special treatment, no exceptions can be
made, if we are not to find ourselves in the morally and philosophically
untenable position of treating the people we don't know as though not having been introduced to us somehow made them more deserving of betrayal.
An across-the-board policy of (realistically achievable) moral
responsibility towards the spouses of your lovers will do nothing to
comfort those spouses who are also your relatives or close friends.
However, it may lend the guilty third party a reassuring sense of
integrity. As reported to me by my respondents, a similar sense of
integrity may be achieved through a policy of truthfulness when directly
questioned by the suspicious spouse of your married lover.
The rationale is something like this: It may be that the spouse knows
that your lover is having an affair, but not know the identity of the
third party. In this case, if the spouse is a friend or relative of
yours, s/he is quite likely to ask you "Do you think X (your married
lover) is having an affair?" to which you can truthfully answer yes.
This reduces the amount of actual deception that is necessary and will
allow you to play the 'integrity' card (for what it is worth) later on
in the event that your cover is blown. For the same reasons, if the
spouse asks you "Are you having an affair with X?", you should again give the truthful answer yes. You should bear in mind that if
the spouse of your married lover asks you directly whether you are the
third party in the affair, s/he probably already knows that this is the
case. Your situation at this point cannot be improved by lying and
you should demonstrate as great a fidelity to the truth as possible. On
the other hand, if the spouse merely suspects that your lover is having
an affair but does not know who with, s/he is unlikely to accuse you,
just in case s/he is wrong. Here, you can be as truthful as you like
because of the neglible likelihood that the spouse will be certain of
which questions to ask.
There is a third issue pertaining to your moral responsibility towards
the spouse of your married lover which is probably worth mentioning.
Where the spouse is a close friend or relative of yours, it may be that
both parties confide in you about their private lives and their
relationship as a couple. I am advised that you should not assume a greater loyalty towards whichever member of the couple you are sleeping with.
Do not make a mental note of everything the spouse tells you and
report it to your married lover. In particular, if you learn that the
cheated-on spouse is also having an affair, do not grass them up to your
lover. It is not in your interests to force any kind of confrontation
between the two of them. And the day may come when you would like to
have an affair with the spouse who is currently left out. Do not assume
that your lover will thank you for playing at romantic espionage on his
or her behalf. You can trust your married lover less now than
before you were sleeping together. S/he is a liability because s/he has
information which can damage you.
Alert readers will have noticed that this third issue has less to do
with the third-party philanderer's personal integrity and more to do
with insuring oneself against the shit eventually hitting the fan.
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