If a married person fools around with another person (an unmarried person), is the other person just as wrong as the adulterer?

Does the unmarried person know that the other is married?

@Trillian: The question is hypothetical, but all parties would know everyone’s correct status. The married person would not be in an “open” marriage.

(Just to be clear – the unmarried person is also aware that the married person is not in an open marriege, right? I’ll assume this…)

Equal responsibility/guilty/wrong/immoral (or however you want to word it).

@tom_g: The married person would not be in an open marriage.

When I thought of this question, related, as I said, to the term paper question that I asked, it was because this morning I remembered a coworker a long time ago (about 12 years ago, which I know, in internet time, is a long time!) who was discussing fooling around with a married man. She said “they’re not my vows, they’re his vows. I“m not doing anything wrong.” So that’s what made me think of this. No, I“m not fooling around with a married person!

The punishment for both is death.

I would say the married person bears most of the responsibility. They said the vows.

Wrong is wrong. But in my opinion, the unmarried person did not make a vow, did not make a promise. What the married person is doing is incredibly hurtful and deceiving. What the unmarried person is doing is distasteful and immoral. Basically, they both suck.

I’ve been counseling someone who is “the other person” right now. My advice to him is that he is clouding the woman’s perspective about her marriage. If she wants to leave her husband it should be independant of his involvement.
I also told him he was a dog.

@Adirondackwannabe – Sure, the married person obviously made the vows. But the unmarried person knows that these vows have been made. S/he knows that by his/her actions (crap, I’m going to use “his” for convenience sake..) He knows that his actions will be hurting someone, and is involved in bringing about this pain and is involved in deception. We have this whole marriage thing right now not just for two people to live in a vacuum and gaze into each others’ eyes, declaring how much they love each other. Part of this is to signal to society the availability of each participant. When somebody knowingly violates this, they are engaging in behavior that has been deemed by the society as wrong.

Let’s try this: John is married to Nancy. Nancy is an artist and has accumulated a large collection of work over the years. One day John and his friend Chris decide that it would be a good idea to destroy all Nancy’s paintings. They decide it will be fun for both of them to experience the pleasure of destroying her paintings. John has made it clear to Chris how much Nancy treasures her paintings and how much work she has put into them.

Do they share responsibility here, or is John the one who is solely to blame because he’s the one who has taken vows and is married to Nancy? It’s clear that Chris is as guilty here because he’s aware that Nancy has put a ton of work into her paintings, values them immensely, and would be hurt if they were destroyed.

How is this so different from the marriage/cheating scenario? The unmarried guy knows* that the husband of her lover has put a ton of work into his marriage, values them immensely, and would be hurt if it was destroyed.

* Ok, so some of you may say, “But how the hell does he know that? They could be unhappy, he could be a jerk or whatever.”
Sure, that could be the case. But if that’s the case, then it is up to the woman to end the marriage on her own. Once this happens, then there is no question. The commitment the married people have to each other is over, and the commitment the rest of us have to uphold certain values in society will not be violated.

Well, poachers are shot on sight in some areas of the country. I don’t know about morality, but ethically it would be wrong of the unmarried person in that they know the other is not really free to involve themselves.
Knowing that the person is married and proceeding anyway indicates a selfishness and lack of concern for others.

I said “most of the responsibility”, not all. The married person has given someone their word.

@Adirondackwannabe: “The married person has given someone their word.”

That just seems like a technicality. I never gave you my word that I wouldn’t steal your identity and rack up your credit cards, but it would still be just as wrong whether I gave you my word or not.

Yes, they are just as wrong. They are voluntarily violating the bounds of marriage. They are a participant in adultery.

Whatever.

Most of the responsibility falls on the spouse but some of the responsibility falls on the unmarried party.

I had married men proposition me all the time when I was younger. It made me so mad and I usually had few choice things to say to them.

I think we have to watch out for ourselves in this life. It is a slippery slope trying to act as if you know what a third person you have never spoken to wants simply because there is a standard relationship in place.

Depends on the circumstances, I would say.

@tups: Can you clarify the circumstances that would make it acceptable or not acceptable?

If a person just did it to fool around or to mess with the people involved, it would be kind of evil.
But there’s also different circumstances. If someone did it because they were really in love with this person, it’s hard to not do it. If the married person couldn’t leave the marriage for whatever reason, but the married person and the married person’s lover loved each other and couldn’t live without each other. I’m not saying it’s cool or anything, just that there’s always different circumstances and you can’t generalize and say it’s all completely unacceptable.

Most of the burden is on the married person but some on the other person.

I dunno about hypotheticals, but at least I have some experience I can talk about. There was a time when I was quite miserable. I thought maybe I wanted to get a divorce, but I’m a chicken and I didn’t want to leave if I didn’t have anywhere to go. Also, I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave. I have children and I believed I loved my wife. But I was absolutely miserable, perhaps because I was getting mentally ill. I don’t know. I don’t want to blame that. It was me.

So I reached out to other women online and had several virtual affairs. One of the things that was important to me was that the women be concerned about my wife and my family. I don’t know exactly why, but the effect of that was to make sure I was unlikely to meet anyone in person. Oddly, it seemed like most of the women were more concerned with my marriage than I was. But then, I was in despair and I didn’t know what to do other than to try to destroy things without actually destroying them.

These virtual affairs became a part of my process for healing. Did it have to go that way? Of course not. Was there some, more responsible way for handling things? No doubt. But that’s not the way I went. I won’t say I was thinking straight about it all. I certainly wasn’t thinking the way most people think. I accept responsibility for my actions. But I’m not going to say I was wrong, either. I can change without having to beat myself up any more than I already have.

For anyone who hasn’t heard the story before, I did tell my wife what was happening, and she got me to see a psychiatrist, and it turned out I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was able to get therapy and meds and we were able to go into couples counseling and we are still together four years later. This is, according to our therapist, pretty unusual. Very few couples he sees end up anywhere but divorce.

What this has taught me is that the devil is in the details. That there is usually a great deal going on inside any marriage that we don’t know about. We generally have no idea about the psychological state people are in. That the ethics of these situations are very complex and people’s efforts to make it simple by making up ethical rules are worse than useless. They make it harder for people to work through things that are deeply felt because we can’t talk about them. We have to hide them. Hiding them makes it worse. We live in a shame-based society that is focused on driving people into the mental health system, except that we shame people for that, too.

So men, in particular, really suffer, because not only do we not have a language to discuss feelings, but we also cannot access help for the situation because it is unmanly to do so. So many of us “act out” by engaging in addictive and self-defeating behaviors. Driven by pains to try to feel good, but every way we can feel good is immoral. I say “so many” and I have no idea what that means. I’m not saying it’s a majority of men, but that I have been at many different meetings for people who need various kinds of support—mental illness, addictions, and there are so many people at these meetings. A lot of people are suffering.

Questions like this—I don’t know. They are invitations to shame people. And I offer myself up to have shame heaped on my head by telling my shameful story. I guess I can do that because I’m a total expert in shaming myself. Yes, when others tell me what a shit I’ve been, my back hurts, but I think I can handle it. I hope my story might be useful for someone out there.

I don’t want to be shamed. I want to help. I don’t think shame helps. It didn’t help me. It’s hard to ask, but I think I can ask because I don’t believe people really want to hurt each other. I just think people don’t know what else to do and all the simple solutions we trot out all the time aren’t nearly as simple as we might suggest.

So I ask people to try to put themselves in other people’s shoes. I ask for sympathy, even for the people who have wronged you. I know there are many, many women here who have been cheated on by men. Yes, those men made vows. But I don’t think they wanted to hurt you. I think they have their own pains and don’t know what to do and the rules don’t help, because they are too simplistic and were made too many thousands of years ago. You know? Way before the internet? ;-)

The way we respond to these kinds of ways of wronging others makes the situation worse. It is black and white thinking, and it does not promote any kind of healing. I’m not saying people have to let themselves be walked all over and be cheated on again and again. But I would suggest that there can be ways of opening up relationships so that people… men… can find what they need, or explore what they need in less destructive ways. Sex is a fraught topic, and we are in no way close to talking about what it really means or is about. But we have to and we have to help men understand their feelings if they are ever to communicate better and if we are ever to come to better accommodations with respect to our marriages. What we are doing now isn’t working. An institution that fails half the time can not be considered to be a model institution. Yet we keep on putting it up on a pedestal and we keep on getting all kinds of bent out of shape about it when it doesn’t work. This does not seem to me to be a sensible way to approach this problem.

Depends on a lot of circumstances, mitigating factors. To vague to answer now. Not everyone who is having sex outside of their marriage is cheating. Not everyone that is married legally requires fidelity. A marriage license (therefore a promise) is not the only legitimize a union that is built on the same promise a state marriage is built on. If I have lived with a man for 10 years and we have not been legally married but fidelity is implied and promised, is his cheating just as bad? Does the person who is not married have any responsibility in the breakdown of a marriage if they are the party the spouse is cheating with? Don’t know. I’m not going to be so quick to condemn anyone.

It takes two to tango so yes, I believe both parties are equal in their partnership of crime. However, the married person has far more at stake and is ultimately the one that will suffer more life altering consequences should the affair be revealed. Still….the other person that willingly enters into an affair with a married person is certainly of questionable character too, they deserve each other and whatever comes for colluding in their deceptions.

it is not a crime

@ragingloli Not in the literal sense but it is a “crime” against ones integrity, for lack of a more descriptive word.
Of course if you don’t value integrity it matters not, obviously.

Nope. The violation of trust or violation of marriage obviously is with the person who is in the marriage. You can’t break an agreement when you’re not in one.

@Blackberry True, but to know of an agreement and allow another to risk their agreement does implicate you as an accessory not to mention you’re willing to gamble with anothers life situation, bah….I’m so glad I have never been tempted to go down that path, I’d never be able to sleep at night. shiver

@Blackberry – Aren’t you a part of this society? I know you’re not a sociopath, so you don’t hold this logic in other parts of life, right? Why the exception here? Is it wrong to hurt people? Is it wrong to violate agreements – legal or otherwise – that we hold to be important?
You seem to be trying to find a technical way out here so you don’t have to be morally responsible for causing the pain of a someone you don’t know (and their kids, potentially). The fact you don’t personally know this person and didn’t sign a legal document with this person no way makes your actions right.

Are they both guilty of breaking the marriage vows? No. Only the person who made the vow can break a vow. Did they both commit adultery? Yes. Are they both equally guilty? I’d have to know what you are accusing them of having done to be guilty of to answer that part. It is a complex situation two people create when they “cheat” and lie in cooperation with each other and it involves other people. Especially when the other people aren’t aware they are being lied to, stolen from and cheated on.

Unless the un-married person receives explicit information from the spouse of the person he/she is planning to have an affair with, then yes, they are both equally guilty. They both know that vows were taken. It doesn’t matter if only one of them actually took the vows. Unless they are in an open marriage, and we’ve decided that for the purpose of the Q, they are not, then everybody knows and understands that you don’t allow a third person into a marriage. The same usually goes for un-married couples who are in a supposedly committed monogamous relationship. People shouldn’t have affairs, unless all of the parties are OK with it.

I know people do it all the time, every day until Sunday, but that doesn’t make it right. The only exceptions I can see are if the spouse (for whatever reason) gives “permission” for the couple to carry on an affair, or if the couple has been legally separated for a long time (although long time is a relative term) and has the paperwork started for a divorce, in which case it’s not exactly an affair.

I can see some reasons why the spouse might give permission. Maybe the spouse no longer has any interest in sex and would like to see his/her partner happy and sexually satisfied, although they still want to have everything else that a marriage entails, not an ideal situation, but I can see this happening. Or if the spouse has some type of an illness that precludes them from having sex, that person might be willing to let the partner have an affair.

The other exception would be if the spouse was in a perpetual vegetative state, in which recovery was not likely or possible.

Unfortunately a lot of men, who enjoy having affairs, but are too lazy (or don’t want to lose their marital benefits) talk stupid women, married and un-married, into having affairs with them by telling them that their spouse is bad in some way. There are a lot of douchey guys and bimbos that will enter into affairs if they talk themselves into believing that the spouse is bad in some way. If the spouse is really that bad, then the person should get a divorce before hooking up with someone else.

I have an “ex” friend who had an affair with a married man and justified it because she “didn’t know” his wife. Some peoples rationalizations are just astounding. Oookay, soooo, as long you you weren’t her sister, best friend or next door neighbor somehow that makes it better? Gimme a break.
My friends have all known for years to never, EVER, expect me to cover for any affairs, sorry, you’re on your own and I won’t lie for anyone.

To me, it’s similar to accepting stolen property. You didn’t steal it, but you know it was stolen and it’s not yours to have.

“To me, it’s similar to accepting stolen property.”
That was literally the case, back in the day.

This question is as old as the hills & the answer is still no.

Choosing to act in a manner likely to bring suffering to another is immoral, in my opinion. Both individuals in @jca‘s example are equally wrong for “fooling around.” However, the married fooler has the added wrongness of violating the wedding vows.

@Coloma @tom_g You guys are right (don’t worry, I haven’t, and don’t plan on breaking up a marriage), but I do have some questions.

What is the difference between the non married knowing, and being lied to? Even if they’re lied to, the married person is still married. Or, what happens if the couple is in the midst of a divorce?

@Blackberry Those are really good questions.

The single partner knows their partner’s marital status. It’s their call on whether to participate in a relationship that will result in the other party breaking their marital vows. It is an ethical choice.

The single partner is misled about their partner’s marital status. The ethical choice is no longer offered to the single partner. It might be important to that person.

The married person is in the midst of a divorce. In my book, this would pass the ethical line. For those with religious beliefs or other reasons, it it might not.

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, and it is not used to judge others by their sexual behavior.

@All The bottom line is that we all have differing opinions when it comes to ethics. Each case is too individualized to make any blanket statements about what is right and what is wrong when it comes to having an affair. The closer we are to the subjects involved, the more emotionally we become invested and make our personal judgement calls.

They are both guilty, but of different things. It’s hard to say whether they are equally guilty, though.

I don’t see why the unmarried person is guilty of anything. I think people in long-term relationships are basically entitled to know the boundaries of the relationship, but the person outside that relationship is under no such obligation. And even if the person outside the marriage does know the status, and that the other partner would disapprove, so what? Whatever factors are at play that created a situation for the married partner to stray are still not the fault of the unmarried party to the tryst.

There are plenty of reasons why sleeping with married people might be stupid, but it’s hard to make a case that it’s unethical.

Yes. Just as guilty.

@bolwerk It seems inherently unethical to me… they are knowingly taking part in an action that might cause great harm to someone, just to satisfy their own desires.

@augustlan – the only case I can think where it’s inherently unethical for the third party is when it’s done to deliberately harm the married partner not involved in the tryst.

@bolwerk But if the un-married person knows that they are involved in an affair with a married person, they are, in fact, deliberately harming the other spouse. Even if that isn’t what they planned or wanted to do. It is still the outcome (in most cases, unless the other spouse is totally OK with it) and the un-married person knows that.

Someone earlier mentioned theft as a similar example. Say person A steals money from a bank, then tells person B that it was stolen but gives it to them anyway and says to go ahead and spend it. Person B did not actually steal the money, but because they know it was stolen, they know full well that they are harming the person/company/bank from which it was stolen.

Here are two possible cases for you @bolwerk:

1.) The couple that lived across the street were married and had three children. The wife started to suspect her husband was having an affair. When she confronted him, he denied it. This went on for at least a year. He kept telling her that she was crazy, which led her to think seriously about her mental status.

It turned out that, yes, he was having an affair with his secretary. He finally admitted to it, left his wife and married the secretary. It was a mess. Two of the kids would have nothing to do with their father for decades.

The secretary knew the wife and children. She would politely chat with the wife when she called to talk to her husband. The wife and the kids considered her a friend. Maybe she was being sincere. Maybe her nice ways were intended to help pave the road once the husband finally did up and leave. If that’s the case, it back-fired.

2.) A co-worker was married to a man who also worked for the company. Years ago, she had an affair with another co-worker, but the couple decided to stay together. About five years ago, she started having another affair with another married co-worker. This guy was also married, and while he and the husband worked in separate depts., they worked together on projects.

The lover ‘hired’ my co-worker to report directly to him. When the news came out, the husband divorced the co-worker. The lover (now boss) was fired and his wife filed for divorce. My old co-worker showed up shortly after with a honking huge diamond ring, and the cheaters are now married. Both original couples socialized together outside of work before and during the affair.

——
In both cases, some that knew these couples thought it was ethically wrong for the secretary or the boss and co-worker to play a part in being the ‘other person’ when they know it would shock and upset the spouse if they found out, much less damage the lives of those involved.

There is always the chance that a spouse may fall in love with someone else. If the spouse and the loved one decide that they cannot live without each other, why can’t they just keep their pants on until the divorce comes through? Otherwise, it just adds salt to the wound.

@Kardamom: No, they are not deliberately harming the other person. They are getting off. Even if that’s odious with a married person, it’s not unethical, if you buy that sexuality is a private matter. And I really don’t like analogies to theft. Theft involves property, and a spouse is not property – at least not unless your value set is feudal.

@Pied_Pfeffer: I’m not sure what the point of those parables are. Again, odious, but not strictly unethical for the outside parties unless there is at least some tacit agreement that they should not be doing what they’re doing. I agree about keeping the pants on, but OTOH I understand why they don’t.

@bolwerk , I don’t like your ethics at all. I guess ethics are relative.

@Judi: I don’t think they’re relative. Maybe I’m wrong, but they’re largely about dealing with public conduct. Anyway, my wording was deliberate: I don’t see why the unmarried partner is guilty. That doesn’t automatically mean there aren’t problems with said conduct, but they tend to go back to things besides ethics (like your own damn safety).

@bolwerk Thank you for your continued plugging away at this. What you are saying, and what I originally said to @Blackberry now gels in my thought process. Where to draw the line in an ethical situation is a personal choice. We tend to judge others by our chosen ethics. A person’s actions doesn’t necessarily make it right or wrong, unless it is against a law. The punishment is if someone goes against their own moral beliefs and feels guilty about it. It also means that if their actions are not the norm, or are against the personal ethics of others, it will most likely result in a loss of empathy from others.

Well…like attracts like. Cheaters find people to cheat with and criminals find other criminals to consort with and drug addicts hang out with other drug addicts.
What cracks me up is do people REALLY believe that if a married person is willing to cheat in the first place because they are too immature and lacking in integrity to leave their relationship that they, as the cheatee. are somehow exempt from the obvious feeble character of their married lover?

Gimme a break.
Likewise for the married person…hmmmm, do you think that if someone lacks integrity and ALLOWS themselves to become involved with YOU as a married person that THEY are not high risk to do the same again.
People are so self deceptive always thinking that somehow their situation is different.

I was solicited on several occasions in my marriage, once by one of my ex’s “friends.” Ooooh, big mistake…those guys went away with the freaking fear or god in them! They knew I meant business and had no doubt they picked the wrong target for their sleazy seductive ploys.

I’m not sure where I read this study, but it said that while some large percentage of the people in the study had cheated, 90% condemned cheating. It suggests that it really doesn’t matter what people have to say on this subject. What matters is their behavior. The problem is that people won’t necessarily tell the truth about their behavior.

So the answers to this question are quite predictable. Whether people actually behave according to what they say they believe—not so predictable.

Which makes me wonder what we learn by asking questions like this.

@wundayatta Your doubt about what we might learn about this topic, as well as questions like these, is understandable. Sometimes we do take away a new opinion from the discussion, and yet never admit to it. In other cases, it may take much longer for the information to sink in. In some cases, we adhere to our self-values and dismiss those of others without really taking into consideration their perspective.

As for the 90% statistic provided, it’s impossible to buy into it without having the data and source to consider. Maybe these are people who cheated and later regretted it due to what they learned from their personal experiences.

@wundayatta What that probably indicates is that people feel it is not OK for others to cheat on them.

I think that’s exactly it, @Dutchess_III. It’s so obvious, I overlooked it. Or rather, I was thinking of it in a more venal way, but you’re right. Of course no one wants to be cheated on, and that’s what people think of when someone asks a question like this. Everyone puts themselves in the shoes of the person who is wronged, not in the shoes of a person who might be motivated to stray.