Amatory Appetites and the Agony of Secrecy: A Guide for the Perplexed
Dear Belladonna Rogers,
In a restaurant near our apartment, my husband and I saw the husband of one of my closest friends at a romantic dinner with another woman. I’m sure this wasn’t a business meal, unless you include monkey business, and I’m also sure it wasn’t a one-night stand. He and his wife also live in our neighborhood. He didn’t see us but I had a clear view of his assignation, and I didn’t enjoy the view. What do I do now? Tell his wife? They’ve been married almost 25 years, and I don’t want to do the wrong thing, but I do want to be a good friend.
Angst-ridden on Manhattan’s Upper West Side
Dear Angst-ridden,
You certainly have good reason to be angst-ridden over what you saw and perplexed by what to do. Before discussing your options, I’ll quote a great-aunt of mine who used to say, “the only exercise I get is jumping to conclusions.”
The impulse to make snap judgments is human. But then, so is to err. At a dinner party, a friend of mine sat across from an attractive man in his mid-50s. He was extremely attentive to the lovely young woman at his side, making sure she was included in the conversation, often holding her hand, or putting his arm around her. Curious about the origins of this obvious May-December match, she finally asked, over dessert, “How did you two meet?” His reply: “When the nurse brought her to me in the hospital and said, ‘Here’s your new daughter.” She realized she’d spent the entire evening jumping to conclusions— like a grasshopper in a shoebox.
We’re fated to go through life with insufficient information. This means we have to guard against the frequent temptation to act on inferences based on partial evidence, especially when we’re as “sure” as you say you are of what we’ve seen.
It’s possible you made a similar mistake. The woman with your friend’s husband could have been a long-lost flame from his youth, now happily married. From across the restaurant they appeared to be romantically involved because (a) they once were, and (b) fires once kindled are often never extinguished, meaning that (c) they’ll always gaze lovingly and even yearningly at each other and therefore (d) they’ll forever appear to others to be a couple because (e) they’ll love and be filled with sexual desire for each other as long as they live. Getting married doesn’t erase your hard drive.
None of this means, however, that either his marriage or hers is in jeopardy, or that his wife — or her husband, for that matter — was unaware of their dinner together. It also doesn’t mean that they acted on their undying mutual attraction before or after dinner, or have made any plans to do so. The fact that he chose a neighborhood restaurant frequented by his and his wife’s friends — rather than a candle-lit hideaway in Greenwich Village — may suggest that he felt he had nothing to hide because he didn’t. On the other hand, a wise man with whom I discussed this column, a distinguished physician who’s been privy to more than his share of confidences, observed, “That’s exactly how a lot of men think. They’ll go to a neighborhood restaurant precisely because they figure no one would think they’re stupid enough to go out with their girlfriend so close to home.”
Take away point: unless you saw your friend’s husband in flagrante delicto on, under, or near their table, your suspicions may be unfounded, regardless of how it appeared to you.
No one, not one’s closest friends, neighbors, family members, nor anyone on Earth can ever know the intricacies of other people’s relationships. One can make educated guesses, have intuitive insights, or reach logical conclusions based on deductive reasoning, but no one can fully fathom anyone else’s marriage. Most people can’t even fathom their own.
You’ve doubtless heard that no good deed goes unpunished, and its corollary, “I did her a favor and she never forgave me.” Most people, including me, would not tell a friend if they saw the friend’s spouse in a restaurant with someone else, especially if it looked like a romantic tête-à tête. You risk turning a momentary peccadillo into a permanent catastrophe.
That said, you wouldn’t have written to me if you weren’t worried, and if you weren’t inclined to tell your friend — which, to repeat, I don’t recommend doing. Let’s look at your options. Your first step is to be clear about what kind of person your friend is.
Is she a someone who wants to know as much about everything as possible, even things that others find difficult to handle? Or is she a person who prefers to live in what I like to call a “happy bubble,” where as little unpleasantness filters through as possible? If she’s a happy bubble person who’s likely to deny that any part of her life could possibly be at risk, there’s no point in saying anything to her. Such people are psychologically unable to understand or absorb the precursors of doom. You see storm clouds and grab a trench coat and umbrella. They see the sunlight filtering through the same clouds and leave their rain gear home. They are immune to thoughts of doom.
Happy bubble people have such powerful psychological defenses that protect them from absorbing negative information that if your friend is one of them, you could introduce her to her husband’s love child, a perfect Xerox copy of him, and even that wouldn’t persuade her that he’d been unfaithful. That’s why I call it a happy bubble.
Other women know before they marry that their future husband is positively guaranteed to be a bounder (Hi, Hillary! How’s that working out for you?)
You also have to consider the possibility that (a) his wife already knows and/or (b) she may be having an affair of her own with each member of the couple aware of the dalliances of the other.
There are many moving parts here, and based on your letter, there are also many unknowns: the wife’s tolerance for reality versus her preference for the bliss of ignorance; whether she’s aware of the situation; whether there is a “situation” at all, despite what you’re “sure” you saw; whether she’s involved with someone outside the marriage; whether this is the latest in a long line of extramarital affairs or whether this is his only affair; whether this is a new woman in his life, an innocent meal with an old flame, or a resumption of a premarital love affair. Each variation effects the situation.
Bearing these basic points in mind, you have three options, all based on the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm”:
(1) You can do nothing. This is the conventional wisdom, and there’s a good reason it is. It poses the fewest risks to yourself and to others. You lose nothing but sleep and you leave the situation untouched by your intervention. You allow human nature to take its course. You don’t play God. Why? Because you’re not God. I know. I saw your email address.
Extramarital affairs — like pre-marital and post-marital affairs — often run their course and just (pardon the pun) peter out, short of a cataclysmic marriage-ending catastrophe. It’s possible that your friend’s husband — let’s call him Dick — will continue this affair until it runs its course. Your friend, his wife — Jane—may never know and will never suffer from not ever having known about it.
Obviously, if Dick follows this affair with more such entanglements, Jane may eventually notice that Dick’s cover stories will start sounding suspiciously repetitive on the one hand, or far too creative on the other. She may, unless she’s a happy bubble person, figure it out with no help from you. By the same token, she may be glad, for her own reasons, unbeknownst to you, to have her husband take his amatory appetites elsewhere. They may have a loving, non-sexual marriage, for all you know, and this affair may pose absolutely no threat to their rock-solid emotional bond that has, after all, endured almost 25 years, according to your question.
If you say nothing now, you’ll have to maintain your silence forever. If, months or years from now, Jane learns of Dick’s affair and asks you, “Are you surprised? Did you ever have any idea?” you’ll have to say you never had an inkling. If you disclose your suspicions only after Jane discovers the truth, she may well feel you betrayed her and that as her friend, you had a duty to warn her as soon as you knew, meaning now. She could feel that you’ve been enabling Dick by your silence, and taking his side by allowing him to go on with his affair with your tacit complicity. So if you say nothing now, say nothing ever.
There’s no easy rules and all you say is fine, but you have invented imaginary situations, each REAL situation is different and presents different opportunities to investigate further or to politely and discreetly query the parties involved.
Whole, faithful marriages are a prized possession of any healthy society. Infidelity and bastardy each carry high social costs. Each and every couple’s marriage is needed for a healthy *society* and when an individual falls into infidelity that extracts a high *social* cost. Repeat for emphasis. SOCIETY needs healthy marriages.
When a private individual steps into the straying zone, it is thus a SOCIAL DUTY to help prevent a crime. For infidelity, even in jurisdictions where it is off the books, or never enforced, is a social crime. The “appearance” of infidelity is like the “appearance” of any other crime.
If I see Dick breaking into Tom’s house, I call the cops. But if I see Dick breaking into Tom’s marriage, or Sally breaking into Jane’s marriage who do I call?
Well, this is also why I am not a big fan of police, as a concept, beyond a very limited function. When we have cops we don’t do what we should do on our own. Why the heck did Dick come to break into Tom’s house in the first place? Why the heck did Sally come to think that dating Jane’s husband was perfectly acceptable.
Maybe in Dick’s town they dropped all laws against breaking in. Maybe in Dick’s town the common consensus is that seeing a married person on a date with a non-spouse is either not my business, or even to be celebrated. Oops, I meant to say that in Dick’s town the common consensus is that when you see a person break into a neighbor’s house you yell over “Hey Dick, NICE! Beautiful house your breaking into there! Need a ladder? Hey, I get dibs!”
That would be a crazy town. A crazy society.
But when it comes to marriage, and protection of that social-defined private property called marriage where are the social protections today?
The old school protected its marriages in the commons of life, and those who still live in old school cultures do still protect marriage.
We should do so again.
Our laws should once again recognize infidelity as a crime, and take it seriously.
And when a good citizen sees a person breaking into another citizen’s property, whether that property is house, business or marriage, every such citizen has a duty to do something about it.
bvw: You wrote, in part, “There’s no easy rules and all you say is fine, but you have invented imaginary situations.” This is a real question that I received. The events described are as they happened on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City in June, 2011. Nothing imaginary here.
bvw: Yours is the best reply. Adultery and divorce do great harm to all of society, not just to the families involved. Adultery is indeed a social crime as well as a grave offense to the other partner and their children. This man’s wife could possibly be exposed to sexually transmitted disease if this tryst is part of an extramarital affair. Surely, any good friend should warn the wife on this basis alone. If the female dinner companion is a relative or platonic friend, then the wife should already know about it and no harm is done. If not, then informing the wife is the best way to enable a true reconciliation. If this is an affair, it’s just a matter of time before others find out since he has become careless in choosing tryst venues. Affairs have a way of eventually comming to light so telling the wife now is better than finding out later.
Then there is this possibility.
Angst-ridden goes ahead and dumps all of the juicy details onto her best friend; who listens quietly then says:
“I’m very grateful for your sincere concern for my welfare. This because in addition to possibly saving my marriage, it now may well do the same thing for your marriage Angst-ridden.
You see, your husband and I have been having a torrid affair for over 15 years now. You have been so busy poking your nose into everyone else’s business and lives that your husband was an easy target.
I didn’t want to burden you with my guilt all these years, but now with your revelations I don’t feel so bad. He, your husband is good Angst-ridden, he is really, really good.”
Belladonna must be paid by the word to go on and on so . . ..
Simple response is this: Send an anonymous note to him at his office. No return address (no fingerprints if you’re paranoic) and simply say — “First alert — you were observed at local restaurant recently with woman companion — should you wish to modify your actions in future.”
Then FORGET ABOUT IT.
You saved me the trouble – I was about to say the exact same thing.
And if it were me, that’s what I would do.
aurora1920 writes, “Belladonna must get paid by the word…” Alas, I don’t.
http://www.newkabbalah.com/losh.html
excellent essay ..thanks for posting.
Thanks for your comment, General P. Malaise. Great name. What does the “P.” stand for?
Menachem Ben Yakov: My deepest thanks to you for sending this extraordinary link: http://www.newkabbalah.com/losh.html
I recommend it as highly as I can to all readers. I am most grateful to you.
Doing nothing in these situations is, thankfully, going the way of the Dodo as the new generation grows up. Doing nothing leaves the wife-unknowingly-exposed to herpes, chlamydia, HPV, HIV, syphillis, and gonorhea among other things. It literally could kill her. So how is that the best thing to do? I would simply tell my friend-calmly-that I saw her hubby in X restaurant kissing another woman (or whatever he was doing to make the LW certain) and that I would want to know if it were me, and that I’ll never bring it up again if she doesn’t want me to.
I am the sort of person who 1) has been cheated on, and people knew, and didn’t tell me and 2) has high-risk HPV that puts me at higher risk of cancer for life now. Not fun. So I ALWAYS want to know. Everything.
re: momof4
Often life brings people rather cruel hands to deal with. Your situation is obviously one of them.
Another might be the loss of a leg or arm due to an accident, cancer from smoking or a complete nervous breakdown as a result of extremely high stress across a period of time, like combat fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan.
In these and similar situations the natural inclination of those who have suffered; then learned to cope and live with whatever happened is to reach out and help other people that appear to be headed towards the same painful destiny.
“Maybe what I can do will save that person from the pain and suffering I’ve endured” although a normal reaction, it seldom works for a variety of reasons.
1. Mind your own business is high on the list.
2. Different solutions work better for different people.
3. The odds are you are not a professional trained in the needed field(s of therapy.
4. Legal. What if you are wrong? Can you prove your case for meddling to a judge or even a jury if the other person decides to slap you with a law suit? Maybe a huge contract worth millions of dollars to both individuals of the other couple gets destroyed by your desire to intervene in their lives for whatever your reasoning was.
The best advice; as difficult as it can be, is no advice at all.
Yes, we live in a time where great harm can come from maintaining our distance, even as contact between people can bring harm to another. The wife in question is unable to offer her consent in ignorance.
Attention is one thing and physicality another. If the questioner knew that no physical entanglement were likely, there would be little to say or add. At this time. she is certain of little. Two bad choices. So…
Why not, anonymously, put this very column by B. Rogers into the hands of the husband, and call it a day.
It’s also possible you’ve just met his sister.
I’m thinking perhaps, if one finds oneself observing what appears to be a “date” in the middle of your normal communal stomping grounds, you might as well just go over an say hello. I figure if he’s shoots soup through his nose, then he’s doing something he ought not, and has been firmly reminded that this is a bad idea. Otherwise you’ll have put your suspicions to rest, without poisoning all of your future interactions.
Voyager, you make an excellent point for anyone who may encounter such a situation in the future. As an advice columnist, I must take the questions as they come, and this one came after the questioner had gotten home without having done as you suggest. I agree that your friendly, open approach would be a great way to go for anyone encountering such a situation in the future. Thanks for your suggestion.
I agree with Voyager. In the future, go over and say hello. Dick was being rather upfront and did not appear to be hiding anything. Your surreptitiousness has made the problem worse. At least, in your mind. If you weren’t going to say something at the time, perhaps you should hold your peace now.
Thomas_L: Excellent points. Thanks for your sensible comment.
Before reading this column I would have thought that saying nothing was the wise and right thing to do but I could not have articulated, even to myself, why. Ms. Rogers’ analysis of the situation is breathtakingly clear and wise and is leavened with a refreshing bit of humor (particularly the “…you’re not God. I know. I saw your email address.” statement). And that title! It’s multi-layered, referential (“Guide to the Perplexed” indeed!) and irresistibly attention-securing. Had the title been lesser I doubtless would have scrolled right on past this gem, much to my own detriment. I had no awareness of Belladonna Rogers before. I am now a devout Belladonna Rogers reader.
Glenn Howard: Welcome! Thank you for your kind words. You’ll find this column posted here every Tuesday. I’m delighted to have you as a reader.
Your best friend might quickly become your enemy either if you tell her or if she finds out you didn’t. So “Do nothing and keep your mouth shut” is the best option. Let things run their course.
I’d just play ignorant and mention it like it was nothing to my friend so that if it ‘was’ nothing…no big deal. “Oh, I saw your husband with a red-headed woman the other day in such-and-such restaurant. I didn’t have time to stop by and say hello so I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself. Is she a family member or friend of you both?”
Upon returning from an overseas work assignment, my in-laws and wife met me at the airport. Sitting in the parking lot was a vehicle from our office with one of our female employees sitting in it. I never noticed her since I was very glad to be home and only had eyes for my wife. However, my in-laws had a history of distrust and unfounded accusations of infidelity were in their past.
They decided the female employee was there to see me and was discouraged when the family met me instead. They disclosed their suspicions to my wife’s sister and she in turn, later accused me of “having an affair” with the female employee. Her ex-husband was a serial offender. This in turn, led to some rather uncomfortable family gatherings and needless to say, I have never forgotten their conclusions that were unfounded and uncalled for. The female employee was there on my behalf because on several occasions, employees returning from overseas were not met by anyone and the company wanted to be sure we had someone to greet us and provide transportation if needed.
So, when you see something you regard as suspicious, unless there are obvious and overt signs, passionate kissing, checking into a hotel room in the middle of the day, etc., mind your own business and leave the private lives of others alone.
Bart: Welcome home, and I appreciate your telling how it feels from the other side of this battle line. I hope all will read your comment. It is precisely because of what you experienced that I wrote, “Take away point: unless you saw your friend’s husband in flagrante delicto on, under, or near their table, your suspicions may be unfounded, regardless of how it appeared to you.”
I have known too many men whose wives or in-laws feared what yours did, and who suffered the painful consequences of false accusations of infidelity when they were, in fact, 100% faithful husbands. I am sorry that you experienced this anguish and am grateful that you wrote to show how an unjustly-accused husband feels. Thank you.
OK Ms. Rogers, here is my question to you. Let’s say your husband told you he was playing poker with his male poker buddies tonight, but instead he meets an attractive woman for dinner at a nice restautant. During the dinner he appears to behave more like someone on a date with an existing girlfriend as opposed to a guy taking his kid sister out to eat. In this scenario, you and your husband had a traditional (not sexless) marriage where he swore to you on the wedding day that he would “love you forsaking all others until death do us part.”
Your best friend sees this dinner meeting. Should she tell you? Do you want to know that your husband is at least a liar and possibly a cheater?
A Guide for the Perplexed, anon, “unknown friend,” 14-15th C, Eng
Great advice.
I’m laughing at the suggestion that Belladonna gets paid by the word. And of course, you have seen her, alas, reply. But I think the reply is indeed too long. Why not just say, Hey, this aint none of your business. Stay out of it. Be prepared, on the other hand to support either of the two people who make up the couple–you never know who is the wronged person until all the truth hasb been outed.