Affairs go on all around us so surely someone has been there and has advice.

What would you do if you thought an acquaintance was having an affair and the spouse was unaware, yet you don,t know the spouse or any of the relationship dynamics other than what you can gather through a fogged one sided view from the acquaintance? Especially what do you do where young kids are involved?

I have seen affairs die a natural death, especially emotional affairs and the marriage survives without exposure although probably not the kind of good marriage this forum is seeking. However, the marriage survives and kids have both parents and they get a chance to improve.

And I have seen affairs exposed and rip the marriage apart and end in divorce because they don,t have the tools to recover. Now maybe the marriage would have ended anyway, but sometimes it seems that is becomes the insurmountable obstacle.


So pros and cons? Action steps?

If you have read enough posts about infidelity, then you would realize that the most vital 1st step in saving a marriage is the exposure to pertinent parties that are close to the couple who are married.

The choice of that should be in the Betrayed Spouse's hands, but as a moral ally to the preservation of united families and to marriage in general, you could be a great asset in distrupting the affair as their mutual friendly acquaintance.

Why would you leave a Betrayed Spouse out of the loop on what is destroying his vision of his marriage?

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

LTL

And if you had been told the spouse was emotionally unstable and had his own affairs would you count that as being gaslight by the wayward?

How would you go about informing/passing a message to a spouse you don,t know and has no idea who you are?

Haven't you read that EVERY Betrayed Spouse is controlling, violent, emotionally unstable and has Never been a good Husband/Wife for their entire marriage?

For me, I would contact the individual personally to let them know there is something very important personally that they need to know.

I would also bring a copy of Surviving An Affair and a link to this forum.

Further, I would let them know the fullest extent of evidence I have to prove my allegations and also tell them that their Wayward Spouse will refute every claim and request that He/She keep any and ALL sources of information confidential.

If it's true that he had a previous affair(s), then I would also guide him to being radically honest about his own past indiscretions, but until that is known for sure, I wouldn't treat it as Gospel, coming from a Fogged Out Cheater trying to justify and rationalize their own despicable behavior.

LTL

A lot of waywards say that their betrayed spouse is unstable and make up all sorts of other lies to justify the affair; however, a BS deserves to know the truth of what's going on in their own marriage.

If I knew a friend or colleague was having an affair, I would let that person know that I know and that they have a week to tell their spouse about the affair, or I would inform the BS myself in a note signed with my name and contact information and include whatever evidence I have.

Exposure doesn't destroy a marriage but an affair can. I know the messenger can often get blasted for telling the BS, and oftentimes it's the BS doing the blasting, but I would still believe it's my duty as a human being to inform the BS anyway.

If it's an acquaintance and I have no personal relationship with that person and I don't know their spouse, I would probably not get involved. However, as a betrayed spouse myself, I would have appreciated the information from anyone who knew of my H's affair, though. I might not have believed them, but at least they would have cared enough about me as a human being to do the right thing.

Well my situation was different because it was my cousin (but I hadn't seen her in a long time) and I saw her husband with another woman at one of my son's baseball games.

I called my cousin immediately and told her to come down there. I let her do all of the investigation from there and come to find out he had been seeing this woman for 16 of the 20 years they were married.

I know I would want someone to tell me.......

I endured 10 months of my WW cheating before I discovered her love notes accidentally.

I KNOW that several people were aware, but told me Nothing.

Maybe my Family and Marriage could have been saved if I knew earlier. Maybe Not too.

But, I devalued the integrity of each of the individuals who held out information about my life.

I knew something was wrong, but could only attribute the feelings to my WW's mother recently passing away.

I tried Sooo many ways to be compassionate and considerate, while all the while continually gettiig shot down, not realizing why my caring efforts were making no deposits.

Unfortunately, I allowed myself to get too entrenched in late work hours due to feeling so rejected at home, which surely assisted the affaires texting and phone calls to occur unimpeded.

I Would Want To Know. From ANYONE.

LTL

To comment on the first entry...Exposure can end affairs***EDIT***

My affair ended by fear of real discovery and exposure and not by exposure itself. Yet exposure was done four years later. After exposure, my family begged me to proceed to a divorce as they never liked my H. My mom cried to my knees to leave him, that there is no way I could be happy because men have a harder time to forgive an affair and I would never be happy again. Yet, I was already "in love with H again" and was so determined to save my marriage, so words of my family went out the other ear.

***EDIT***

I personally think fear of exposure is more powerful than exposure itself. At least, that was for me. It is the moment you think of what your actions really are and can snap out of your current state of mind and snap back into the real world and see the consequences of your actions.

SadSoul,

Although in retroset you feel that exposure may have ended your marriage, the true reality is that it would have openly demeaned the affair, making it less likely to secretly carry on.

Exposure, especially if caught in the Earliest Stages is the Number One Tool for firstly messing up the secret hidden fantasy romance and allowing for the possibility that IF the spouses worked on meeting each others emotional needs and eliminating all Love Busters, then the proper romantic reconciliation of the marriage would have a reasonable opportunity to fall in love with each other again.

Remember, your thinking was completely Fogged Out at the time frame you are remembering.

LTL

Threats of Exposure without following through just validate that the cheating spouse can gaslight their betrayed spouse and fully expect to keep on getting away with their secret second life, while now taking additional precautions to hide it further underground.

No THREAT of exposure should be relayed in advance anyways.

That just gives the affairees more time to paint an ugly characterization of the betrayed s pouse, allowing the cheaters time to just display their relationship as, "Just Friends."

LTL

Yes, LTL, you are right, in most, not all cases.

I had already left H, ready to redo my life with the excuse of career pursue, thinking "don't love H" and the "fear of exposure" to my parents made me reconsider his offer to retry. The fear of exposure DID eliminate completely OM, I erased all type of way of contacting him from that point by giving H all access to my computer, telephone, etc.

I believe it is actually the openness between spouses that prevents the SSL, since I was open from that point forward.

The reason I got in a mess was that I was also closed about that point past. That is why actually I made our marriage a mess.

***EDIT***

So I do agree, exposure is good...***EDIT***

Anyways, in seeing another one having affair, exposure should be done to BS.

I wanted to highlight, I called my sister to tell her I was leaving H, and I revealed about being in contact to OM. I wish my sister would have exposed that to my H then what I revealed to her... ***EDIT***

Please familiarize yourself with Marriage Builders concepts, or refrain from posting.

Sorry, that was my personal experience. Anyways, it was good having been in MB forum. This forum helped me tons.

Let's substitute another crime for infidelity, such as theft. If you walked by an old lady sitting on a bus bench with her purse laying next to her, and the young lad sitting next to her was quietly pulling her pocketbook out of it while her head was turned, would you walk on by? Or would you stop and inform the lady that she was being victimized?

Infidelity is a MUCH more personal crime than theft, yet for some reason people feel more of an obligation to help a victim of theft than they do a victim of infidelity.

What do relationship dynamics have to do with it? If you see someone steal from a business, do you need to see the financials and know the 'dynamics' of the business to know it is wrong? Is there some relationship dynamic that would make it OK?

If you see someone breaking into their house to attack their family, would you not inform them? Infidelity is no different, it is an attack on a marriage and family. It is ESPECIALLY important to protect them if there are kids involved, wouldn't you think?

I've never been wayward myself - but if I had it doesn't make it OK for it to be done to me.

If I'm being stolen from, it's theft no matter what my character.

If I'm being defrauded into a partnership (like a dishonest marriage) then it's still fraud even if I was 'emotionally unstable' (and I was! Show me the BS who isn't)

I find it a shocking level of victim-blaming, this assumption that the BS has to pass some sort of character review before you can tell them who else is in their bed!!!!

Would you get character references before telling them about house intruders?

And as for secrecy being a way of holding the marriage together - that is a positively shameful statement of cake eating from the wayward who doesn't want to lose anything.

The BS has EVERY right to leave an adulterous marriage. It is not for waywards or for less than courageous outsiders to make THEIR decision about what is best for them.

Yes, I do think it is especially important when there are kids involved to do anything to save a marriage, including letting the betrayed, unaware spouse know they have a problem to fight.

The type of dynamic I was thinking of was if the spouse is an angry abuser it could put lives in danger to just drop an exposure message out of the blue. If you knew that to be the case there would be two separate issues to deal with and one is extremely hurtful and the other is life and death. They both have to be addressed.

Also, I know MB can help couples survive an affair, but if they don't have those resources it can push the marriage in directions it would not go on its own at that time to expose in the middle rather than letting the affair die its natural death.

And I just don't know these dynamics. If it were personal situation, or a close friend I would know what the right choice was. Obviously I am second guessing any info or impressions I got through her as she has proven unwilling to be a 100% honest person. So sorting through it is not always clear what is fact and fiction.

Using the theft analogy...if I saw the boy beside her sitting there holding her bag I would stop and observe a little before I rush up screaming thief. I would be ready to act. I might approach and ask questions. But I wouldn't assume I knew what was going on.

I feel this acquaintance is exercising extremely poor boundaries, but I don,t have solid proof.....yet.I just am not close enough to see clearly though my instincts tend to be correct on these things.
I am asking some innocent questions of mutual acquaintances that do know the whole family to make sure he isn't,t an angry maniac. Don't think I am looking the other way. If you have stories of this kind of thing and how to drop a message out of the blue to a man you never met it would help. I only have contacts that are likely to reach her instead of him and she is manipulative enough I don't want her to have prior warning that it will be exposed.

Not knowing what is going on is different. You wouldn't pass on idle rumours or jokes. But when you know about an affair, tell.

As for the chances of the BS being abusive it is very small. Battered wives tend to love their husbands and know better than to shag around. Dr H says it is actually very difficult to persuade a BW to leave an abusive man.

The abuse card is always baloney.