What a weird scenario

What a weird scenario
by ndtnguy (2019-09-02 11:03:54)

In reply to: This is going to be a weird poll question posted by p.s. I am not a crackpot

A few thoughts, in which I will try to do something other than simply replicate things already said:

1. If you marry a person, and that person then goes out and cheats on you, that's one thing. You made a promise, and the promise isn't conditional; if both parties intended to keep their promises when made, they're still binding even if one party acts in a manner incompatible with them. That's part of the deal. Marriage isn't like a contract for the manufacture of widgets, where A's obligations are discharged by B's first material breach.

2. But this scenario is different: John and Ellie got married when Ellie had cheated before and John didn't know it. That goes to the premise of the marriage; John probably doesn't need to settle for divorce, he probably has grounds for annulment based on fraud. The question he faces isn't just "should I stay married to a person who wasn't faithful," but "would I have been willing to marry someone who already wasn't faithful and who had hidden that from me"?

Obviously only John can answer that second question for himself. Certainly if---as is entirely reasonable---his answer is "no," then he should do as he is doing.

3. (Cue tangent): at the same time perhaps people generally oughtn't to date for seven years before getting married. I guess if John and Ellie were high-school sweethearts and spent some time dating long-distance during college that wouldn't be as long a time as it sounds. But without running through an entire set of assumptions, I bet they're not 24, and that this might have played out differently had (a) they gotten married years ago or (b) they had thought more carefully about the question "do I want to marry this person" from the outset of their relationship.

You have a very strange thought process *

They met in high school

John was a senior and Ellie was a junior. They married after John finished grad school.

If she is a teacher

She sounds like the type who ends up banging the 15 year old in her class

This does add an interesting twist

Is it possible John was the only man she had been with up until the stripper? I'm not sure if that's a mitigating factor, but maybe it could be if he wanted it to be.

Possible but not lilely

Give the ensuing events.

That likely diminishes the relevance of my third thought.

In some ways that makes the whole thing even weirder.

It might make it more understandable

Who would possibly think it was "normal" for somebody to fuck a stripper at a bachelorette party?
1.) A complete whore
2.) A very naive fool who lacks life experience under the influence of her party girl maid of honor

I wonder

You have to be way beyond conventional levels of naive for (2). Because you not only have to be naive enough, in the standard sense, to accept the story that it's "normal," you also have to be sufficiently unmoored to conclude that "normal" is the same as "acceptable."

I also wonder what the true n for this sort of thing is. How "normal" is it really? Nashville has become the bachelorette-party capital of the country in the last few years. The groups I see roaming downtown do not tend to exude an "I'm here for a little chaste fun" air. (Ask the same question for the other sex as well, but they don't seem to stand out the same way.)