Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

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There's judging people, and there's judging actions.

- Getting married under societal pressure even when you're pretty sure you're gay: I'm willing to cut him some slack on this.

- Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK, you've been placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation.

- Telling a lover you want to be exclusive, and getting him to move to a completely new country, stringing him along with the idea that someday you'll leave your wife and live with him, when in fact you intend neither to leave your wife nor to be exclusive: Uuh, OK, that's actually pretty bad.

- You know your wife wants to start a new life with someone else. But that would make it harder to hide your current life. So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.

> There is simply no excuse for this.

The fault is here:

> my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together.

You have an entire community that exerted enough social pressure to force two people together by fiat who clearly did not want to be together. Reading between the lines: a closeted gay male and a woman being excessively pressured to produce a child NOW before getting too old.

At that point, you've created such a highly aberrant social situation that you're guaranteed to get pathological behaviors.

After the community generated such a screwed up situation, it is difficult for me to assign much fault to the couple involved rather than see them both as unfortunate victims.

I may not approve, but I find it difficult to blame.

> So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.

Why are you assuming that the social pressure that forced them together magically went away and assigning both agency and blame solely to the husband? Why is the community pressure somehow easier to deal with 10 years/15 years/20 years later? The fact that the wife could be browbeaten back into line shows that the community social pressure very much did not decrease or become easier to deal with over time.

A person can be both a victimizer and a victim, in fact probably most are. Victim status does not excuse the victimizers actions, even if it sometimes helps explain them. We can study the root causes to help prevent it in the future and simultaneously realize that the man was a scumbag.

> realize that the man was a scumbag.

If so, then you are painting everybody, including the wife, with that same scumbag brush.

The wife didn't have to get married, but she did because of the social pressure. The wife didn't have to get pregnant (not just once, but twice), but she did because of the social pressure. The wife didn't have to stay married but did because of the social pressure. etc.

If you have a situation with enough social pressure to force two people who really don't want one another into both marriage and child rearing, it's not clear there is any viable way for the individuals involved to correct the situation afterward.

I may not approve, but it is hard to blame.

>Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK

In what world is this ever "OK"?

Several cultures are okay with open marriage. Usually you have agreement between parties, however.

those aren't called affairs though. just relationships.

“OK” is an over-simplified word to use here. It’s incredibly complicated. And it changes with the era and location. If it’s illegal to be gay where you are, or if there literally is no societal understanding of gayness like in the 1700s or whatever where staying a single man is not always an option, I don’t think asking someone to be celibate their entire life is reasonable either. It’s still not _great_ but I don’t blame the individual as much as I do society.

Now, the 90s are a different time than the 1700s, and I do think it’s a bit selfish and myopic to think that having affairs in a marriage is your only option. But if I’m being honest, as an out gay person who strongly considered staying in the closet forever, I understand and can empathize.

It works better when you don't remove half the sentence.

No it doesn't. Voluntarily choosing to marry someone, choosing to deceive them in such a cruel and selfish way, choosing to betray a solemn vow is not being "placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation". It is deliberate, conscious, malicious action over many years upon an innocent victim. The circumstances are entirely of his own creation. He is 100% culpable.

I think the point is not that having an affair is “ok” but that it’s within the range of things that not unusually awful people can do. So it’s “ok” as in “Ok, so you had an affair”, not “It’s ok that you had an affair”.

I recently discovered an acquaintance has been cheating on his wife for half a decade, and this thought has burned in my mind many many times. To hide such a thing is cruel; to expose your partner to potentially life-changing disease because you're a cruel liar is also disgusting and absurdly foolish. It's never OK.

Your parent comment isn’t using “OK” in the sense of “this is alright and I agree with it”. That’s obvious from the next paragraph:

> Uuh, OK, that's actually pretty bad.

Let's say you know a secret, and you tell people who can use the secret to harm good people.

Is there a difference between:

- Going to them proactively to get some money

- Telling them when they ask you right after they captured you

- Telling them after 24 hours of torture

It's wrong and harmful in all circumstances; but in the first case, it's doubly wrong, whereas in the last case, there are significant mitigating circumstances.

If this whole story had stopped at #2, you could say it's wrong, but there are mitigating circumstances. Risk of disease is fuzzy and far away; the physical and emotional rewards are right in front of your face. If you don't see any hope of improving the situation, it looks to you like your choices are:

- Come out and completely destroy your life, your wife's life, and your child's life

- Live in a loveless marriage, never enjoying romantic or sexual intimacy

- Enjoy romantic and sexual intimacy secretly, telling yourself that you're not really hurting your wife because you're being "careful" or whatever.

It's not right, but I can see how a person who experiences normal human empathy could choose #3. When I was younger I certainly made my fair share of stupid decisions in search of romantic intimacy (or more crassly, when the "little head told the big head what to do").

As we go down the line, the damage to others becomes greater and more immediate, and the alternative "right" behavior become less and less desolate. It therefore becomes harder not to conclude that he person either lacks empathy entirely, or have made massive efforts to suppress it -- either finding justifications to avoid looking at what's right in front of their faces, or just killing the feeling altogether.

Thanks for your assessment. I hope your judgement is useful to the author and their family.

You mean to be sarcastic, but there's a good chance it may. When I was recovering from my first marriage, during which I was pretty heavily gaslit, having rational, analytical assessments of my wife's behavior by third parties was actually really helpful for me to recover.

His wife has no doubt spent years of her life being gaslit as well, being conditioned to doubt her assessments of what's normal and to feel guilty for suspecting him, for resenting him, for wanting something better. I doubt she'll ever read what I wrote, but there's a non-zero chance it would be helpful to have my take on it.

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