If a married / partnered person pays for sex without their partner’s knowledge, that’s a betrayal , man or woman.
But context matters. When someone is in the grip of addiction or deep emotional pain, as lily was at the time, their choices often come from survival mode, not entitlement or thrill seeking. It doesn’t excuse the behaviour, but it does change what it means.
and it is up to the partner / family how they choose to deal with it, whether to work on it together and independently or whether it’s an unfixable breach
Her situation with David is different again. If they agreed he could sleep with paid strangers but not have an affair, that’s a boundary, a messy one, but still a negotiated arrangement / agreement that he reneged on . The question is whether she actually wanted that, or whether she said yes because she felt like saying no would cost her the relationship.
What’s striking is how quickly people forget that men do this all the time and get treated as flawed but forgivable.
Ive seen hundreds of posts on here over the years where the woman has chosen to forgive her partner and work on the marriage.
When a woman does it, it’s “proof” she’s unhinged, broken, or deserving of punishment.
The public loves a redemption arc for men but rarely extends the same empathy to women, especially women who are open about sex, addiction, or regret.
on a technical level, paying for sex while married isn’t morally different between genders.
But the reaction to it is. The outrage towards her says less about ethics and more about how uncomfortable people still are with women owning both their sexuality and their damage, both inward and outward and how we/ they express it.