I think most if not all OW are fed a pack of lies at some point or other. If the pack of lies involves being told the man isn’t married, or is separated, or divorced, and the OW doesn’t know he isn’t single, then she’s a victim too.
But I honestly don’t care what the other kind of pack of lies is, ‘we don’t have sex’ ‘we live like brother and sister’ ‘the marriage is dead’ ‘I’m only there for the children’ etc etc, its totally irrelevant. There’s a person totally in the dark with their rights and choices being deliberately taken from them. Easier to take it at face value and not delve too deeply in order to justify poor behaviour, some even go as far as to make out to themselves that they’re actually doing a good deed, really a saviour and making a poor man trapped in a terrible relationship happy.
I think OW have a vested interest in not looking too closely at what the married man says to them. Over the years I’ve been hit on by married men and told all sorts of twaddle, and twaddle with recurring themes, all designed to make me think they were poor unhappy souls trapped in dead relationships with awful wives. Script wasn’t in it.
How on Earth can anybody be absolutely sure about the state of anybody’s relationship? Absolutely sure that someone lying to their wife isn’t lying to them? Simpler to just believe it if you want justification for doing something you know isn’t right. Absolutely sure that a married couple don’t sleep in the same bed every night? That they never, ever have sex? Impossible to know from the outside. Easier to decide he’s really a lovely honest man trapped and desperately looking for love.
Pack of lies or not, believable or not, if the OW knows the man is in a committed relationship, if she knows she’s a secret, if she knows why she’s a secret and helps the man keep that secret, she’s complicit as far as I’m concerned and knowingly contributing to causing the worst pain anyone can suffer outside of the death of a child to someone who has done absolutely nothing to them, not that that would justify it either.
I genuinely can’t get my head round anyone, of any gender, thinking that it’s ok to help someone do this to another human being, or pass the buck for their awful behaviour onto the married person with a shrug and “he’s/ she’s the one who made the vows.” etc. The one who made the vows is the one breaking them, absolutely, but the third person in the triangle is not blameless in causing immense pain to the betrayed spouse and their children.
It’s hard enough to get your head round the fact that the man you love has done this to you, but you love them, have an important relationship with them, a life, children and a huge history and a reason to step back and try to understand and a base of previous behaviour to make judgments from. Somehow a total stranger blundering about in your marriage and doing their utmost to destroy it without knowing or caring for a second who or what they are helping to tear down, is harder to fathom. I know that sounds odd but it just is. It’s like a random murder, somehow, where everyone is left scratching their heads as to why anyone would inflict such a terrible thing on a stranger who never did them a day‘s harm.
It’s easier as the victim of this selfish behaviour to presume they are just entitled nasty people, where their own desires and happiness trumps everyone else’s. They find it so easy to shrug and say ‘Well, your marriage isn’t my problem and it’s not my fault he’s cheating.’ No, it isn’t, but it doesn’t mean that sleeping with someone who is in a committed relationship isn’t a really, really shitty thing for someone of any sex to do.
I swear if people knew what this pain truly felt like, saw close up the damage it does, you’d never, ever help do it to anyone else.