Is adultery ever justified

[Velvetpaws75]

Can it ever be morally justified to cheat on your partner whether married or not?
I have heard several people say it is fair enough if their sex life is absent or unsatisfying or they are otherwise unhappy in their relationship.
Personally I do not feel it is ever acceptable.
I think that if you are that unhappy either leave the relationship or get agreement that you can have sex with someone else.

No because you should separate first, end of

Never justified or right and I judge a cheater however way it's done

As someone whose partner had an exit affair , when we had a 3 month old baby , the experience was absolutely horrific. We weren’t right for each other , but the split and the fall out were horrendous. We should have just split .

No. If you have relationship issues or sec incompatibility then you discuss with your partner and / or leave.

Justified? No.

Understandable? Perhaps. If one partner has tried to fix the relationship with minimal effort from the other and doesn't want to leave their kids for example.

It's not exactly 'couple goals' but I think it's one of the many things that people do in relationships and it's not the worst either.

I wish my FIL would find someone else. My MIL still recognises him but it's two years since she said his name, three years since she went into a nursing home. He visits her every day, he's lonely and depressed. Everyone's life would be better if he had a nice lady caller.

Having said that, I know that shagging someone else would hurt DP immensely and I'm not going to do it because I love him. That's the simple end of it. If he had a polygamous bone in his body I'd certainly be interested though.

Polyamorous not polygamous 🙄

Meanwhile "with my body i thee worship" and "with all my worldly goods i thee endow" (separate finances anyone) dont seem to be seen as being as important. I wonder why its ok to break some vows but not others.

People seem to think that sex is just the PIV in out in out act. Its so much more than that. Its the intimacy that surrounds it. The cuddling. someone gently stroking your face etc

@JenniferBooth were has any one said that sex is just PIV?

And for your other points, neither of those were in my vows. Seperate finances are usually negotiated by couples with mutual agreement.

Adultery is the act of one person that creates a false reality for the other. Its practically always comes with lies, manipulation and gaslighting of some level to allow the affair to take place.

Never mind if the couple are still having sex and the ability to give informed consent to sex is removed from the betrayed spouse.

No, I don’t think it can be justifiable. Understandable, perhaps, but not justifiable imo.
That being said, I have cheated in the past. Morally I knew it was wrong and it felt like that wasn’t my true character, but I guess it was as I did it. I don’t think it defines you forevermore though. The ex I cheated on was abusive, in every way he could be, and the guy I cheated with helped me to see how awful my situation had got… I don’t know if I’d have left my ex at that point if I wasn’t primarily so appalled with myself for cheating, and more than just the act of cheating, but for the fact I had become a person capable of cheating due to the way I felt about myself and my life at that point, due to the way I was treated. I’m very happily married now, and am quite sure I would never cheat on my husband.

My Aunt got dementia just a handful of years after marrying my uncle.

Whilst she was in the nursing home, a shell of her former self, he embarked upon an extra marital relationship.

I felt only pity for him, he was terribly lonely and his actions would never cause any hurt to my aunt who would not have had the capacity to understand what was going on even if she had been told.

If the same thing happens to me I hope my dp finds someone else and if I am too demented to understand I don’t care if it happens before I die as long as he is happy.

As everyone who marrys takes the risk that their spouse may at any time become disabled or so ill they're unable to function, including sexually ( even a very young person could be permanently disabled in an accident) then my answer would be No, that does not mean you have any right whatsoever to go and have sex with someone else. Not unless you don't truly mean your vows of lifelong fidelity, for better for worse of course, in which case, if I were the disabled spouse and was betrayed, I'd look for an annulment.
I think that in cases of abuse , there is some mitigation as that person is starved not so much of sex, but of genuine love and of respect, and is being wilfully harmed! It's still a maladaptive way of coping way and the best way would be to get help to leave but victims of long-term abuse are rarely able to think straight and I would have compassion. That does not mean it's justifiable though- betraying someone, by adultery or any other way, and the accompanying deceit is always immoral, always wrong.
If the perp can admit that and accept they were wrong and resolve to never betray nor practise deceit again, they can be absolved eventually, but the act itself will always remain unjust. It will always remain an injustice committed against the one betrayed!

I believe that if you genuinely love your partner/spouse for who they are, they will be attractive to you no matter what , because you perceive an inner beauty that outshines the changes in physical appearance we all experience. I would say the evidence of this is the couples who stay together, loving and loyal, into old age, with all it's wrinkles, sags and decrepitude, until one of them dies. Then the surviving partner grieves and mourns, often staying single until death. This was the case with my parents anyway and I know my father missed my mother every single day for the 6 years he outlived her, and that was because such people love their spouse for who they are, rather than looks!
Even if we never get fat, the only way our looks won't change for the worse is if we do like Jimi Hendrix- die young and leave a good-lookin' corpse!

Interestingly that most of us would consider that there are circumstances where murder is justifiable. However, this ability to understand that there is never really an absolute right or wrong - does not extend to adultery.
It must be due to some sort of deep evolutionally fear of not passing on our genes, or something similar.

So - to summarise. Yes. Of course there are justifiable circumstances.

And moreover - sex isn't the end of it all. Sex, love and commitment do not have to go together. For most of humanity's history sexual fidelity was not this massively important issue. At least not for men. Women's fidelity, was of course strictly guarded - specifically for making sure blood line continues.

However - this isn't an answer popular on here.

Had this exact conversation with a friend yesterday.

She was a firm no; it's never justifiable under any circumstances.

Me: people can find themselves in situations they never expected, and end up making odd decisions in their vulnerable state.

The difference?

She is 24 and happily living with her boyfriend of 18 months. She's still in the honeymoon phase and things are rosy; everything is ahead of her.

I'm 40 and been married for 15 years, and am currently going through some things that have made me vulnerable.

I think this is at least partly a perspective thing.

Spoken like someone in a one-way open marriage.

Of course adultery is never justified. A person has made a vow to be faithful whether religious or not. That person has broken a promise when they had another option available to them.

it always depends on the situation, at first its the whole love etc, but then when the day to day duties etc people then sometimes want escapism from there day to day relationship ect, then they get the lust or thrill of a new partner or potential and before long they are having an emotional affair which then can or does lead to a full affair.

its obvisouly more complex and for further research on reasons why @Velvetpaws75 people have affairs, psychology today has some excellent articles on why people have affairs

Husband or wife in coma for years not ever going to wake up

Husband or wife goes missing and is presumed dead

Or illness that changes a person completely such as dementia etc where the person is no longer a partner

IMHO

You can never justify adultery unless the person being cheated on says it's okay for you to do that.

Interesting that marriage vows say 'till death us do part' yet 51% of marriages end in divorce not death. Yet or most here, it is more acceptable to end the marriage than allow an affair. How are we adding up the math?

@insideoutsider

Actually my marriage had no vows - not all marriages do

No.

Have the balls to leave before starting another relationship.

STI's too. Most people have their head in the sand about it, but there's one - gonnorhea I think - that is immune to medicine now....
Terryfying.