Cheating is lying.

A post on Kiss & Blog recently touched on the topic of cheating. It didn't take very long for people to erupt into a passionate little war in the comments. It should come as little surprise that I'm an opinionated bastard and this topic has managed to light a measure of ire.

For the sake of clarity, let's define "cheating" as behavior/conduct falling outside the bounds of the agreed upon relationship usually perpetuated in a surreptitious manner to escape discovery by the partner.

As such there are two functional facets to this transgression; being forsworn and lying, which both reduce to violation of trust.

They are forsworn because they have by definition entered into an agreement they have subsequently violated. Promises are important; they are a tangible symbol of a person's integrity. A person that will not honor their oaths is incapable of thinking of anything outside of themselves. There's a reason the military has traditionally hanged deserters and that defectors are rarely given positions of confidence. A person that has broken such an important trust once may do it again and who's to say how much heed they would pay to lesser promises. A cheater is a traitor to their own relationship.

In addition to each specific instance of the proscribed activity, there is the ongoing process of lies to keep the whole system running. Bald, ugly lies for direct questions. Lies of omission for steering the conversations away from inconvenient details. Manufactured alibis to provide the time to cheat and cover their tracks. Quiet, internal lies to justify their behavior to themselves. From the time a person chooses to cheat, they have also added a potentially infinite number of lies into their life.

Some people would say that leaves the Other Woman/Man innocent of all this.

The person with responsibility in this situation to [do] the right thing is the married guy/person.
They are the one who has everything to lose and should be guarding that with their life. The mistress only has a responsibility to herself and her own wellbeing - which is in jeopardy if she's with a married guy anyway. She also should be aware that people will regard her/him in a certain way for being a mistress. - M

Let's not set the wife and mistress against each other. Rather, let's place the blame or lack of self-respect or whatever on the correct person in this hypothetical situation, the husband.
- cro

The only people cheating would be the husband or wife, not the third party.
Is it wrong to cheat on your partner? Of course it is. That point has never been in debate here. To lay the blame for that cheating on a third party is wrong. Blame, which we all seem to be assigning here, belongs to the person who is cheating - be they husband or wife.

The only people responsible for a marriage are the two people in it. - Melissa

Codswallop! What self-serving, high-handed hypocrisy!! The very act of getting involved with a cheater is an assumption of responsibility. Notice I didn't even add a qualifier such as "knowingly" to that statement. Just like it is your fault if you contract an STI because you slept with someone you didn't know was a carrier, because you chose to have sex and assume that risk. Just like you can get convicted of statutory rape for sleeping with someone underage with a fake ID. Foreknowledge only acts to aggravate the breach, the lack does not obviate.

The mistress (used in this case for both genders for clarity) is an active participant in something that is counter to the vows their lover has made. Provided they know their lover is cheating, they have malice of forethought in their interactions. Whether they know the other person who is being cheated on, they are also committing to lies to that individual.

There are terms for that; conspiracy, collusion, accessory.

I don't give a bloody shit what justifications either party cares to offer in support of their behavior. There are none. They know what they are doing is wrong, else they would not be conducting themselves in such a covert manner.

Accept the gawdammed guilt and show some fucking accountability. You're a coward and liar.