Talk about a head-scratching story.
A recent New York Times Magazine article about a man asking if he needs to console his wife after her affair ended has gone viral — but not for the reason you would expect.
Torn on how to handle this marriage bump in the road, the reader turned to Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher and writer who has been the magazine’s Ethicist columnist for over a decade, helping readers navigate difficult moral dilemmas, such as this one.
In the call for help, the husband explained how he was well aware that his wife was having an affair.
“She said that she needed it, that it gave her vitality, that she enjoyed a sexual freedom she had longed for and that she felt it was wrong to do this in secret and without my consent,” he wrote.
Despite agreeing to this arrangement, this hubby pointed out that “he always suffered when she was away with her affair partner and could not find a way to take this easily.”
Eventually, his wife broke off her fling “because the overall emotional burden for both of us was too great” — but was grieving her decision. So the question at hand for the conflicted advice seeker was: “Should I feel sorry for my wife?”
It didn’t take long for this story, published in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, to cause a frenzy online, with many wondering both why someone would expose the inner workings of their marriage to the world — anonymous or not — and why the paper would publish such a bizarre story.
After all, it is an advice column, so no question is ever too bizarre or out there to ask — but still, the internet was conflicted over this one.
“Imagine being a New York Times editor earning $300,000 a year and saying, ‘Yes, this is definitely an important topic worth publishing,’” one person wrote on X.
“It proves who and what they are or represent. Definitely not representative of a good moral standard for any society,” an agreeing comment read.
“I don’t know how to express myself about this, but I feel like people used to have the decency to not express these things,” someone else shared on the platform.
“Imagine admitting you are a cuck,” a commenter questioned.
“They would like to have a society with Beta Men,” quipped someone else, a phrase to describe subordinate men.
“We need to bring back shame,” read a comment, insinuating that people these days share too much of their personal lives.
Some even chimed in with their own, rather harsh, advice for the inquiring husband.
“You just get divorced. You don’t ‘Let her have her fun.’ You don’t ‘have your own fun.’ You just get divorced. Why the f–k are we acting like any of the actions here are ok?” someone questioned.
Read the full article here