She asked a simple question: “If a man is married and having sex with another woman that is not his wife, and that woman is not married, is she committing adultery? I know that the man is, because he is married, but what about the woman?”
The simplest definition that I have found for adultery is: “Voluntary sexual relations between a married woman and another person who is not their married spouse.”
To take that a step further, this definition is further expanded on the ‘Lectric Law Library to include: “The married person is guilty of adultery, the unmarried person of fornication.” The definition continues: “The punishment of adultery, in the United States, generally, is fine and imprisonment.”
My copy of The Random House Dictionary defines fornication as “voluntary sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons or two persons not married to each other.” This, too, was cause for imprisonment and death in some societies in times past.
As I was gathering my response to the first question, the woman wrote again asking if I would have a response regarding the legalities of adultery. According to this article by Sherif Abdel Azim, Ph.D., the Bible and the Quran decree death for both the adulterer and the adulteress. However, according to the article, the Bible only “considers the extramarital affair of a married woman as adultery” whereas Islam’s Quran says adultery “is the involvement of married man or a married woman in an extramarital affair.” Further, according to this particular article, according to the Biblical definition, “if a married man sleeps with an unmarried woman, this is not considered a crime at all.”
Coming back to the present day, adultery is a very real problem within a growing number of marriages — adultery defined by today’s definition of sexual relations between a married person and someone who is not their spouse.
A person needing a reason to cheat on their marriage can search for justification and find it easily. But what man or woman is going to feel better about the sexual relationship their husband or wife is having with another person when they are shown words that “prove” they’re “not doing anything wrong”?
My thoughts on adultery are these: It is a crime against the marriage when a man or woman becomes involved with someone who is not their spouse. That man or woman becomes an adulterer and he or she will be subject to whatever actions his or her spouse and/or their legal counsel feels is appropriate when the adultery is discovered and if divorce is a consequence.
My thoughts on the single man or woman who becomes involved with a married man or woman are fairly simple. If the single man or woman has NO knowledge of the marital status of the other person and truly believes that the other person is NOT married, they may be forgiven for their involvement.
At the moment they learn this person is married, and they make the decision to continue the relationship, then they have moved from innocent victim to co-conspirator and are deserving of whatever happens when the betrayed spouse enters the equation and takes action. It may be that lawsuits against the other person will become more common.
© Pat Gaudette. All rights reserved.
Order Pat’s books from Amazon.com: How to Survive Your Husband’s Midlife Crisis: Strategies and Stories from the Midlife Wives Club and Midnight Confessions: True Stories of Adultery.