How to Advise a Friend About Infidelity

What if the friend is teetering on the edge of cheating on her husband or wife? What kind of advice can you offer a potential cheater?

What makes you think you can offer any advice about relationships to anyone? Take a look at your own relationships. Are you a genius in your own decision making, when you know the details intimately and you know the truth of the matter? Because if you have ever made big mistakes in your life, then you're already in a bad position to be giving other people advice. 

Relationships, including whether or not to commit infidelity, are mysterious. They are mysterious to the people in them, and they are most certainly mysterious to people outside of them. So step one is, for heaven's sake, admit your expertise is in domestic science or accounting, but relationships that you are not in are way over your head. Tell your friend that you can't give advice on relationships, because you aren't good at relationships. You are no expert.

If your friend really begs you to give your opinion, you're then in a spot. Most of the time, this kind of intense conversation causes the person being asked for advice to actually give it. Even if they don't know what they are talking about.

The safest thing to tell any person considering infidelity is to tell their spouse that they are experiencing massive trouble in their relationship, and they need to seek help with a marital counselor with this sort of expertise. At the same time, they should tell the new boyfriend or girlfriend that they have to put the extramarital relationship on hold until they have a chance to work it out with the spouse. 

Explain to the would-be cheater that you can't work on your marriage when you're experiencing an extramarital affair because the affair is draining energy from the marriage. It's black and white. If you want to work on the marriage, then you can't have the friend on the side.

Any advice you give holds risks to the advisee. If you say: 'your spouse is wonderful and you're just expecting too much', you possibly may be condemning the friend to a lifetime of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation. If you say: 'go to the new lover', you are stepping across an ethical boundary, plus you're giving advice about a person you most likely don't even know. 

Good advice is very tricky to give. If you choose to give it, you better hope your biases don't blind you to what is truly best for your friend. And remember your friend is not the only one affected by any decision made.  Your friend's spouse, possibly children, and even your friend's new love interest, will be affected.  Plus you put your own relationship with your friend at risk when you allow yourself to become involved.  Whatever you say will be remembered, and if it turns out to be a mistake, you can be blamed.

Any relationship problem will resolve itself in time, at least to a certain extent. If your friend is in agony and needs advice right now, that agony will pass in time, even if the problem does not go away as quickly. Often, the best advice you can give a friend in love-trouble, is to wait it out and do nothing. Doing nothing will cause something to happen. It always does. 

The hope here is that the partners will resolve their issues without the interference of an unqualified third party (you). But whether it does or not, your potentially spectacularly bad advice will not ruin your relationship nor haunt your friendship with your needy friend in the years to come.