What does my married colleague want?
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I didn’t ask you to tell me your beliefs or opinion, I asked what god has to do with modern marriage. Which was not thought out well because no, I don’t want to know what you think marriage means. My point was god doesn’t have anything to do with a marriage if the people having the marriage don’t want god to! The guy isn’t sick because he broke his assumed by you, promise to god.
This is a secular advice site.
“Marriage, by its nature, is between the two participating individuals (regardless of sexual orientation or gender) and God.”
No, it’s not. It’s a legal contract. People can bring God / gods into it if they want to, or not. And excuse me, but until the Supreme Court decides women can’t divorce, you don’t get to decide what’s sufficient grounds for divorce and what isn’t.
If I’m not mistaken, the earliest marriages on records also had absolutely nothing to do with religion. Sooo.
Bringing the conversation back to the original question…
OP, you ask what your colleague wants, but I think that’s the wrong question. I can’t possibly know what he wants because I’m not in his head.
But what do YOU want? Do you want to be having an affair with a married man, tying yourself to someone who will never prioritize you, but will go hot and cold based on his family obligations and his own feelings of guilt? If not, then set your boundaries accordingly. No sex, no flirting, no overly personal confidences that should be between him and his wife (like about his vasectomy…wtf?!?)
Do you even want to be friends with him? Does he treat you the way you’d expect a good friend to treat you? Does he make you feel truly good about yourself — not just flattered by his flirty attention but does he make you feel like an ethical person, like you are respected? You are perfectly free to return the relationship to “professional-only” without knowing what his feelings are or aren’t.
In short, you don’t need to know how he feels (he may not even know how he feels) in order to make decisions about how you will behave, what level of interaction you allow with this person, and where you spend your emotional energy.
