I got a very interesting comment that I assumed was in relation to my post on Tracking Your Spouse With GPS. I’ll quote most of it below, but the general gist of the comment was that if a husband is cheating on a wife then it is the wife’s fault for being fat, ugly, stupid, withholding sex, etc. I think that this is the most absurd comment that I think I have ever heard in my life – so it almost doesn’t even warrant a response. But just in case someone comes along and is convinced by some of the arguments because there is no rebuttal I have decided to write this post. It will also allow me to make a few comments on the topic of who is to blame for GPS tracking a spouse and what can be done once the cheating has been discovered.
Here is the comment:
MMM. . . which is the greater betrayal, banging some broad on the side, or surreptitiously sneaking a high tech digital tracking device on your spouse, without his knowledge.
One thing, as a husband who cheated on his wife and is now on his second marriage (with whom he was cheating, and who herself was cheating on her hubby), I can tell you what the problem is.
YOU. For you it is easier to get a gadget, catch him in “ultimate betrayal†and make it all his fault and turn him into your puppy, than it is to work on the real problem. Are you fat, uninteresting, do you nag, did you give up that whole “makeup†thing years ago for a comfy flannel nightshirt and sweat pants. More interested in the latest gossip from your neighbor than hitting the gym, and wearing something sexy with candles and a surprise dinner when hubby gets home? Did you stop doing that “other†stuff, except on birthdays.
Of course, he could have turned into a complete slob that you are no longer interested in. . . but then, ask yourself, if he is so disgusting you don’t want to do him, why do you care if he is doing someone else?
Skip the gizmo, go to marriage counseling.
The first part of his argument is to throw into doubt whehter it is actually more evil to commit adultery or to track your spouse without their knowledge. He really doesn’t offer any arguments for why this is so, he just makes a naked assertion of the fact by posing it as a question. Because of this, his point makes absolutely no sense to me and leaves me answering him like this, “The greater betrayal is banging someone on the side! Why don’t you see that?”
Then he begins his next paragraph with this wonderful gem:
One thing, as a husband who cheated on his wife and is now on his second marriage (with whom he was cheating, and who herself was cheating on her hubby), I can tell you what the problem is.
The person who wrote this comment is himself a cheater. As a cheater, he is trying to establish himself as an authority on why a person might cheat on a spouse. Because he cheated he must know the psychology of a cheater and must be qualified to tell us all the “real truth” about why a spouse might cheat and why it is a “greater betrayal” to track a cheating spouse.
However, all that his admission does for me is diminish his credibility. He has admitted that he cannot be trusted. He is a man who makes promises and breaks them when it becomes convenient for him. This fact is extremely important it ought to inform how we should see everything else that he has to say.
The very next thing that he says is that the reason spouses cheat is because the other spouse is the problem. Really? You broke your promise to somebody and then you say that they are the reason why you broke YOUR promise? I doesn’t work that way. The only person who can break a promise that they made is the person who made the promise.
What is going on is that he is trying to make his moral, intellectual, and emotional failure all about his spouse. He calls her fat, uninteresting, a nag, frumpy, a gossip, and a prude. Is that really true? Probably not.
Then he tries to show some compassion for the wife whose husband has cheated. He suggests that maybe the reason that she is being such a prude and denying her husband her body is that he has turned into a “slob.” But then he seems to think that since you don’t want to be intimate with him that this somehow give him the right to be intimate with some other woman! After all, why would you care that a person who promised that they would be faithful to you is being unfaithful to you. That really doesn’t matter does it?Â
The commentor seems to think that breaking the marriage promise is no big deal – that marriage is something that is worthless and without deep meaning. But that is exactly the type of thinking that I would expect from someone who has cheated and is without remorse. Marriage to such a person means nothing. They have proven it by their actions.Â
He doesn’t seem to understand what marriage is and why people make vows to each other during the marriage ceremony. A promise is a promise, and when you break those promises you have to take it seriously.
He then actually gives some good advice in the very last sentence of his comment. Going to marriage counseling is a very important thing for a couple to do if they want to salvage a relationship after one spouse is caught cheating on the other. Cheating is always a signal that a relationship has some sort of sickness within it, and finding out what that sickness is and working on its cure is of the utmost importance when you want to save the marriage.
But the sad thing is, most cheaters will not admit a need for marriage counseling until they are caught in their cheating. And a spouse often cannot catch their spouse cheating without some type of GPS tracking. When it comes to tracking your spouse there are really two different options available to wives and husbands who suspect that their spouse is being unfaithful. The first is to track their cell phone. A lot of the newer cell phones have the capability to be tracked by GPS if the proper software is installed on the device. There is plenty of free GPS tracking software out there, but not all of it is compatible with every type of phone out on the market. Also, a problem with a free tracking method is that they are generally not very covert – making it rather difficult to use it to catch your spouse in the act of cheating.
Another option is to track your spouse’s car with GPS. GPS tracking for cars is a very popular application of GPS technology and has been used extensively by businesses to improve fleet performance and increase revenues. As a result of this usefulness, GPS manufacturers have tried to make these devices as cheap and accessible as possible to a wide range of businesses. A nice side effect of this effort is that it has made these devices available on the consumer market. While car tracking is a very effective means of tracking a cheating spouse, it is far from perfect. While the movement of a car does tell you a lot about a person’s activity, it is not the same as a cell phone which is often taken everywhere a person might go. However, what car tracking gives up in ubiquity it gains back in covert tracking capabilities.
Most car tracking GPS devices are extremely covert and can fit securely inside a wheel well or under the rear bumper. Unless your spouse has a habit of looking in these places there is often very little chance that they are going to find out that you are tracking their movements via GPS.
Whichever method of spouse GPS tracking you might decide to use, it is my opinion that you are well within your rights to track your spouse in this way. Some people might disagree with me, and it might be illegal in some states for spouses to track each other without their express consent, but that is my opinion. And the cheater bears full responsibility for their own cheating, they are to blame for their own promise breaking. They are the liar and are fully responsible for their own actions.
In your article you do not come across as very professional. You give the impression that this “Buffon’s” comments, as you call him, hurt your feelings or hit home. There are actually marriages in which one person takes care of themself and trys everything to be attractive and engage the spouse, but the spouse does not care or even want to go to counseling. It is not all so black and white.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for your comment. Looking back on it I think you are right. I should go back and remove the name calling – it is unprofessional.
And it did hit home. I have a small problem of being compassionate and empathetic. I can imagine the pain and hurt someone might feel who is being cheated on and then is told that they are too fat or ugly to be loved anymore, or to have promises made to them kept. It does make me angry to think that someone can prop themselves up with that type of agrument and feel justified. It is the the height of folly and it breaks my heart that people are hurt because of it.
And you are also right that marriage is difficult and not so clear cut. Marriage, for most people, is rather messy. It is not always two healthy people coming together in marriage. People are broken and do stupid, silly things. But this is never an excuse for cheating. Love overcomes these obstacles and persists through them. If a husband or a wife honors their promise to love they will work on the marriage until things get fixed – even in the face of people not taking care of themselves.
Love will call for change – even demand it from a spouse. Hate will cheat.
– Joe
I recently bought a portable gps tracker from a wholesale china electronics online store, it’s said that this GPS locators can help me track and protect my daughter either when she out for some school activities, or go out of sight in over-crowded places. Really an ideal gadget for children care!
I came across this page and felt compelled to add a comment to the author. You sound like you might be a young person, say, maybe younger than forty. The reason I think this is because when I was growing up, there was something known as a Constitution, which had a bill of rights, which spelled out certain protections from government that people could expect living in a civil society. If you were older than I, or my age, you would more than likely not see GPS tracking of humans as a social benefit of such technology.
While the situations and conditions is which you describe using GPS tracking upon spouses isn’t the same as governmental intrusion upon individual rights and freedoms, those same rights and freedoms are nevertheless derived from a moral basis that once was more sacred than it is now in our society. I fear that attitudes like yours – that it is an acceptable behavior in a “free” society to track and spy on others, for any reason short of criminal or dangerous activity – are products of your lack of understanding what it might be like living in a time when those rights were not being categorically stripped away from people as blatantly as in the last ten years.
Your argument does not stand the test of logic or morality. There is no acceptable criterion, under your ruling thumb of justified espionage, to limit such tracking only to adultery. Therein lies the fatal flaw to your illogic. You assume that the means, since they exist, are justifiable for using them. The same might be said for the use of nuclear weapons. We’ve built them, so there must be situations where using them is an acceptable means to achieve an end. But what is to stop someone from using GPS systems – which, in my opinion, if used for tracking people is as immoral as cheating or lying, stealing, or raping – to track others for whatever reasons they choose?
As someone who grew up under the threat of communists always supposedly looking over our shoulders, spying on everyone, and we know from the McCarthy era what that led to, it seems what the world needs is less surreptitiousness and delusionally misguided concepts like yours-reasonable sounding on the outside but not well thought out- and the elimination of the very thought form that more spying is necessary to keep people under control. Your notion, of using GPS devices for tracking spouses, reader’s comments of using them to track children are merely only ways to control society more from a paranoid elitist perspective, devaluing human rights, and individual freedom.
It could never be good enough to merely use them to replace maps and guidance systems to make travel easier and quicker, because in your world, there is no such thing as privacy. If you were older, you might not be so quick to christen such devices for such dehumanizing purposes. The world needs more transparency, and less people advocating a ludicrous reduction to surveillance techniques in solving people’s problems.