Damages

31 thoughts on Damages

1. I hate the “homewrecker” archetype. The person making the vows is the person responsible for keeping them.

   My marriage is open, but I know it’s not for everybody. It’s certainly not a good idea for one partner to be all gung-ho about it and the other one be reluctant.

2. I’ve always been annoyed by the script where the wronged husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend gets mad at the “other” man/woman in the picture. Get mad at the jerk who two-timed you; not the person s/he two-timed you with! Unless, I suppose, the latter is a friend/family member, in which case, get mad at everyone. And cry. (This applies, obviously, only in cases where there was not any sort of open relationship agreement.)

3. It is a way to avoid looking at the relationship and what is wrong in it. If you look at what is wrong in the relationship, you have to critic yourself as well (even if it is only for choosing the “wrong” person). It is avoiding responsability.

4. Back in yee olden days when I was in law school we had an alienation of affection case as one of our legal writing assignments. I remember thinking then that it seemed like it was just a malicious cause of action…a way to smear your partner and their lover. If you just go get a divorce, no one is ever going to hear about how your spouse “wronged” you. But if you sue someone for alienation of affection you’ll splash her name all over the media.

5. I hate this. I think people get to feeling too entitled to their significant other’s continued affections, forgetting that this is another person they’re dealing with, who owns his/her own emotions—and each new day of continued love is a gift, not an obligatory payment on a debt.

   Love is a gamble that one plays in the hopes of continuing to win; either it’s worth it or it’s not.

6. “*Public service advisory to all the potential swingers out there: if you have reservations about your partner seeing other people, it probably isn’t a good idea to open up the marriage. There is at least a small chance that, rather than get over these feelings in time, you will develop seething resentment towards your partner and anyone your partner sleeps with.”

   Oh, no KIDDING. I have a somewhat open marriage and it can be miserable if we’re not comfortable with the other’s partner.

7. I’ve always been annoyed by the script where the wronged husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend gets mad at the “other” man/woman in the picture. Get mad at the jerk who two-timed you; not the person s/he two-timed you with!

   Yeah, that would be the logical thing to do. Unfortunately, emotions aren’t logical. You love the “two-timer”, the other person is just another person. It’s much easier to get mad at them. I know, as I have been the “wronged” party, and I harbor an illogical hatred of the “other person”. Here is the poem I wrote in response to this in my own life (I’m not claiming it to be good poetry, but I think it sheds light on the mindset that makes things like this lawsuit happen).

   The Jerry Springer Syndrome

   Jerry Springer used to be one of our very favorite guilty pleasures, and we would sit there together watching the show with rapt attention and upturned faces, ready to catch every glowing morsel of unconventional wisdom that dropped from the flickering screen.

   And more than anything else- more than Christmas with the Klan, more than the grown people who paraded through life in huge diapers, more than the 500 lb.man who had to be cut out of his house- we were captivated by the people (mostly women) who, in a jealous rage, would do violence to the person who their lover or boyfriend or baby’s daddy or husband cheated on them with.

   We would both laugh and shake our heads and wonder why these people would go on national television and make total fools of themselves, exposing their soft, pudgy underbellies to an audience salivating for a taste of proxy pain.

   We always thought they had the wrong person in their crosshairs. Why go after the person who didn’t know them from Adam, never had promised them anything, and never lied to their face, when the REAL criminal was strutting around the stage, pimp-proud, smirking about all of the misfortune he had left in his wake?

   Oh yes. We both asked that question.

   And yet here I stand today, with an unspeakable fury burning deep inside the darkest, most private reaches of my soul, wishing violence and dishonor and damnation on the one who’s name is too wretched to speak.

   I fantasize about Jerry-worthy feats of brute force, imagining hair flying and teeth dislodging, and the pure, singing joy of such acts. This is one of the few things that gets my blood pumping anymore- my one, small, mean hope for the future.

   I am of course, dimly aware of the fact that I have become the thing I once ridiculed, my white belly a flapping flag surrendering what logic and what humanity I have left as it turns temptingly toward the faces of those who’s vocation is feeding on people who fall.

   But none of that seems to matter now, as I am painfully aware of the answer to the question we both asked in derisive tones so long ago. The urge to consume that which consumed my life impels me to an act of stultifying stupidity and recklessness, and it is only contained with the utmost concentration and effort.

   I can’t quite will myself to turn and look at your face, to look into the eyes that were supposed to be my refuge, as you strut around pimp-proud, smirking about all of the misfortune you have left in your wake.

8. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be mad at a person who doesn’t respect other people’s marriages.

   How can you really claim that getting involved in a situation where your actions will be causing harm to someone else, leaves you free of fault? You know that what you’re involved with will cause someone else pain. How do you then claim that you’re not at all culpable for that pain?

   I’m not saying don’t follow your heart (or whatever organ is leading you) but you should at least have enough consideration to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. (Which is what the law suit is about.)

9. you should at least have enough consideration to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. (Which is what the law suit is about.)

   No, it’s about imposing unnecessary consequences on the person in an attempt to punish him for a complete and multi-faceted situation that is not solely his fault. It is an attempt to legally place all of the blame on one entity in that situation, instead of taking into account the reality of the situation.

10. complete

    That would be “complex”. Blargh.

11. “How can you really claim that getting involved in a situation where your actions will be causing harm to someone else, leaves you free of fault? You know that what you’re involved with will cause someone else pain. How do you then claim that you’re not at all culpable for that pain?”

    That might apply to a situation where someone knowingly has sex with a married person who is not in an open relationship or separated from their spouse, but that’s hardly the only situation out there, is it?

    If you take the wife from the lawsuit’s account as true, the man being sued had no reason to expect that his actions would cause harm to either the husband or the relationship between the husband and wife. In fact, if he relied on their judgment of their own marital needs, he could very reasonably have expected his actions to increase the sexual satisfaction of both the wife (directly) and the husband (indirectly).

    It seems to follow logically that he should not be considered culpable for the relationship’s deterioration or the husband’s mental distress; the husband and wife jointly assented to her extramarital relationships, and the husband specifically requested that she engage in sex with other people under the expectation that his own sexual relationship with her would improve as a result. That it did not work out quite as they expected does not seem like it can be blamed on one of numerous participants who does not seem to have done anything outside the bounds of what was requested.

12. Natalie Friedman, the woman at the center of it all, claims her husband asked her to have sex with other men and women including Blinov to spice up their relationship.

    I have a question to people in open marriages/relationships — is this request of “I want you to have sex with someone else” typical? Is this an “open relationship” or a form of sexual abuse?

    I can understand one or both people saying that they each have sexual needs not met in a monogamous relationship and coming to an agreement that the person(s) with unmet needs can, within a certain understanding, engage in short or long term extracurricular sexual relationships. I’m too square to do it myself, but I think it’s great if people find happiness with like-minded folk, whether they be monogamists, poly or swingers. I’m not judging people acting freely, honestly and kindly.

    I have a harder time with the one-sided nature of this claim, and the fact that the man requested that the woman change her sexuality because he was bored with it. He sounds controlling and exploitative, not interested in an open relationship but in an abusive one. I guess I see it that way in part because I knew a couple (through their daughter) where the husband did this to his wife, sort of. He would bring men home and masturbate while watching strangers fuck his wife, and she hated it but felt trapped in a bad and abusive marriage (she finally divorced him, and it was super-duper ugly). This situation at least indicates that she chose the men with whom she would have sex, which makes it seem more volitional, but her claim that she only did it to please her husband makes me question whether or not it was open as much as it was controlling and perhaps abusive. That she later fell for one of the other men makes me think she might have some wish for escaping a bad marriage but felt too weak to do something about it without an ally. Is mine an overreaction?

    Whether or not this guy’s claim is worthwhile under the law, claims of alienation of affection are butt stupid generally. If the affection at issue were truly valuable, it would be beyond the degradation of commodification. Conversely, being able to put a price on love renders it worthless. Conceptually, it’s an impossible claim to satisfy, and therefore it should be beyond the grasp of the civil legal system.

13. Islain,
    The assumption is (aside from the fact that any vows are betweeen the original couple, you never promised no-one nothin’) that you cannot break into a healthy relationship. That is, if you can “steal” someone from out of the relationship, then by definition it wasn’t satisfying them in the first place. Which means you’re actually doing people a favour, including the party that will be left behind. That’s not about some uber-selflessness as in, “Oh, I just want him to be happy, even if that means with her instead of me”. But wouldn’t (unknowingly?) remaining in a relationship that the “other half” is no longer happy in be much more humiliating? Surely, they wouldn’t want anyone to just settle for them? How depressingly unromantic would that be? As the other woman, you’re overcoming their inertia/ignorance for them and put a horrible end to the relationship, rather than letting it go on as unending horror. G-d bless you, you’re a bloody heroine! 😉

    Somewhat ironically, this works best if the Other Woman is a hopeless romantic, I guess (“Clearly, their relationship isn’t the Perfect Love anymore, so obviously, it’s not worth keeping/respecting.”). Also, it doesn’t take into account constellations like still loving each other, but no longer in lust (“Hey, what’s the point of that, if I wanted closeness, I’d talk to my best friend; obviously, a hetero-relationship is very much about the sex, because that’s the one thing I can’t get from my best friend.”).

    But yes, of course I understand being mad at the other man/other woman; it’s much less scary than accepting that the one person you trusted totally hurt you so. That you could be so wrong. And might be again.

    In a nutshell I guess: “While you’re in love, being attractive is automatic, later you have to work at it; if you don’t, you stand the risk of losing a relationship, albeit just a lackluster one.”

    Full disclosure: You guessed it, I’ve been The Other Woman, and ve heff vays of living vis ourselves. “Just following our hearts” is a big part of it. Well, and then it certainly helps if you don’t even know about the wife until you’ve committed yourself, or things like that. At which point you might drop the guy like a hot potato. Or you might not, either because “you know that this love is real and will last and that you can turn the guy around, because frankly, this was destined to be” 😉 or because you know that while you’re in love/lust, he’ll know no other thanks to your wicked wiles (or, for the Torchwood fans, fuck tricks), and after that, it won’t matter, because once the headrush has run out, you wouldn’t want to continue the relationship.

14. “Alienation of affection” is a very old reason for a lawsuit, from back in the day when it was assumed that married persons had exclusive and unfettered sexual access to one another. It’s analogous to suing some third party for interfering with a business relationship between two parties.

    The person making the vows is the person responsible for keeping them.

    The third party is also responsible for not assisting in the vow-breaking. Surely you don’t think it’s A-OK for me to buy a hot TV because, hey, I’m not the one who actually STOLE it?

15. This is why we have a semi-open marriage. We play as a couple or not at all. Toys which might get exposed to bodily fluids are to be used only by us, with the two of us, and not get exposed to anyone else’s bodily fluids (for safety). This includes toys like floggers, especially the leather ones.

    Our playing as a couple usually does not involve actual intercourse; the times that it has have been with one trusted friend with whom we were trying to conceive a baby, as my husband had a vasectomy 10 years ago. And that, too, was done as a couple. We have agreed that one of our parameters is that our couple relationship is the most important, and that we will not let anything get in the way of that. Anything that stands to get in the way of that raises a red flag, and we don’t go there.

    It helps to keep the green-eyed monster at bay when we are both there, both in agreement, and have discussed and set boundaries where we are both most comfortable beforehand. In theory, I could ask permission to go off with someone and leave my Beloved alone, but he hates that and I know it, so I wouldn’t do it. It’s a boundary for me, because he would be unhappy. In theory, he could do the same, but I might not like it, so he doesn’t. We protect each other’s feelings and our couple relationship first and foremost. I don’t think we’ll ever wind up on Jerry Springer, except if I wind up being there with my trans ex-husband, Christine. And in that case, they still wouldn’t get the fight that they want, because Christine and I are on fabulous terms; she’s one of my best friends.

16. “I have a harder time with the one-sided nature of this claim, and the fact that the man requested that the woman change her sexuality because he was bored with it. He sounds controlling and exploitative, not interested in an open relationship but in an abusive one.”

    It really depends on the relationship. Sometimes it’s sexually abusive, sometimes it’s a response to one spouse being sexually satisfied but the other wanting more variety or greater frequency, sometimes it’s a couple with a complimentary set of kinks. In this case, taking the blurb quotes at face value, it sounds like he could be an exploitative prick who’s trying to control her by suing her lover, an emotionally immature man trying to blame a crumbling relationship’s failure on a third party, or anything in between.

17. ekf,

    I have a question to people in open marriages/relationships — is this request of “I want you to have sex with someone else” typical? Is this an “open relationship” or a form of sexual abuse?

    That’s a complicated question, and the answer is the dread “it depends.”

    Scenario 1:
    Pat and Kris are in an open long-distance relationship, which is steady and enjoyable, but not moving towards any sort of long-term cohabitation. Pat has an occasional lover close to home, and Kris is lonely. Kris’s loneliness causes Pat to feel pressure to move, but Pat can’t/won’t move, so Pat encourages Kris to find a sweetie closer to home, so that both Pat and Kris will have someone to snuggle when they can’t snuggle each other.

    Scenario 2:
    Mel and Rowan are married. Mel is the dominant and more experienced partner, and Rowan tends to follow Mel’s lead, sexually. They’re both initially pretty happy, but Mel begins to feel like it’d be nice to invite a third. After much exhortation, Rowan consents to try it once, has a mediocre time, says so, afterwards to Mel, who badgers and bagers until Rowan agrees to try again.

    Scenario 3:
    Shawn and Alix are happily cohabitating, and generally get along quite well. Shawn, however, has proclivities and preferences that Alix doesn’t share. So Alix wants Shawn to find another lover, who shares those proclivities so that Shawn will be able to indulge them, but leaves it up to Shawn to arrange things.

    Scenario 4:
    Sasha and Kim’s sex life has been boring and routine of late. Kim wants to work on spicing it up. Sasha can’t be arsed, and tells Kim to have sex with someone else.

    I’d say that in two of these instances caring partners are trying to look out for each other, and in two of these instances there’s something not entirely healthy going on. I’m sure other people can come up with other scenarios, every bit as healthy and every bit as dysfunctional.

18. Islain, even leaving aside the fact that the couple were apparently in an open relationship, maybe this guy doesn’t believe in marriage and thinks in the long run they’ll both suffer less being freed from this terrible burden. Is he allowed to argue that in court, that he’s not trying to hurt anyone but trying to help them, or does he have some kind of obligation to uphold some vision of society he doesn’t even agree with, in addition to being responsible for upholding a contract he’s not a party to?

19. dude, isn’t that what C&W music is supposed to be for?

    “You Done Stomped On My Heart And Squished That Sucker Flat”

    (Honey, you just sorta
    Stomped on my aorta…)

20. But what if his ex-wife’s heart is so cold that he used to keep his beer next to it?

21. Whether or not this guy’s claim is worthwhile under the law, claims of alienation of affection are butt stupid generally. If the affection at issue were truly valuable, it would be beyond the degradation of commodification. Conversely, being able to put a price on love renders it worthless. Conceptually, it’s an impossible claim to satisfy, and therefore it should be beyond the grasp of the civil legal system.

    You put it best, the whole idea of this law seems off to me. But it seems these days that any problem is ‘solvable’ by suing someone. I’ve never seen the therapy in ‘shaming the people who cheated you in public'(suing people, Jerry Springer, Cheaters) because you usually end up looking just as silly as they do.
    Oddly I’ll be waiting for a case like this to pop up in Boston Legal…that is if it hasn’t already(curse getting series seasons late…)

22. Suggestion, Torri: your informed view of what people do “these days” as far as suing one another is best not drawn from Boston Legal or Jerry Springer.

    jennie, don’t forget scenario #2: Rowan really gets into having a third person, and they with her, and Mel freaks out because it’s not All About Him/Her.

23. what also disturbs me is the way the lawsuit puts a price tag on love, not only that, but it seems to put a price tag on the wife–as if she was something that could be bought sold…it seems a continuation of her sexuality being a bargaining chip..blah

24. what also disturbs me is the way the lawsuit puts a price tag on love

    See: “loss of consortium.”

    Often, in a personal-injury or wrongful-death suit, the spouse of the person has a claim of their own for loss of consortium, which is essentially the value of the sex and services and companionship to the plaintiff due to the injury/death of the spouse. So, unromantic in the extreme, but we live in a world where there are tables setting out the value of missing limbs.

    A friend of mine from law school, who lived in Chicago, was apparently threatened by her lover’s wife with an alienation of affection claim. But then it turned out she had her own lover, so that was the end of that.

25. mythago, thanks, yeah. That one’s depressingly common too, isn’t it?

    I wasn’t pretending to give a comprehensive list of the possible scenarios—just listing a handful that I’d witnessed.

    There’s also, of course, the oft-unforseen effect of New Relationship Energy on a person’s perceptions.

26. Thanks to the open relationship folks for giving me some insight into some of the nuances and contours that could put this case anywhere on the “cool” to “not cool” spectrum. My spidey senses still tell me this at least wasn’t a well-communicated set up, but I might have been overreacting some based on having been too close to an abusive situation that sounded all too similar to this case.

    As for some of the legal stuff — loss of consortium is a claim that can apply to the loss of love from children, too — it’s not a valuation of sexuality in the same way that alienation of affection typically is. Both are variations on the very typical concept of pain and suffering, writ more specifically. Non-economic claims are valid, IMO, but there is an issue of choice and constancy that differentiates LoC from AoA.

    Loss of consortium assumes that the injured or deceased person’s affections would have remained constant but for the injury or death, and that assumption makes sense (and is presumably rebuttable, but conceptually it’s unlikely that, for example, a child would have cut off contact with her parents on the same day that she was hit by a bus, with the bus-caused death being only a coincidental event).

    Alienation of affection makes the same assumption of constant affection, but where a spouse strays from a relationship, such an assumption seems unreasonable in the first analysis. After all, the spouse theoretically has the free will to avoid temptation if the affections for the other spouse had remained strong. It seems reasonable to assume that the straying spouse acts volitionally, which would also lead to a reasonable inference that the affection is not constant at the time the “other” engages in temptation and instead has substantially decreased. To make a claim against the temptor when there is the intervening act of the straying spouse seems to violate all sorts of Torts 101 concepts.

    In a purely commodified situation (i.e., the current nature of our civil justice system), the value of a relationship in a LoC situation can be measured, as it is reasonable to assume it as constant. The same cannot be said in an AoA claim — a spouse having strayed is evidence that the value of such straying spouse’s affections had decreased — so the value of the claim is harder to determine (how much devaluation took place before the temptation on the part of the straying spouse, and how much devaluation took place as a result of the temptation)?

    Stated in an even more commodified manner, if a wife’s love is equivalent to a TV set, a LoC claim could be made against a person if he breaks into the locked home and steals it, but an AoA claim should not be made against a person if he takes it after the wife puts a sign on the unlocked and open door with a sign that says, “Free TV!” Even if the TV-taker is found responsible for some portion of the loss of the TV’s value, how do you determine what that portion might be versus the portion to be allocated to the wife for giving it away? And how much of it was the wife’s to give away versus the husband’s?

    As for an alienation of affection claim being how people solve things “these days,” it’s actually not a “these days” issue so much as it is a relic of days past (as another poster has noted). This case hasn’t gotten much press locally here in Chicago, but if it had (or if a future judgment has some crazy feature that gets it more notoriety), I’d guess they’d repeal the law. There are only 8 states with this kind of law on the books anyway, many of which I’d guess are going the way of desuetude, and Illinois’s may be no different given some more time.

27. The third party is also responsible for not assisting in the vow-breaking. Surely you don’t think it’s A-OK for me to buy a hot TV because, hey, I’m not the one who actually STOLE it?

    But this gets into the property thing again: it seems like the wife is the one who gets to decide whether or not her affections belong to anyone. If she withdraws that affection from her husband, is it stolen?

28. If somebody in an exclusive sexual relationship happens to fall in love with another woman, I won’t blame her. But I think it’s wrong if she knows he’s in an exclusive sexual relationship and she deliberately throws herself at him, trying to convince him to break his promises. In the end it’s his decision and I blame him most, of course, but I still think it’s wrong for her to assist, as you could say.

29. You are missing the big point.
    The law is about women as property. I blogged about it under the snarky title Liberals Don’t Get It, Women are Property about 3 days ago.

30. piny, yeah, that’s what i mean

31. Forget Boston Legal, wasn’t the whole of Ally McBeal pretty much based on this sort of stuff?

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