From: tlode@isis.cs.du.edu (trygve lode)
Subject: Re: Sanctity of relationships
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Distribution: world,soc
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 92 20:03:29 GMT

In article <75nG027bc0Nq00@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> jsp@pls.amdahl.com writes:
>rnjx@vax5.cit.cornell.edu writes:
>
>}The question is this.  Is it ever morally and/or ethically O.K. to actively
>}try to woo one member of an existing relationship from that relationship so
>}that you may start one with her/him?  Under what circumstances?  How about
>}pursuing someone who's engaged?  Where do you all draw the line?  If it isn't
>}O.K., would you still do it anyway?
>
>No.  Unequivocally it is never, ever ok.  If you know that the other person
>is in a relationship, then you are scum if you lift one little finger to
>try to damage or break up that relationship.  Obviously, if you don't know 
>that a person is involved, you aren't doing anything bad by wooing someone
>whom you think is unattached.  But the second you find out otherwise, you'd
>better back off entirely.
>
>Other posters have tried to mitigate this by bringing up situations where
>you "know" that the relationship is wrong for the other person, or you
>"know" that the other person is only involved because of some falling out
>with you.  None of that gives you the right to decide what's best for
>another person.  If you think someone is making a mistake, you of course
>have every right to make your opinion known.  But there is a big, big 
>difference between saying, "I think you're making a mistake here", and
>saying, "Drop this guy and come away with me because I love you more and
>I'm better for you."  The former is just giving your honest opinion; the
>latter is actively trying to entice the person away from the existing
>relationship and toward you.  And that makes you scum.
>
>--James Preston
>

Well, as always, I find that I prefer to make ethical decisions about a
particular situation on the basis of that particular situation rather
than on the basis of a set of rigid, predefined rules, and treat the
others I interact with as adults, fully capable of making their own
decisions and responsible for the consequences thereof.  Maybe I'm just
not very good at coming up with rules, but I find that situations that
involve human beings seem to invariably be so complicated that I just
end up making such determinations based on my feelings about the overall
situation.  (That's why I'm so terrible at hypothetical questions where
people are involved.)

I've wooed someone who was involved with someone else twice--both times
it was someone I was intensely interested in, someone I viewed as a 
potential life partner.  The first time, I had started wooing her 
(albeit rather more clumbsilly than I would now) and a gentleman of
my acquaintance fitting the "jerks who get all the women" paradigm
apparently found that my pursuit of her made her more interesting and,
being vastly more adept at such things, won her heart.  At the time,
he was already informally engaged to someone else and was in a variety
of other less-committed relationships as well.  

The second time I also had been pursuing a woman who simply refused to
believe that I could possibly be interested in her and eventually got
involved with someone else.  I backed off for a time, but after she
was involved with someone else, she started actively trying to spend
time with me and, after she asked me to marry her, I did resume
pursuit.

Now, you may certainly disagree with my justifications for my actions,
but I don't think it's possible to compress the range of human behavior
and situations that exist down into a single axiomatic rule.

Trygve   (I may be scum, but I'm happy scum.)

Newsgroups: alt.romance,soc.singles,soc.couples