Dating Ethics- a Question for the Online Dating Community

Once, I was part of an affair. I cheated with a woman on her boyfriend of seven years. This sounds bad, but from my point of view I wasn’t doing anything wrong. The woman didn’t tell me that I was the other man. She let me think that I was her one and only, and I believed her until I found out she had another boyfriend. I dropped the whole situation like a hot rock, and tried to put as much emotional distance between myself and the girl as possible. I didn’t tell the boyfriend anything, I just walked away.

Picture me, all you out there in online dating land, at twenty-two. Not technically a virgin, but not far off, and just generally lacking information about women and how to deal with them. I had no real sex life and no immediate prospects of one. Then I met Angela.

I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world. Angela was the most forward woman I had ever met, she walked into my life and took over my bed. Nothing like that had every happened to me before and I was deliriously happy. For two months there was nothing but sex. I stopped doing homework and started skipping classes so that I could fit more sex into my schedule. This was great, but we did nothing else together, not so much as a movie date. I was never seen in public with her. We didn’t go for dinner, we didn’t really do anything together except... well, you know.

If I had had more experience dating, I would have known that this was unusual. If I’d had friends who I could have consulted they might have pointed it out to me, or if I had been part of an online dating community, someone could have told me that this was a little weird. Having no point of reference to judge these things by, it took me some time to realize that this was not normal. When it finally did occur to me, I asked her about it.

She broke down: told me that she had a boyfriend, and had had one for seven years. I admit, it surprised me. In hindsight it probably shouldn’t have, but it did. I told her I was disappointed in her and asked her to leave. This is the point, online dating citizens, where I start to look like a coward, because I was content to leave it at that. It occurred to me that I might have some kind of obligation to track down the boyfriend and tell him what was happening, but I didn’t. I kicked her out and then tried to forget about her and her boyfriend, and about all the sex that I wasn’t going to have.

I felt bad about the unknown boyfriend, wandering around out there, trusting the woman who had cheated on him and who would probably do it again. It was concerned about his possible exposure to any disease that she might bring home with her. I was concerned about that myself when I realized I wasn’t the only person she was sleeping with. I had about a month of panic attacks before my tests came back negative.

So my question for the online dating community is this; did I have an obligation to try to find the boyfriend and tell him what had happened, not just for his peace of mind and for mine, but to spare him from exposure to deadly (or at least embarrassing) disease, or was it better to drop it, and leave it to them to sort out their broken relationship on their own?

It was a long time ago, but this is the kind of thing that still keeps me up at night.