When your friend cheats, staying neutral might feel like the easiest option. It avoids confrontation, preserves the status quo, and spares you the discomfort of getting involved. But ethical responsibility demands more than passive silence. But what feels like the middle ground often isn’t as neutral as we’d like to believe. Sometimes, the ethical choice requires us to step outside our comfort zones, even when it means risking friendships we value. Integrity means acting even when it’s inconvenient, especially when someone else is being hurt.
To refrain from acting is an act in itself
When you know someone is being deceived and choose to say nothing, you’re not remaining neutral – you’re actively enabling the deception.
Don’t think about it in terms of choosing a side, or going against your friend. It’s about recognising that someone is being lied to in one of the cruelest fashions, and asking yourself whether you can live with enabling that deception. It’s easy to forget that your silence could lead to the victim being left with a venereal disease, or get married to a cheater under false impressions.
The fairness principle is straightforward: everyone deserves to make informed decisions about their relationships. When we withhold crucial information, we’re essentially deciding that the cheater’s comfort matters more than the betrayed partner’s right to truth. That’s not neutrality – that’s taking a side whilst pretending we haven’t. Imagine if someone knew your partner was cheating but decided your feelings weren’t their responsibility. How would that sit with you?
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
The moral thing to do is inform the betrayed partner after verifying the facts. You owe them the truth more than you owe your friend their secret.
When “loyalty” becomes complicity
If you’ve been on the receiving end of infidelity, you know that discovering mutual friends knew but said nothing can feel like a second betrayal. This reaction isn’t unreasonable or dramatic – it’s a completely understandable response to what is akin to abandonment when you needed support most.
Research on emotional validation shows that feeling heard and acknowledged is fundamental to healing from betrayal. When friends stay silent, it can compound the original trauma by making victims feel isolated and questioning their own judgment. Anger about friends who chose “neutrality” isn’t petty – it’s a natural response to feeling let down by people you trusted to care about your wellbeing
What does staying silent make you?
There’s also the uncomfortable truth that the company you keep shapes who you are. Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behaviour as a result of social interactions with other people. This is far more insidious, that when you regularly excuse or tolerate harmful behaviour, your standards start to slip too.
True friendship sometimes involves holding people accountable rather than simply offering unconditional support for destructive behaviour.
What comes around, goes around
Continuing a friendship with someone who betrays their partner isn’t a neutral act either. Behavioural research shows that betrayal doesn’t come out of nowhere. The ability to stab a loved one in the back is tied to patterns of secrecy, manipulation, and emotional withdrawal. It would be naive to think that someone who can betray their loved ones wouldn’t do so to a friend. And while everyone makes mistakes, repeated dishonesty points to something deeper. At some point, you have to ask: Does this person live by the values I claim to care about? Or am I just looking the other way because we have been friends for so long?
Life has a way of teaching us hard lessons about the company we keep. Many people who once excused friends’ infidelity later discover they’ve experienced similar betrayals themselves. Suddenly, the “neutrality” they once advocated feels far less reasonable when they’re the ones seeking support from mutual friends.
Some may disagree with this perspective, and I understand that empathy can be difficult when the pain isn’t your own. Still, history has shown that even those who commit terrible acts, like the rapist Brock Turner, have their defenders. Family and friends lined up to submit testimonials to plead for leniency for this predator who raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. Sure, some will posit that infidelity is many magnitudes less severe than what Turner did. However, the point is that people are remarkably adept at justifying their support for their loved ones who have harm. If you are simultaneously shaking your head at Brock’s supporters while covering for your cheating friend, I urge you to consider if you are wearing blinders towards the action of your friend and your personal inaction. Just because we care about someone doesn’t mean we should defend the indefensible, whether it’s betraying a partner’s trust or something far worse.
A final word
Look, I get it. This stuff isn’t easy. Nobody wakes up hoping they’ll have to navigate their mate’s infidelity or decide whether to blow up a friendship for the sake of doing what’s right. But I need you to know that the potential cost – a friendship with a deceitful person – is often overstated in comparison to retaining your moral compass.
At the end of the day, we can’t control what others do, but we can control how we respond. Sometimes being a good person means being an uncomfortable friend. Sometimes it means risking relationships for the sake of someone’s right to know the truth about their own life.
If you’re someone who’s been let down by friends who chose silence over solidarity, your hurt matters too. If you’re someone who has the privilege of never having been cheated on, but are faced with the dilemma about whether to cover up cheating by someone else, I hope you never lose that privilege.
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