Adultery, anyone?

Today I ran into the type of situation I struggle with often. A friend of mine was telling me, excitedly and happily, about something she was about to do. Something that I find pretty immoral.

In this case she was plotting about how to seduce a guy we work with. The guy’s engaged. And as she was plotting and scheming about how to get him I kept thinking, I don’t even want to be hearing this.

Now, I do realize that part of my squeamishness was due to the fact that, as someone who’s been engaged, I can sympathize more with the engaged girl than with my friend in this situation. If a girl tried to seduce Mike, I’d kick their ass. But someone pointed out that my friend wasn’t doing anything wrong, really, because she wasn’t the one who was engaged. If anything happened, the guy would be more at fault since he’s the one that would be breaking the engagement. And someone else pointed out that if it was a strong relationship that was meant to be, it would survive my friend’s flirting. But still! It’s the principle, dammit. Off the market means off the market.

The other part that made me squeamish was knowing that it was going against my religion. I mean, come on, while it’s not quite adultery it’s certainly close enough. And while I know that my friend and I don’t share my religion and I can’t really hold her accountable to my belief system, I was afraid that my silent listening was giving her the impression that I agreed with her plan of action. I was afraid that every time I said, “That’s interesting,” or, “He really is cute,” it came across not as noncommittal but as encouraging.

That’s my main problem. I certainly don’t want to encourage her, but at the same time I feel like I can’t really lecture her either. I can’t tell her, “Oh come on, you know that’s wrong,” because she doesn’t believe it’s wrong. Maybe I should be more like those fire-and-brimstone Christians and tell her that she’ll experience the eternal inferno not only for her premarital sex, but also for luring someone into adultery. But I’ve never gotten good results that way. Normally in situations like this I can be noncommittal enough that after a while spent trying to convince me of the validity of their plan, the person gets sheepish and says something like, “You think this is a bad idea, huh?” I’ve always had better results teaching people by example by trying to follow my own morals, rather than hitting them over the head with my belief system.

For some reason, this time is different.

So after awhile I tried to frame things in a way she’d understand. I asked if she’d really be able to trust in a relationship with a guy who had cheated on his fiancé with her. I wondered aloud what sort of karmic repercussions someone could experience in a situation like this. I left my own religion and my own beliefs out of it.

Should I have tried to lead her away from sin? Should I have convinced her to turn the situation around? Am I a bad Catholic for not exposing her to my religion? I’m not sure. But I do know that I tried to guide her through this situation the best way that I knew how.