New York Times article about husband grieving for wife

Tell a head-scratching story.

A recent New York Times Magazine article went viral about a man asking his wife if he needed to comfort her after her affair ended, but not for the reasons you might think.

Not sure how to handle this bump in the road of marriage, readers turned to philosopher and author Kwame Anthony Appiah, who has been the magazine’s ethicist columnist for more than a decade, to help readers navigate moral dilemmas such as this.

In the call for help, the husband explained how it became clear to him that his wife was having an affair.

“She said she needed it, that it gave her energy, that she enjoyed the sexual freedom she craved, and that she felt it was wrong to do it in secret without my consent,” he wrote.

Although he agreed to the arrangement, the husband noted that “he was always miserable when she and her affair partner were away and couldn’t find a way to get through it easily.”

Eventually, his wife ended her affair “because the overall emotional burden on both of us was too great” – but she is saddened by her decision. So the question at hand for the ambivalent advice seeker is: “Should I feel sorry for my wife?”

It didn’t take long for the story, published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times, to create a frenzy online, with many wondering why anyone would reveal the inner workings of their marriage to the world — anonymously or not — and why the paper would publish such a bizarre story.

After all, this is an advice column, so no question is too weird or impossible to ask—but the subject is still debated on the Internet.

“Imagine you’re a New York Times editor making $300,000 a year and you say, ‘Yeah, this is definitely an important topic to write about,'” one user wrote on X.

“It proves who they are and what they stand for. Definitely not representative of good moral standards in any society,” one agreed comment read.

“I don’t know how to express my opinion on this, but I feel like people have had the decency in the past not to express these things,” someone else on the platform shared.

“Imagine admitting you’re an asshole,” one commenter queried.

“They want Beta Men in society,” another person quipped, using the phrase to describe lower-class men.

“We need to bring back the shame,” one comment read, implying that people share too much of their personal lives these days.

“Just get a divorce. You don’t ‘let her have fun.'” You don’t have “your own fun.” You might as well get a divorce. Why do we act as if any behavior here is normal? “Some people questioned.