Should I confront partners in affair?

Dear Carolyn: What is the responsibility of adults who know of a divorced woman having an affair with a married man and also fooling around with other men, sometimes on the same day?

DW is having a number of one-night stands and continuing her affair with MM, who has hesitated leaving his wife. People in the know are told to stay silent, even in this day of STDs and HIV. Simply put, someone could get killed.

What courtesy does MM's wife get? Should the people in the know continue their silence and hope for the best -- that MM's wife doesn't come down with a disease/infection from DW's selfish behavior?

Moral Question

A. Not to blunt a good hysteria, but hasn't sex throughout history had the potential to get someone killed?

Sexually transmitted ailments are not a new development; HIV merely raised the stakes. I do agree that because of those raised stakes, silence is at best a problematic choice and at worst lethal.

However, I don't believe HIV demands a blanket honor code, where everyone is duty-bound to tell everyone everything. There's still a benefit to knowing one's place.

The closer people are to the drama, the greater their obligation to intervene -- wielding only the facts, as always. The DW's close friends, for example, need to call her out, the MM's close friends need to tell him what they know, and shame on MM's wife's close friends if they're stranding her in the dark. With rare exceptions, truth-telling is at its most effective when the truth comes from the person who knows you best.

That's hardly a perfect system, though. So to prevent herd paralysis, where everyone thinks everyone else has it covered, your "adults" need to ask themselves: "If it's not my place to say something, then whose place is it, and will those people come through as I hope they would come through for me?"

Still imperfect, but it does introduce accountability -- a powerful referee.

Dear Carolyn: "Your college years are the best years of your life."

I hear this all the time. It can't really be true, right? Your college years are better than starting a career, buying a house, falling in love and having babies? Really?

I graduated four years ago, and the last four years have been the best of my life, personally. But it would be really depressing if it was really all downhill from here.

Baltimore

A. Generalizations are depressing. But here's how the alternative sounds:

"Your college years are a one-time convergence of youth, unprecedented independence, lowered barriers to varied opportunities, an atmosphere that encourages discovery, a handpicked abundance of peers and quantities of unstructured time that you've never seen before and probably will never see again -- which, if not the pinnacle of your existence, at least deserves recognition as a rare and fleeting opportunity for profound personal growth." For those inclined to nostalgia, only the abridged version will do.

And those inclined to preach might as well not bother. No matter how many ways old people find to warn young people not to squander ephemeral gifts, we all find ways, young and old, to squander our ephemeral gifts -- love, babies and real estate included. In warning others, at least for a moment we have those precious things back.