Should I Come Clean About My Old Sexual and Financial Betrayals?

Two of my past indiscretions have me wondering what I should do about sharing them with my spouse and/or my pastor. Many years ago, my wife had a one-night stand with a male friend of ours. She admitted to it to me a couple of months later because she couldn’t deal with the guilt, explaining that she regretted it the minute the actual act began and resisted his pleas for additional encounters. I am a pretty understanding guy: I discussed the various reasons this happened, agreed that I had been neglecting her (starting a new business had me frazzled and exhausted) and agreed to forgive and forget, and 50 years later we are still together and happy.

But I always felt that I owed her one, and I did have sex with a customer three times. I ended that relationship and have never breathed a word about it. My wife has always been very insecure, not only concerning our relationship, but in any friendship or family situation. I don’t want to hurt her in any way. I know that to discuss it would be traumatic and a permanent blemish on our marriage.

The second indiscretion involved my theft of a few thousand dollars (over the course of two years or so) from my employer by getting kickbacks from a vendor. He would overcharge my employer and give me a percentage of the invoice amount. There were many reasons I stole this money. We were ‘‘keeping up with the Joneses’’ in a wealthy community and were constantly cash-strapped; our kids were in college. The company I worked for regularly ‘‘bought’’ sales by providing lavish entertainment, cash and prostitutes. There’s no excuse for what I did, but I think I was somehow of the mind that stealing from them wasn’t the same as stealing from a church or an individual.

I am religious, and do have a close relationship with our pastor, yet I don’t really feel comfortable discussing these things with him. I can live with the guilt. Should I? — Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

You say that your wife was unfaithful once, in part because you were neglecting her; she regretted it and told you about it. Your response was to pay her back (you felt you ‘‘owed her one’’) by being unfaithful three times, not regretting it and keeping it to yourself. You go on to explain that you cheated your company to ‘‘keep up with the Joneses,’’ having rationalized your actions by the company’s unseemly way of courting business.

I confess that I don’t view things quite the way you do: In both cases, your thinking reflects the mistaken thought that two wrongs make a right. Still, I do see that not much good would come from confessing your long-ago infidelity to your wife now. You owe her the important truths about your relationship, but the infidelity is likely to loom large in her mind, even though you have been faithful ever since.