Dear Abby: I’m housemates with my husband’s former mistress who

Reading the headline alone is enough to make a person groan. "I'm housemates with my husband's former mistress." That's not the setup for a sitcom, it's a real life situation someone brought to Dear Abby. And the fact that the advice is mostly "set boundaries and communicate" tells you everything about how far we've drifted. At what point did we decide that a wife shouldn't be furious at the situation but should instead learn to manage it like a roommate dispute?

This is what happens when marriage becomes negotiable. The husband betrayed his vows, and the response from the culture is to help everyone adjust to the new normal. Dear Abby can suggest family meetings and ground rules, but that's just rearranging deck chairs on a ship someone already sank. The real question is why the wife is being asked to make peace with a living arrangement that wouldn't have existed in the first place if her husband had kept his promises.

Look, we know there are financial realities and housing markets that force difficult conversations. But this family's problem isn't the rent. The problem is that the mistress wasn't an onetime mistake; she's now a permanent fixture. At some point, "forgive and move on" becomes "accept the consequences and pretend it's all fine." There is no rulebook for this because there shouldn't be a rulebook for this. The husband created the mess, and the wife shouldn't be the one expected to clean it up with polite conversation and a chore chart.

The lesson here is grimly simple. When sin is treated as a lifestyle choice, the fallout becomes someone else's burden to manage. The husband should be fixing this, not the wife. And Dear Abby would serve her readers better by saying that marriage isn't a trio, no matter how many rooms are in the house.