After my relationship with Jerry came to an end, I learned how much of his life I had not understood. I learned about other relationships, lies he had told me, and violations of consent and boundaries that I had not fully recognized while they were happening. I felt incredibly alone while I was trying to make sense of it all.
Naturally, I wondered how Jerry had treated his other partners. I did not assume that every relationship looked like mine or that every person had experienced the same things I had, but Jerry was still the same person in all of them. I wondered where the patterns I had experienced had come from and who else had seen them.
I did not have enough information to answer those questions. Later, I began asking something different. Even if Jerry never treated another person exactly the way he treated me, could what happened in our relationship really have had nothing to do with the other relationships in his life?
The more I thought about it, the less sense that made.
Private is not the same as contained
When we say that a relationship is private, we usually mean that people outside it do not get a say in what it looks like. They are not entitled to every detail or allowed to make decisions for the people involved. Those boundaries matter, but sometimes we ask privacy to do something it cannot do. A private relationship does not keep everything that happens inside it from affecting anyone outside it.
We cannot be in a relationship with someone without being affected by the other relationships in their life. Some effects are welcome, and even negative ones – disappointment, inconvenience, an uncomfortable conversation – are not necessarily harm. As I have discussed in previous reflections, to assess harm we need to look at what has actually been damaged, lost, restricted, or put at risk.
We already understand these connections in ordinary life. The amount of time someone has for me depends partly on their commitments to other people. A family member may need help or a friend may already have plans. A child may need more attention or something difficult at work may follow someone home. A good afternoon with a friend can leave them happier and more present.
My relationships affect what I bring to other people too. If someone I love is struggling, I may be worried or distracted. If I have promised to help one person, I have less time available for someone else. None of this requires anyone to have poor boundaries. It is simply part of having people in our lives.
Something can be none of my business to control or influence and still affect me. We do not get a version of someone untouched by the rest of their life, and harm does not become an exception just because it happens somewhere we cannot see.
How harm moves outward
Suppose I am in a monogamous relationship but begin an intimate relationship with someone else without my partner’s knowledge or agreement.
My partner is obviously harmed directly. They are making decisions about sex, trust, money, and their future without information they should have. Even before they discover what I am doing, they may notice that I am less available, that plans keep changing, or that something between us feels off or different.
What happens to my partner can also reach the people close to them. They may have less attention for their children or friends, need help managing responsibilities, or turn to family for support. A friend changing plans to spend an evening with them is not necessarily being harmed. But children losing stability at home, or a relative struggling financially after helping with emergency expenses, may experience more than inconvenience.
My other relationships are involved too. I may lie to friends about where I have been or use someone as an excuse without their knowledge. People who learn what happened may lose trust or respect for me. A friendship I valued may be damaged by something I did to someone else. The person I began seeing may also have been deceived, with consequences reaching into their life.
These people do not all have to know one another. Some may never meet or even know the others exist. The effects can move through the relationships surrounding my partner as well as my own, before or after anyone learns what happened. They do not have to look the same in every direction.
Working in healthcare has made this kind of connection especially visible to me. Patient care depends on people in many different roles working together. Someone on that team may be dealing with abuse at home, harassment from a coworker, or mistreatment by a manager. They may be exhausted or distracted, need time away, or need more help from the people working beside them. Sometimes that means an ordinary adjustment; sometimes it leaves coworkers carrying an unsafe workload or damages the trust they need to work together. Patient care can also be impacted, whether immediately or over time. A patient may experience a delay that worsens their condition or a mistake caused in part by a breakdown in communication, without ever knowing that harm done to someone on the team contributed to what happened. The person who caused the original harm may never meet that patient or know how far the consequences reached.
These two examples may not seem related, but the connections are familiar. The same kinds of ripple effects occur in families, friendships, workplaces, and other groups where people’s lives overlap. Whether or not the original harm was intended, it does not stay separate from everything else the people involved are living through.
What we may never see
I started by wondering how Jerry had treated other people. I ended up thinking about how what happened between us affected other relationships in both our lives. Those connections existed before I told my story, even if talking about it made them easier to see.
It took me time to name the harm I experienced directly. Harm that reaches us through someone else can be even harder to recognize. That is why naming it matters so much. It can help us understand how something we thought was happening only to someone else has affected our own life too.
It took me time to name the harm I experienced directly. Harm that reaches us through someone else can be even harder to recognize. That is why naming it matters so much. It can help us understand how something we thought was happening only to someone else has affected our own life too. When we look closely at what exactly we mean by harm, it becomes much easier to see how easily it can move through our human connections.