You are right Inky, one punishes his kids at home… as long as they are HIS kids, they are actually kids and he actually has a home. Adults should have dignity to choose. If adults risk to fight wars, it is better to go to the judge.

“So good luck finding a friend or lover who dovetails perfectly with your own value system. It’s not as easy as all that, and hopefully you won’t clash!”

However I do not know why you are personally attacking me with your irony. Do you feel attacked somehow? It seems you also have a value system to defend. You may as well be my friend, I do not mind what you do as long as it is not going to hurt me or someone else intentionally in some way. Tough I suppose you would not like me as friend, because I would warn you for the bad consequences of your actions, and you may no longer act with peace of mind. I believe I’m just giving you some tools to reason about how you may hurt someone else without intention to do it.
I do not know what you hid to your friend, and I do not know why your friend wanted to know about that, but personally I may start to feel a fake if my friend was proud of me for something I never did or respected and valued me because he thinks I did not do something. (I imagine he talks proudly about me to everybody he meets.) Eventually I may start to think he is talking about somebody else, that he is actually a friend to somebody else and not to me. Moreover I would fear he will find out, I will hurt him and lose his friendship anyway. In the end, even in the course of the relationship, I would feel lonely like I had no friends at all. Then it is better to not have friends at all, at least you are not risking to disappoint anybody.
Do you really want to live in a world where a person pretends he is somebody else just to be friend with a person that pretends to be somebody else? It is a fair and fun game, yet it looks loneliness to me when you are looking for a deep connection.

Anyway, I guess your opinion on the scenario is “Martha did OK, she acted in her own self interest, being with Jerry what was mattered the most to her at the moment. Jerry was an idiot to think she would say the truth just because he asked for it and she said she loved him. Once he knew the truth, Jerry should have punished her and go over with it. Martha did OK by leaving him, once again she acted in her own self interest.” If I’m right with this summary, I’ve got one question. How should Jerry have punished Martha?

“People are selfish at the end of the day and their values do change.”

If you say that people are selfish, it means you also have an idea of “unselfishness”, how does that look like? What should a person do to be unselfish?

By the way, thank you for your replies to my post.