Earlier this week the Odyssey Facebook page shared the article, “I Broke Girl Code’s Cardinal Rule And I Don’t Regret It” that was written by Cat Urbanski.

The article was about a controversial topic: being the "other woman".

While someone can’t hope to publish something like that without inciting controversy, the intensity with which people are attacking the woman who wrote it is astounding to me.

They say never to read the comment section because it makes you lose your faith in humanity.

But of course, I went and read it anyway. I was disappointed but not surprised. Here are some of the “highlights:”

As you can see, people have no use for what this woman did. I don’t personally think that I could knowingly be “the other woman”--having been cheated on before I know the pain it causes and the trust issues it instills, so I wouldn’t want to put that on someone else.

However, this isn’t about that. My response to all this actually has very little to do with her, to be quite honest.

Everyone is so outraged by her behavior--they can’t believe that she would break up a family, ruin a marriage and impact the lives of that man’s children.

But the people in the comment section -- and people everywhere when it comes to the topic of cheating -- are forgetting one very important fact: it takes two to tango.

I don’t agree with what this woman did.

But I also don’t agree with how people are conveniently forgetting that the man was also complicit in this. There are always two people involved.

It was not on her to preserve this man’s relationship and the integrity of it; that was his job and he failed at that.

When someone is in a relationship, the only person they should need to trust is their partner.

There are approximately 7 billion people in the world and you can bet that I hardly trust any of them. But when I’m in a relationship, I wholeheartedly trust my partner.

It doesn’t matter who they are hanging out with because I trust them to not give in to any advances made at them. That is a baseline requirement for a functioning relationship.

So it was not on this girl to preserve this man’s relationship, it was on him.

This man knew what he had at stake. He knew that he had a wife and children and a life with them. He actively chose to jeopardize all of that by cheating with this woman. She didn’t make him do anything. Everything that happened was a result of choice, not of force.

Everyone is so ready to jump down this girl’s throat because she put this piece out there.

And while she opened herself up to this backlash, people need to realize that the party not speaking out about it is also at fault for this.

This man might not be a member of Odyssey publishing writing about his current situation, but that doesn't mean that he and his actions don't carry a huge portion of the blame in this scenario.

This expands beyond just the context of this article. It is a common chain of events.

When people find out that a man has been cheating on his girlfriend or wife, people will chastise him a bit, sure; but the “other woman” almost always catches more flack even though she isn’t the one who betrayed the trust of her partner.

It is not on the other 7 billion people in the world to make sure that a relationship maintains its honesty and dedication. That is completely on the two people engaged in the relationship in the first place.

People love to talk about the women who sleep with married men.

They love to drag them through the mud and call them names. A woman who sleeps with a taken man is a slut, or a whore, or a homewrecker.

The thing about calling people homewreckers, though, is that homewreckers wouldn't have homes to wreck if your significant other hadn't let them in the front door.

People don’t break and enter into relationships. The party involved that is already in a relationship makes the conscious efforts to cheat on their significant other. We always want to call the “other woman” all sorts of terrible names.

She becomes, like Urbanski stated in her article, an outcast and a pariah.

But in the midst of ostracizing the woman, we gloss over the fact that the person who actually did the cheating is the one who actively and knowingly did their partner wrong.

They’re the one who committed the crime in the relationship but people don’t talk about that because they are too busy blaming the other person for the actions of whoever was in the relationship.

I don’t condone cheating.

I think that if you know someone is in a relationship you should have enough respect to back off.

But at the end of the day, it is up to the person in the relationship to preserve that relationship and not cheat.

We are creatures with the ability to choose. When you are in a relationship and choose to betray your partner anyway, you carry just as much, (in my opinion, a bit more) of the blame as the person you cheated with.

Everyone jumped at the chance to cut Urbanski down upon publishing her article, but they shouldn't forget that it always takes two. Her partner is the one who betrayed his wife and his familial obligations.

That is the choice that every cheater makes regardless of who they are cheating with.

It’s time to think about where we, as a society, are placing our anger.

Because the response to that article is a very telling sample.