In one of those interesting ironies that present themselves to us every now and then, a portion of the story I was working on last night – well, early this morning, actually – relates to a post I just stumbled across at The World History Blog, called Time Travel and Fidelity.
Miland Brown brings up the subject of fidelity independent of chronology. In other words, if a time traveler travels beyond the period of his or her nuptials, is he still bound by them? One commenter suggests the concept as book fodder, and others cite The Time Traveler’s Wife and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series and their takes on the concept.
In short, the arguments as I see them are:
If the time traveler is temporally in an area bound by the beginning of the marriage and the end of it, through divorce or the death of one or both of the spouses, then anything that would be considered illicit extramarital activity without time travel being involved would be wrong. Travel temporally outside those boundaries, and no cheating is involved.
And…
If, from the time traveler’s perspective, the marriage has occurred but not ended, then any activity that would be considered cheating under normal, non-time-traveling conditions would be cheating. For instance, this opinion states that if a time traveler traveled to a time before his spouse’s birth, fooling around with, say, Marie Antoinette, would be cheating (and pretty dangerous too, by the way). It would be cheating even though the traveler’s wife might be centuries away from being born. Still cheating because from the time traveler’s perspective, his wife and marriage are still alive.
As I said, I’m right in the middle of addressing this issue. A number of readers have emailed asking the question of whether I remained faithful to my wife Molly while in the past. What I say is that according to the argument I believe is right, yes, I remained faithful.
So, I guess you’ll have to read the new chapter, Time Passages, which I’ve almost completed, to discover which argument I follow. 
