Would you tell your friend of their cheating lover?

Have you ever found your best friend's lover in a stranger's arms and felt as if it were you they are cheating on?

Would you intervene - somehow?

Or, have you ever broken up with your lover and then your friends start congratulating you, telling you stories of how your ex used to cheat on you?

They knew and you didn't.

Sometimes when people see their friends' partners in offside positions, so to speak, they fear to raise the flag. And later goals have been scored, and they turn around and claim they feared to jeopardize the relationship.

The question is, what would you do if your friend's lover cheating on him/her?

"I cannot tell," Geoffrey Kiwalabye says easily.

"I have ever told a friend about her cheating husband and to my surprise these two continued loving themselves as if nothing happened and in the end I was the one they hated. I looked like a home breaker," he adds.

Kiwalabye got a shock of his life when that friend of his told her man that he once tried conning her and because she refused now he is being biased. That is how he lost his friendship.

"I thought I was my friend's keeper but that woman shocked me when she told him that I also liked her - that I was poking my nose in their relationship."

But Sarah Naggayi, a designer in Kampala, sees it differently.

 "If I care so much about the person being cheated on, I would tell him or her," she weighs in.

"These days there are so many diseases, what if I keep quiet and he or she gets sick? I would feel bad knowing that I would have done something to save his or her life."

For Shalom Musazi, a secondary school teacher, it would be a moment of reflection.

If she caught her friend's husband cheating, she would ask herself: "What would my friend want me to do? What do I think she would like me to do? I would respect what I think my friend would want me to do."

Experts

"If you have to tell them make sure you are right and not just hearsay," cautions Shamim Lule, a counsellor at Uganda Counseling Center.

"Do not tell them what a friend said. You might make people separate on wrong rumours."

Lule says you can use evidence of a photo or audio/video footage for emphasis.

But counsellor Denis Samuel Kaggwa says that if the couple has been together for long, you do not have to tell them because you will just disorganize them.

"To avoid looking like a marriage breaker, go silent and never ever tell anyone about it because rumours back-fire. It might backfire at a wrong time."