Jennie and Philip met at university and got married the year they graduated. They were open to each other about their feelings, and quite early on, Philip told Jennie that being a man was something he found difficult. When they made love, he never wanted to be the active partner as he felt expected to be. Neither of the couple were very happy with their sex life, but they were happy to be together. As time went on, they had two children.

Several times in the first ten years of their marriage, Jennie found herself getting infatuated with someone else, and she told Philip about these feelings. Philip was not a jealous person and told Jennie that the marriage could be open if she wanted; Philip didn’t want another lover himself, partly because he was unsure of his own sexual identity. None of Jennie’s early romantic attachments led to any sex, and she was open about all of them. Later, however, she had several affairs that involved sex, and at that point she felt it would be fairest on Philip not to tell him. In one of these Jennie explored a side to her sexuality that she hadn’t explored before – her desire to be submissive to a dominant lover.

Why didn’t she tell Philip earlier, given that he had said he wouldn’t mind?

It’s traditionally seen as a betrayal when you’re sexually active with somebody else and you don’t tell your partner about it, but in a strange sort of a way, I felt very strongly at the time that it was helping me to keep the marriage together. I wouldn’t do it now, but it seemed to make sense at the time.

The affairs had been going on for over 15 years when Jennie finally decided to tell Philip. He seemed, from little teasing comments he made now and again, to have already guessed.

It was almost as if there was a challenge there to say ‘Come clean, I’m ready to hear it now’.

His response was a surprise: he was relieved. Philippa (as she is now called) says

She said she wasn’t seeing me as a man, and that she needed a man, and I said ‘Well in that case, I might as well stop trying to fake it.

Philip explained his wish to live as a woman.

To tell or not to tell?

The fact that Jennie decided not to tell Philippa about her affairs shows that, even with the best of intentions, it isn’t easy to be open to your partner about your interest in someone else. (Note that I will call Philippa by that name from here onwards, to respect her female identity; also, all names have been changed.) Philippa had already told Jennie that the marriage could be open, and yet Jennie felt it wouldn’t be right to tell Philippa about her affairs. When Jennie looks back, she clearly finds it hard to remember how she came to this decision at the time and, as she said, she wouldn’t do the same now.

Jennie’s silence makes some sense to me, though, given that there is strong pressure from society to keep affairs secret, stronger perhaps than the pressure not to have affairs in the first place. However idealistic you might be, the assumptions of the wider society can get into your head and lead you to conform, even when you have good reasons not to.

The complications in Jennie and Philippa’s relationship – Philippa’s difficulties with living as a man and Jennie’s new-found desire for a dominant lover – might have made talking about the affairs harder. Eventually they did talk, though, and talking about one issue seems to have made it easier to talk about other issues. It must have been hard for Jennie to finally admit her affairs, but she doesn’t regret doing it for a moment.

Did Jennie’s affairs help them to stay together? I think they probably did. She wasn’t happy with their sex life, so when someone offered her a kind of sex she preferred, it gave her a way to be sexually fulfilled while staying with the partner she loved. Despite her lack of honesty about her affairs, they don’t seem to have hurt Philippa and they gave Jennie an outlet for her sexual feelings. I wouldn’t recommend keeping an affair a secret, but in this situation, who am I to say it was wrong?

The edifice of lies

First of all, cheating by definition involves lying to your partner.
You have to avoid mentioning this new interest in another person, even though you’re probably thinking about them all the time.
You have to lie about where you’re going when you’re planning to meet the new person, and lie about where you were afterwards.
You have to lie about why you are suddenly glowing, or excited, or turned on.
You have to lie about how you learnt that new sexual technique.
You have to lie to your friends and family as well, to avoid word getting back to your partner through the grapevine.
You have to remember what story you told all these people and keep your story consistent.
You have to hide electronic traces of your affair as well as physical ones.
…and so on and so on.
It takes a lot of effort to build and maintain an edifice of lies of the size needed to hide a new relationship from a partner you spend a lot of time with. Personally I find this all far too difficult, and any lies of mine tend to be seen through by anyone who knows me.
Some people manage it, and even keep up the lies for years on end. Most are discovered sooner or later, and being discovered is always a risk. You can’t control every bit of information your partner receives – even if you did, this control would itself become obvious to them. In the long run, they are almost bound to find out.
Rona Subotnik and Gloria Harris, in their book Surviving Infidelity: Making Decisions, Recovering from the Pain, mention one woman who found out about her husband’s affair after his death – it was no less devastating than finding out when he was alive. And as he was no longer around to talk about it, she found it hard to work through what it meant about their marriage.

Lack of respect

Even your partner never finds out, the fact that you are lying to your partner means you are choosing not to give them any influence over one part of your life. Your choice to do this can only mean that your respect for your partner and their autonomy is lessened.
‘Oh no,’ you might say, ‘I’m keeping the secret from my partner because of my respect for them, because they would be upset if they knew.’
Really?
They will be upset one day anyway. And what kind of respect reduces someone’s ability to choose their response to the situation?
If you lie to someone about something this important, you are not respecting them – full stop.

Hidden means stifled

If a new relationship is hidden, it has little chance to grow. The new lover cannot become part of your life as new partner would usually do, such as by meeting your friends and family, going to events with you, being mentioned in conversation. If your new lover is single, they can’t start telling everyone they know about their new lover, so they become isolated. If they have a partner, they have to lie to their partner, so the same issues apply to as to your partner. (This doesn’t apply if the infidelity is a one-night stand or a series of one-night-stands, of course.)

It is often said that the secrecy and illicit nest of secret affairs is part of their attraction. Perhaps that is true, but compared with what you are losing through the secrecy, this seems a poor reason to have an affair.

Here is Nell describing her experience of being unfaithful:

“I was monogamous for seven months with one boyfriend. When an opportunity for sex arose with a close female friend, I was very happy to go with it. But now I knew I was supposed to be monogamous, and so this was clandestine. She knew of him, but he was unaware. For the following year I was increasingly sexual with others. My boyfriend remained mostly unaware, though I sailed close to the wind several times. I understood that the status quo was supposed to be monogamy, and I simply saw myself as destined to be unfaithful. I knew that I didn’t love my boyfriend any less because I was sharing sexualness with other people, in fact some of these others offered things that he never could, and maybe it helped us remain together. I rarely had guilt at my sexual relationships with other people. I knew he would find it hard to know, but I was becoming increasingly aware of my own discomfort at this dishonesty.

“It seemed wrong that the person I professed to love most was not the person I could share everything with. It’s not the practice of deceit – I’m exceptionally good at deceit, and always have been – by nature I was secretive and I found the act of dishonesty very easy. However, emotionally, it had stopped making sense. I needed to be able to share the fullness of my life and relationships with the person I was having my most important relationship with. Yet I didn’t know how to do this without destroying that relationship. Already, several times, I had had to admit to being sexual with another, and twice, he had broken off the relationship because of this, though only for a matter of weeks. He had also asked me to be monogamous, and I had said ‘yes’, because I didn’t know how to say anything else. Each time, shortly afterwards, I had broken that decision and given myself a hard time about my inability to trust myself to remain faithful. And yet knowing, still, that I didn’t love my boyfriend any less.

“In the end what happened was it seemed to be that if I said I would be monogamous, almost immediately I’d be sexual with someone else. It was like I was proving to myself that I couldn’t keep that promise. Apparently I didn’t want to even try. Reading my diaries, I had written something like ‘I can’t even trust myself, I only promised last week that I wouldn’t be sexual with other men, and here I am, this has happened, and I can’t keep my promise’.”

Have you had an experience like this? Have you had a secret affair and felt guilty? Have you promised yourself that you would never do it again, and then broken that promise? There is a solution.

Nell later discovered for herself that it was possible to be nonmonogamous in an open and honest way. Many other people I have interviewed have also discovered this. She learnt about polyamory, which means having honest, loving and/or romantic relationships with more than one person. I’ll write more about polyamory in the next post: it is not exactly the same as open fidelity but has a lot in common with it.