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.

She has interviewed over a hundred people who have had no-strings-attached sex while married, without telling their spouses, and concludes that this is becoming more and more common in the UK. She also concludes that many of them don’t feel guilty about it. Women are no longer much less likely to have affairs than men, and age isn’t a barrier either.

Like so many journalists writing on this subject, Levin completely ignores the idea that someone might be honest about having sex with someone else. None of the interviewees seem to have considered for a moment the idea of telling their partners about their need for more sex, or about the fact that they are having sex with someone else. As usual, the choice seems to be between monogamy and cheating. The third article talks about what happens when the other spouse finds out, though this never seems to be through a confession.

Interestingly, there seems to be a consensus among the people interviewed that this extramarital sex keeps them sane and happy and therefore saves their marriage. To some extent I would agree with this: sex with others can enliven a relationship, as I have found myself and heard again and again from the people I’ve interviewed. But Levin does point out that “the partner who chooses to have a fling has to live a life of subterfuge and always be on the alert in case he or she is found out”. Yes, it is a big price to pay. I would go further: I’d say it the deceit that causes most of the problems, rather than the extramarital sex itself. In fact, if there is no deceit, sex with others has a much better chance of enlivening the relationship.

I want to say loud and clear to people in this situation: there is another way. You don’t have to be monogamous and you don’t have to cheat. But it requires talking to your spouse and telling them about your needs.

Here are some thoughts from an Open Fidelity perspective for someone who is married and considering having, or has had, a no-strings-attached affair, and who wants to stay in the marriage.

The ideal time to talk to your spouse about this issue is when you’re starting to feel unhappy and are tempted to cheat but before you have done anything concrete to find another sexual partner. It will be much more difficult to try and find a solution if you have already broken your original promises. But even that can be done. The longer you leave it, the more difficult it will be, either to keep the secret or to come clean. And the secret is almost bound to come out at some point.

Tell your spouse that you are having problems being monogamous. Tell them you have considered looking elsewhere for some sex, or that you have done so if that is the case. Also tell them how much you love them, how committed you feel and that you don’t want to leave them. Say that you would like to work out a way in which both of you can be sexually satisfied while still managing to stay together.

Then wait for the suggestion to sink in, for your spouse’s anger to die down, and for them to consider their options and the alternative options (the two of you splitting up; you having an affair behind their back; and you being unhappily monogamous). If your having sex with someone else with no strings attached will really not affect your love for your spouse or your relationship with them, it might be possible to convince them to accept this too (but make sure you are certain of it first!).

If you have been unhappy, the chances are they have also been unhappy, so they might be glad for the opportunity to talk about their difficulties. Who knows, they might also have been wanting something different in their sex life and have been wishing they could tell you. They might even have already guessed that you’re thinking of an affair. This will be an opportunity for you to work out what you both want and find a way in which your probably differing needs can be made compatible.

Then try, tentatively and gently, to negotiate with each other a solution that involves you getting some sexual fulfilment while staying with your spouse. I can’t say what the solution will be – each relationship is different – but I can, over the course of this blog, give you examples of people who have tried this solution and what they have learnt from the experience. Are there some rules that you can agree that will make it easier to cope with each other’s liaisons? Practising safe sex is an obvious example. Perhaps a period of strict monogamy would be a good idea while you find ways to make non-monogamy possible. Are you prepared for your spouse to have lovers too? If you find this idea difficult, ask yourself why. Look for support from others who have tried honest non-monogamy, perhaps via this blog and the links from it.

This whole blog is about this alternative to monogamy and cheating, called Open Fidelity, so keep reading if you want more tips.

• ignore the feeling and stay monogamous;
• leave their partner in order to get together with a new partner; or
• cheat on their partner with the other person.

I’ve talked a bit about staying monogamous, though I’m sure there will be more on that in future posts. Leaving the original partner is always a possibility, but often the person does not want to leave, for reasons such as:

• they love their partner
• they feel committed
• they don’t want to be seen to break their promises
• breaking up would cause upheaval (emotionally, practically and/or financially, particularly if they are married or have children).

For those who don’t want to leave their partner but are finding it hard to reconcile this with an attraction to someone else, a secret affair is the only other obvious option in our culture.

So given that other options aren’t obviously available to most people (a situation I aim to change), it isn’t really surprising how many people cheat on their partners. It seems to be almost expected by western society today that many people will enter into ‘monogamous’ relationships (such as marriage) and will then, sooner or later, have sex with someone else without telling their partner or spouse.

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.

I am using the word ‘monogamous’ in this blog to mean ‘having sex with only one person over a period of time’. A person who is monogamous is someone who, over the course of, say, a year, has sex with only one person. I will usually mean ‘sexually monogamous’, that is, if someone has a romantic attachment to more than one person but has sex with only one, they are strictly speaking being monogamous. Of course there is plenty to discuss in all this, but this definition is where I am starting from.

Helen Fisher, in Anatomy of Love: a Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce, defines the term differently, as ‘having only one spouse’ regardless of any short-term sexual relations with other people. This is more of an anthropological definition, used in discussions of forms of marriage in different cultures.

I think the definition I am using is the more widely used one in general western culture, and so will make more sense to people. Besides, we need words that distinguish people who have sex with only one person from those who have sex with more than one person.

Partner

I generally talk about partners in all my writing, rather than about husbands, wives, girlfriends or boyfriends, for two main reasons. Firstly, what I am talking about applies just as much to same-sex relationships as it does to relationships between men and women. And secondly, whether a couple is married or not is not usually relevant to the argument, as nowadays many couples live together (or even separately) without being married but the same issues surrounding monogamy still arise, just as they would if the couple were married. I am aware that ‘partner’ can mean ‘business partner’, but here it won’t mean that.

The problem with the gender-neutral approach is that you can end up with lots of ‘they’s and confusion about who is being referred to. I don’t think it is useful to use ‘he or she’ all the time, and grammatically I don’t have a problem with using ‘they’ in the singular (it is very commonly used). If you talk about a husband and a wife, you can they say ‘he did this, she said that’ and it is clear, but with two partners, ‘they did this and they did the other’ is not. I will try to make it as clear as possible, sometimes by using examples with names when no other method works. Please add a comment if a particular sentence isn’t clear to you, for this or any other reason.

Infidelity

One of the main arguments I will be making is that ‘fidelity’ shouldn’t mean the same as ‘monogamy’. For the purposes of the next few posts, however, while discussing the status quo, I will use ‘infidelity’ to mean ‘having sex with someone who isn’t your partner without your partner’s knowledge or permission’. Someone who does this could be called a ‘cheater’ and their partner has been ‘cheated on’. These terms are not ideal but I choose to use them because they are generally understood.

Many people try their utmost to be monogamous. They try to avoid getting tempted into having sex with anyone other than their spouse (or their partner, in other words the person they have committed to). But more fail than succeed.

Yes, there are couples who stay happily together for decades, with no interest in anyone but each other. They are the lucky ones in today’s society – they find it easy to keep to the conventional rules.

But I suspect that many other couples who do manage long-term monogamy struggle with it. They are tempted and resist the temptation, or they avoid situations where they could be tempted. Perhaps one of the two partners struggles alone with their attractions to other people. This person might be afraid of mentioning to their partner how difficult they are finding the struggle to be monogamous, for fear that their partner could be angry or could leave them.

Alternatively, the two partners might struggle together when one of them is attracted to a third person. One partner is suspicious and the other partner makes promises or denies everything.

Looking at relationships this way, we can see that large portions of the energy in a relationship can be used in keeping to the rule of monogamy.

And of course many others don’t manage it. I will go into the numbers in more detail in a future post but, essentially, studies show that in western societies marital infidelity occurs in 40-70% of all marriages. These infidelities can take many forms, from visits to prostitutes, one-night stands and holiday flings to affairs lasting years.

Many of the married people having affairs have vowed to ‘forsake all others’ when they got married, usually with full sincerity, and even when these exact words are not an explicit part of the marriage ceremony they are implied in it. Can we argue that they have changed into different people, suddenly not caring about the feelings of their spouse? If infidelity was a rare occurrence we could treat it as an aberration; but it is not rare, not at all.