Cheating Is Wrong. I’m Still Glad I Did It

Early into my marriage, my father learned that he could no longer call me on the phone and start talking openly. If my husband wasn’t home when my dad called, I’d answer the phone and say, “Hey, I can talk.” And we’d talk about the divorce we both knew I wanted, or else I’d just cry while he listened, furious and helpless. But it was rare that I answered the phone this way. My husband was always home.

We shared the most stifling homes together: first, my junior year dorm room and then, during my senior year, an apartment in downtown Annapolis that was so tiny we couldn’t even fit our sofa through the front door. We had to move it in by dragging it around the back, smashing in the glass rear door of the vacant apartment next door, and pushing the sofa through that apartment until it was free to come through the other side into ours. These were spaces that were never meant to house more than one person.

That was my husband’s position: We fought because we were jammed in unnaturally stifling circumstances, like factory-farm chickens packed so tightly that they have to be debeaked so they don’t peck each other to death. I was only a year away from graduation, at which point we’d have a second stream of income that would allow us to upgrade our space. This apartment and the fights for which it was responsible—all that was temporary. Soon we’d move on to better things. “Tell your dad not to worry,” he’d say, which I never did.

My friends were sympathetic, but all of them put together didn’t have the resources I would have needed to leave and live alone. Plus, it would have cost me a couple thousand dollars to break our lease and put down a deposit somewhere else. Once, after a particularly bad fight, I attempted suicide. In the hospital, I knew no one would be able to see me outside of visiting hours; such was my desperation. But during the hospital visit, I was foggy and sad. When I got home, I was furious with myself. I’d wasted the last precious time I’d likely ever have to myself when I could have been hatching a plan.

In the end, I didn’t set the wheels in motion to end our relationship. Or at least it didn’t feel deliberate at the time. One day, serendipitously, my husband was too sick to join me to see a friend. I went alone, and the friend, whom I’ll call Jake, confessed his interest in me. Under any other circumstances, I likely would have shot him down, but I was starving.

Some well-meaning people want to know why I cheated and didn’t leave, and other even more well-meaning people understand why I didn’t feel like I could leave but still think I shouldn’t have cheated.

The sex alone was nothing to write home about, but the whole assignation was an unprecedented hours-long span during which I felt free. Most of the time, I had nowhere to go and no money to spend when I got there. I had no option but to spend my free time with my husband, in whose presence it was difficult to imagine a future free of him. I was less thrilled by the physical act of infidelity than by the freedom it had rented for me. At Jake’s apartment, I could call my father and speak candidly to him, and I did.

“Hang on,” my dad said a few minutes into our conversation, during which Jake had put on headphones and was bobbing his head to some music. “How long can you talk?”

I barked out a laugh. Nothing was particularly funny, but a year of the nervous energy that characterized my marriage was bubbling up through the cracks any way it could. “I can talk all day,” I said, and then, still laughing, I started to cry. Jake peered over at me and hurriedly looked away. “I can talk to you all day about anything I want.”

When I got home to my husband that afternoon, I was blissed out. “Hope you’re feeling better,” I said.

Some well-meaning people want to know why I cheated and didn’t leave, and other even more well-meaning people understand why I didn’t feel like I could leave but still think I shouldn’t have cheated. I understand. And to an extent, I agree. It’s not a kind thing to cheat on somebody; it isn’t respectful. When you cheat, the other person has an understanding of your relationship that you’ve secretly decided you no longer share.

But at some point, my marriage stopped being a relationship. I stopped caring about salvaging or respecting the marriage; I only hoped that mine would be one of the bodies recovered from it once it collapsed.

Jake wasn’t the only person I cheated with, though he stands out as the first. Mostly, I preferred the company of strangers, many of whom never knew I was married. Unfamiliar men allowed me to be a woman I had forgotten how to be. I could flirt without feeling cowed. I could laugh and swear. These were not men I hoped would be soul mates; they were merely men who were not my husband.

Ultimately, I was able to secure a room for myself on campus again for the last couple months of my last semester in college. My occupancy was set to begin just after spring break, and so I began planning an exit. I spent several days at my mother’s apartment in D.C. under some tissue-thin pretext.

It had been months since I’d spent this much time apart from my husband, but at this point, I’d managed several dalliances with other men under his radar. At first, I remained glued to my phone during every date, certain that a barrage of panicked texts would come in at any moment. But the barrage never came, and gradually I began ignoring my phone for the duration of a drink, a dinner, a whole evening.

As grateful as I was for the fun and light of these dates, I never did cheat comfortably, anxious as I always was about getting caught. I’ve heard others describe that anxiety as a rush, but for me it was never anything but a downside. More than anything, I was chasing the free time that these infidelities granted me. If an afternoon of free time to “see my professor during her office hours” or “check out this rash at the nurse's office” was feasible, then surely I could drum up the confidence to take 10 whole days to spend visiting my mother. And to my own surprise, I could.

I didn’t spend most of the time in which I worked up the resolve to end it cheating on my husband. The sex wasn’t the point. Instead, I pretended with those men. I pretended that we were on normal dates and luxuriated in their laughter at my jokes, their open admiration of my body, their average degree of kindness.

It was just two weeks, but enough time to curl up with my father and his dog on his sofa so that we could watch TV, or else I baked brownies at my mother’s apartment. On a few of those nights, I’d blow out my hair and wear stockings and heels to go “to a little party at my friend’s house—just a few of us, nothing exciting.”

The infidelity was just one small part of the greater mission—rebuilding the scaffolding that had once held up a truer version of myself.

“Okay, honey,” my parents would say. “Have fun.”

The infidelity was just one small part of the greater mission—rebuilding the scaffolding that had once held up a truer version of myself. Visits to see my parents were part of it. Going out was part of it. My parents didn’t cosign the cheating—my mother never did confirm her suspicions that I was cheating, in fact, though my father knew. But they also couldn’t bring themselves to forbid it.

The day before my move-in date for my new dorm room, I vomited on and off for hours, stressed and frightened. My mother bought applesauce and pudding cups and turned on Animal Planet for me, not knowing what else to do. The next day we all drove to the Annapolis apartment together. I broke the news. My husband slammed doors and punched a wall, until his friend escorted him out of the apartment. I wept over all of this. But my father took me by the shoulders.

“It’s not your problem anymore,” he said gently. “Let’s get you packed up.”

My parents took me to lunch to celebrate, only to watch me staring at my soup with stony eyes. They didn’t know what to say. The mood hung eerily between festive and funereal. “Well, honey,” my father eventually said. “How do you feel?”

I felt full of adrenaline and hollowed out and very, very small. How had it all crumbled into this? Cheating on him had filled me with power that now felt as if it must have belonged to someone else. I still wanted to be loved and, fluent only in love freighted with expectation, feared what must have awaited me.

I twirled a strand of red hair around my finger. I wasn’t naturally a redhead, but this was the color I’d been trying when I met my husband; I’d spent the duration of our relationship touching up my roots with cheap dye to preserve the image of the bright, lively woman he’d married. Underneath the red hair, I knew I looked sallow and thin. This had never been my color, and yet I’d sunk two years and hundreds of dollars into it. “I think I’m dyeing this back to brown when I get home,” I said. “The upkeep is a nightmare.”

I’d been aiming for breezy but had overshot it and knew I sounded manic. Hearing my own shrillness as I tried to convince my parents that I was okay, I gave up and cried.

“But would you still cheat if you had it to do over again?”

How I hate this question! It presumes a wrongness in the choices I made: Sure, you were desperate to make the best of an impossible situation, but don’t you privately agree that you bungled the whole thing?

I always wonder what these people would ask my husband, if they were able to interrogate him about the choices he made during our marriage. I was not the only person in that relationship who violated the rules of how people are supposed to treat each other.

My flings would have been meaningless at any other juncture of my life, if I’d had them at all. These men didn’t care about me. But they granted me space. They allowed me to regain the fluency that I’d once had in flirtation and sex, the lingua franca of romance; they reminded me of what I used to like. They cleared the brush from my face so that I could see, again and again, what I had been missing. The men and the sex were not what those little relationships were about; I was. I was the point.

Two weeks after my father died, my husband contacted me on Gchat, the only app where I hadn’t blocked him. We hadn’t seen each other for four years. He offered his condolences, which surprised me. But, raw and vulnerable, I thanked him all the same. He said that he hoped I’d sit down with him to talk about how “we could have been better to each other.”

It enraged me, but it wasn’t incorrect. We could have been better; we both could have. I read his chat and considered the traits I had stopped tolerating from men after the divorce: attempts to modulate my behavior, even the most lighthearted jokes made at my expense. I’d won these prizes in the divorce. But his marriage had been violated too. What prizes had he won from me?

The Gchat conversation ended there, and the meeting never happened. But sometimes I wonder whether I’d apologize to him for cheating. Even I wonder whether it was harm that I inflicted on him or something else.

I imagine sitting down with him. “You were never in control,” I might tell him. No, more accurately: “You were once, but I figured out how to take it back.”

Rax King has been published in Catapult, Electric Literature, and Autostraddle. Look out for her monthly column, Store-Bought Is Fine, at Catapult for hot takes about the Food Network, and follow her on Twitter at @raxkingisdead for hot takes about everything else.

Originally Appeared on Glamour