Your Partner F*kced Someone Else? Get Over It.

So your partner fucked someone else, had an affair, cheated on you, fooled around, cucked you. You’re pissed, angry, furious, maybe even despondent.

Get over it. It’s easy.

How do I know that? Because you did it already. When you met.

OK, you’re right, I’m being deliberately flippant about the anguish and betrayal that most monogamous people feel when confronted with a cheating partner. But I’m doing this for a reason: society has imposed a historically and biologically unacceptable view of adultery on us, and it’s destroying marriages that would otherwise survive. And people think that sex itself is the problem. It’s not.

Let’s start with the big overlooked fact: You’ve already gotten past the fact that your partner had sex with others.

In the 1970s, only 21% of women were virgins on their wedding day, and by 2010, that number dropped to 5%. Just one out of twenty. That’s an astonishing (and good) trend. So, dear married reader, it’s pretty safe for me to assume that your spouse had something like one to five sexual partners before you got married. (Unfortunately, the study didn’t have similar statistics for men; apparently men are less reliable at reporting. No idea how they figured that out. But I think it’s safe to assume that the numbers are similar or even lower for men.)

How does that make you feel, knowing your husband or wife was fucked by someone else before you met? Does it feel like betrayal? Do you feel like your spouse is immoral, unclean, despoiled, a slut? Does it make you sick that your wife had someone else inside her, or that your husband’s cock was in another woman’s pussy before yours?

I’m deliberately using provocative sexual language here to make a point. These are the feelings that many people have when their spouse has an affair, yet they didn’t think those exact same thoughts on their wedding night. Or on the night they first had sex together (because that was probably long before their wedding).

Why? What’s the difference? Why are you disgusted and angry over an affair but not over former lovers?

Well, obviously, your spouse made a promise not to do that, and that promise was broken. But equally obvious, it wasn’t the sex that’s upsetting you. Because that didn’t matter on the day you got married. The fact that your spouse had sex with someone else was acceptable. (In fact, premarital sex is even desireable—like so many skills, sex gets better and better with practice and with more partners.)

Your anger is about the broken promise, the broken trust, and (probably most important) the fear of loss. You thought you could trust this person, and planned to spend the rest of your life with him or her. You’re still in love, and maybe have kids, friends, community, a house, and a dog, but with this promise broken, what’s next? Is he going to dump you for this woman? Is she going to abandon you and the kids for her new lover? Are you going to lose the life you built together?

That is the true worry: Fear of loss.

And why do you fear that? Well … has your husband left you yet? Did your wife file for divorce? Why did your spouse carry on for so long and not only stay with you, but also tried really hard to keep the relationship a secret? Because your partner wants to stay married! If your partner had wanted to leave you, you’d be single already. What’s actually going on is that your partner has demonstrated that your relationship is more important than sex.

And your partner has also demonstrated that there is something wrong that made the affair happen. Boredom, indifference, fights, financial strain … the list is long. People don’t have affairs for no reason. Your partner broke a promise, but did you also break one?

Marriage isn’t just a promise about sex. It’s a promise about many things: a shared life, shared interests, possibly children, a financial partnership, a place in the community, and to care for one another in good times and bad. The real problem is that our society places sex on a pedestal, higher and more precious than everything else. When it falls, it falls from a great height and breaks everything around it.

When bad things happen, we have a choice of how to react. Anger is a choice, not a requirement. Understanding and forgiveness are also choices.

But it’s not about sex. If you can get over that, you’re on the path to true communication. If you think back to your wedding day, and remember how you felt about your partner having sex with other people, you’ll realize that sex isn’t the real issue. Once you do that, you may actually hear what your partner has to say.

Image: Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827). Public domain. (Modified by the author.)