The first time I cheated on my boyfriend was the day before our six-year anniversary. I’d been engaging in what some might call an “emotional affair” for months with someone at work. Well, not just someone. A female friend of mine who was (recently) married to another woman.
It may shock you to know that none of the relationships involved in this affair survived. Least of all the one that blossomed between me and my co-worker.
We had a full-fledged affair for six months, during which I felt alive, frenzied, and intoxicated. Even when it was painful, it was thrilling. During this time, I was incessantly curious about myself: what kind of person am I? How far can I push my own boundaries? What am I unearthing that perhaps I have always known? I had a lot of questions and at the time, very few answers.
And even to this day, I still wonder if everyone who has ever cheated on their partner thought of themselves, at some point, as the type of person who would never cheat. I wonder if they, too, held themselves up to a standard of being. What is the moment, or series of moments, that starts to distort their own sense of morality?
At what point does their desire to act out evolve from kindling, to a match, to a fire? And in that scorching hot moment when they feel their own desire burning on their face, what is it that they feel? Do they feel powerful, too?
I never admitted to my boyfriend that I had cheated on him. It never felt worth it, because I was already hurting him so much by leaving in the first place. The affair was a catalyst for all the things I knew were true about us: I had outgrown him, I could not give him the things he wanted in a partnership, his substance use issues were out of my own depth to deal with, and also — perhaps most pointedly — I was definitely gay.
This was not a realization I came to swiftly or with any sense of clarity until it was staring me plain in the face. I had always had crushes on other girls from a very young age, but I also had crushes on boys. Since one set of feelings was nurtured much more than the other—by my friends and family, by society, by every single piece of media I consumed—the idea of seeing women as potential romantic or sexual partners never seriously crossed my mind until my late teens. Even then, when it did cross my mind, it was very promptly suppressed.
All these years later, once I’d had started exploring this side of my sexuality, it felt like I had torn the lid off of something and there was no turning back.
So, I broke up with him, for all the obvious reasons, and for many that were left unsaid that had absolutely nothing to do with my affair. Six months after that, the woman with whom I’d been having the affair, left her wife. She and I went on to be in a boundary-less, confusing, but nonetheless rewarding relationship for over a year afterward. In the beginning, our relationship had started innocently and escalated over a period of many months. There was a lot of will-we-won’t-we energy, some of which was explicitly discussed. We would both lean all the way in and then tear ourselves apart. It was emotionally exhausting, confusing, and often tormenting. We knew something beyond a work crush was happening, and once we acted on it, it was like Alice following the rabbit.
We only got deeper, blindly chasing our own desire.
I was head over heels in lust, not only with her, but with the idea of being in a relationship with her. All those years of suppressing the idea that I could be in a relationship of any kind with a woman were madly bubbling to the surface. I wanted it so badly that there was absolutely no room left for the concept of being heterosexual anymore. What I had known to be true about my identity was exposing itself. I pulled and pulled at that thread, and found a sense of satisfaction knowing it was something no one else knew about.
I was drunk off the adrenaline of hiding our relationship, and then hung over from it for the rest of our time together. There is an incredible amount of power that sits at the centre of lust, and it was compounded by secrecy.
Combining these two elements was like watching emotional plutonium form in my hands. It was dangerous, and beautiful, and terrifying, and perfect. This is what infidelity felt like, even if it was just for moments at a time. This feeling, this itching, burning combusting was the closest thing I had ever felt to power. In all of its chaos and uncertainty, it somehow became the thing over which I felt total control.
By pushing myself to the limits of my own boundaries, by tearing apart my preconceived notions of monogamy and keeping secret after secret, I turned the coals of my identity into diamonds. That didn’t make it fair, or better, or particularly remarkable. I was still cheating on a person that I did love, who loved me, and who was for all intents and purposes, a really good partner. That was the most difficult thing to grapple with: the idea of fairness. To this day, I think about a lot of my actions, and feelings, and decisions as having been unfair to my partner.
My own sexuality and sexual identity was a secret I kept from him. It was the same secret that I had kept, also, from myself until I could no longer contain it. My private exploration into making sense of my own queerness happened slowly at first, and then all at once — much like my infidelity. My own inner turmoil, my rationalization and re-rationalization, my constant if not pedantic evaluation of how I presented myself to the world was meticulous and delicate. If I said or did this, would it be perceived as gay? If I wore this, or didn’t wear that, would people think I was queer?
Looking back, I now see how unfair I was to myself in those early moments. I was starting to shackle my own desire, to label it with negativity, and shame. So the journey to forgive myself for how unfair I was, had to start with accepting that my perceived heterosexuality was at odds with my actual sexuality, and in order to align myself to who I was and how I understood my place in this world, I had to step outside of my heterosexual identity.
I needed to understand that my cheating was a response to my own self-discovery, and an attempt to harness autonomy and agency over my sexuality. The world had decided that I was straight, and I had determined that the world was wrong. I had to take that power back. In this process, cheating allowed me to step into my power as a queer person. And it changed my life.
I t took me nearly five years in therapy to forgive myself for cheating however. When my therapist would ask me if I would change anything that happened, any decisions that I made, any conversations that I had (or didn’t have, for that matter) my initial response was always, and unequivocally, no. But that’s not entirely true; there is one thing.
I wish, at the time, I’d had the words to describe how I felt. I wish that I could have used words to make sense of everything that I was feeling. I searched for them, I tried to force them out of me, but it was in vain. I wasn’t ready to tell that story then. I was without the resources required to speak my own truth.
Cheating was a choice that I made in the absence of the words and tools to express my own desire and inner-struggle, and in the presence of shame and fear about who I am and how that would impact another human being. Despite everything that was on the table, everything that was screaming “no” at me, I cheated anyway. We cheated anyway.
When I was with her, I felt powerful. When I was lying about where I was, I felt powerful. When I knew she chose me over her wife, I felt powerful.
When I continued to have sex with my boyfriend, dissociating in the process, I felt powerful because I had a kind of control over my own mind and body that I didn’t have before. I played fantasies of being punished by him in my head, the dramatic irony of it all somehow, sickeningly, got me off. He had no idea, and I felt confident in living two lives.
My ability to compartmentalize became fuel for the fire raging inside of me. I became very skilled at rationalizing and justifying my behaviour. That’s how the human brain works, especially when it’s high on dopamine and chasing more. We have an uncanny way of being able to explain and justify just about anything. That’s the part that made my power feel complicated. I felt guilty for not feeling guilty. I was manipulative, and misleading, and a liar.
These were not adjectives that anyone who knew me would have used to describe me. These were adjectives, and behaviours, and decisions made by the type of person I felt sure that I was not and would never be. Until someone walked into my life that made me see who I could be, and who I longed to be.
A situation presented itself where I could shed a skin that no longer fit me, and open up a world full of colours I had only dreamed about seeing.
Over time, that truth started to sting. I took advantage of my boyfriend in every way possible. I took advantage of his trust. I took advantage of his generosity. I took advantage of his ability to numb out because he had substance abuse issues. I took advantage of his maleness because, on some level, I thought I was smarter than him. That’s how duplicitous this energy made me.
I not only felt more connected to my true self than ever, but like I was in total and complete control of everything and everyone around me; a hubris was born. I could not find a balance between needing to feel powerful and doing it in a way that was fair. Could I have tried harder to strike that balance? Maybe. But, perhaps I knew my power rested somewhere in those waters, in the depths of my personality, in the dark parts.
I didn’t know who I was going to find when I decided to wade in the deeper waters of myself. I didn’t know if I would like who I met in that place.
I thought, perhaps, I wasn’t supposed to like whoever I met there. I wanted to dislike her, because I thought I had to. But I was tired of doing things because I thought I had to, because it was expected of me. I had to know I was capable of knowing myself, even the dark parts. I had to know there was something else out there for me, and all I had to do is jump.
Admitting out loud to people that you have cheated on a partner feels an awful lot like asking for a scarlet letter to be placed upon you. I still feel ashamed about it. I still talk about it in therapy.
There are lots of people who probably think I should carry shame with me always. But I can no longer carry around the weight of something I decided to do in order to meet the person I kept in the closet. I can no longer feel burdened for finding power in doing things the way I did them.
I cheated on my long-term boyfriend because I was confused. I kept cheating because I felt powerful. At the time, I was only 24 years old, and I desperately wanted to let go of everything that the world had placed onto my shoulders, and start to figure out who I am.
In order to do that, to take a leap of faith solely on myself, to open the closet doors, to look in the mirror and see myself, I needed something more than my intellect had afforded me. I needed power. So instead of waiting for it, for the first time in my life I just took it. I was no longer afraid of what would happen if I did it, I was only afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.
I knew that the affair was only a stepping stone. The entire time she and I were together I knew it wouldn’t last; it wasn’t built to last. Our entire relationship was built on secrecy and infidelity, the collision of two separate journeys seeking power, fueled almost entirely by lust.
It was set up to burn out from the get-go.
I learned a lot about myself from that relationship, and I learned a lot about what red flags look like for me. The entire experience forced me to interrogate the concept of monogamy, which is something that I thought I was struggling with. But since then I’ve listened to enough Dan Savage and spoken to enough queer people to understand that monogamy is a choice, not an assumption.
The status of my relationships is a living, breathing thing. I may choose monogamy for months, years, or even decades, and then that status could evolve or change. This understanding became something that has permeated my relationships since, and is an agreement I have in my current relationship.
Discovering, exploring, and cherishing my own queerness has freed me from the assumptions that came with heterosexuality. It allowed me to take the space and time I needed in order to find the language to explain how I felt. Looking back, I realized that how I felt was trapped — in my relationship, in my own body, by the performance of my sexuality — and what I so desperately wanted was the power to get out. I suppose I could have torn down the walls around me brick by brick.
But an affair was a stick of dynamite, and it certainly did the trick.
