Everyone hates cheaters. To cheat (and get caught) is to render oneself instantly despisable. The deceit, the skullduggery, the intimate betrayal! Most of us are personally familiar with an explosive affair upending our lives, or the lives of loved ones. Hating cheaters is easy, almost comforting in its near-universality. Affairs aren’t typically afforded the assumption of moral ambiguity; they create clear, easy narratives of Villain and Victim, Wronger and Wronged.
There is only one exception, it seems, to this golden rule: Cheating is okay if you end up with the love of your life.
Most casual affair-havers can’t pull it off, but a rare few play the long game, proving that, through decades of mutual adoration, they were drawn to cheat not by baser instincts but the highest possible call known to humankind: true love. Look at Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, one of the most famous crazy-in-love Hollywood couples of all time, who were together for 50 blissful years after Newman divorced his first wife, to whom he was married when he met Woodwood on the set of The Long, Hot Summer in 1957. Does anybody even remember that Tom Hanks was still married to his college sweetheart when he fell for Rita Wilson on the set of 1985’s Volunteers? They celebrated 35 years together in April 2023.
The secret, it would seem, is patience. But how long do you have to wait to go from persona non grata to sitting pretty atop cupid’s pedestal? Fifty years, give or take. That’s true, at least, for one of the world’s most famous onetime mistresses: Queen Consort Camilla Parker Bowles. “It’s not easy,” the then-Duchess of Cornwall told Vogue in 2022 about the turbulent period in her life when she and the future king of England kept up their romance after marrying other people. And Charles hadn’t wed just anybody, of course; Diana was the universally beloved people’s princess. “I was scrutinized for such a long time that you just have to find a way to live with it.” In Netflix’s The Crown, Camilla is imagined to have said: “One doesn’t want to be all ‘poor me’ about it, but people have not been kind. I think they forget loving the Prince of Wales has cost me everything.”
For the most part, we have collectively forgiven Charles and Camilla for their indiscretions. Many happy decades together have proven, perhaps, that they’d both cheated on their previous spouses because — despite the customs and royal duties that had attempted to trap them in the wrong marriages — true love prevailed. All these many years later, having been given her mother-in-law’s blessing before Elizabeth passed away, Camilla herself is now queen; she who’d once lost everything has gained it all back and then some. Her longtime affair with Charles, once a tawdry international scandal the likes of which the world had never seen, has since been rebranded a love story for the ages.
Among a younger, more irony-pilled crowd, Camilla is the role model for side chicks everywhere, someone whose ascent from public disgrace to literal queen of England might inspire other mistresses to simply wait out the storm.
That’s what I’m trying to do, at least. And if my calculations are correct, my wait is somewhere between 10 and 25 percent done.
Five years ago, I fell in love with a stranger while I was still in a long-term live-in relationship with someone else. And as I always point out when I tell this story, this wasn’t an affair, exactly. My ex and I were in an open relationship. But we did have one unbreakable rule: While we could hook up with whomever we’d like, we could not fall in love with anyone else.
Cheaters Week
Stories about infidelity and betrayal, from catching them in the act to getting revenge (and even making peace with it).
I’d gone on a lesbian cruise to report a culture story about the queer community and the forging of intergenerational lesbian bonds. On that boat was Lynette, the woman whom I was destined to marry. What began innocently enough as a hookup became something else entirely when she told me she loved me three days after we’d met. “You can’t possibly know that,” I’d scoffed at the time, my heart hammering a million beats a minute in the dead of night, both of us in bed together, somewhere far, far out to sea. She’d just shrugged. She said she was 53 years old; she knew what she wanted in life. And suddenly, right then, so did I.
I returned home to my ex, and I told them almost immediately that I’d fallen hard for someone else and saw a different kind of future for myself. (Would a “real cheater” be so honest and open? Minus five years of penitence for good behavior.) Devastated but determined, I hurriedly packed my things and left my ex behind in the sunny apartment where we’d accumulated so many beautiful things — the sheepskin rug from our roadtrip around Ireland; a glass shelf bursting with houseplants; my first real, grown-up sofa — and I moved in with roommates, wondering what the hell I thought I was doing. I called Lynette, who was back home in northern England, thousands of miles away, and I cried while she talked me off the ledge.
A few weeks later, I published my story about what I’d experienced on the cruise, and it quickly went viral. I’d tried to assuage some of my terrible guilt about the breakup by disclosing in the story that they’d cheated on me — once, and only once — while on a solo vacation a couple years back, as if to say, See? I’m not the only bad actor in all this. I don’t regret most of the ways things ended between us, but I do regret airing that particular piece of dirty laundry, because the truth is I’d never really cared about the cheating — our real problems were more pedestrian and far less exciting, involving poor communication, division of household labor, and the different things we wanted out of life — but I knew that it’s a powerful trump card, a cheap and easy way to get people on my side. No one will get up in arms on your behalf about the dishes, or a relationship with generally toxic vibes, but cheating? Bring out the pitchforks!
My inbox filled with long, searching, grateful messages from strangers who told me my essay had given them the nerve to leave their partners, or else radically transform their lives. Some of the people I knew in real life, however, were less thrilled. They were, in fact, very angry with me and how I’d treated my ex; I lost a number of our mutual friends, including people I’d known and loved for many years. For the most part, I agreed with their harsh assessments. But now that time has passed, and Lynette and I have gotten married, does the staying power of our love mitigate the ways I’d done harm when we met?
I reached out to a number of people who admit to having cheated because they’d fallen in love with someone else to hear how they feel about my working hypothesis that time + commitment = cheating forgiven by society. “It’s interesting that when a relationship is on the rocks, even publicly, friends’ and family’s feelings about the rockiness are rarely considered important,” says Theo (not his real name; everyone in this story was granted a pseudonym), a 30-something living in New York City. “But if one partner cheats on the other, the community seems to develop their own right to punitive measures.”
Theo fell in love with another man when he was still seeing his college boyfriend in his early 20s. “Being the bad guy of a cheating narrative has given me an empathy for other friends who’ve found themselves in collapsing relationships, especially when the headline is they were the one who did the bad thing,” he says. “It’s much more likely that both parties were being dicks to each other about a whole host of topics, and then one partner makes a mistake or a decision that explodes the relationship.”
“I find this obsession with other people’s relationships and indiscretions fascinating,” says Eileen, a Yorkshire woman who had an affair when she was younger with her current partner, who helped her escape an abusive relationship. “People cheat for all sorts of reasons. I don’t see it as necessarily amoral but morally neutral. Good and bad people cheat on their partners and that act doesn’t automatically relegate you to the ‘bad’ team. I’ve supported friends through affairs and I think the only thing I would judge someone for is to not look for the ‘why’.”
Laura, who lives in northern England, fell in love with the man she’s been with for eight years when she was still with her ex. “We were very young when we got together, and I don’t think I ever felt like it was ‘right’,” she says. “I think there was a bit of a sunk-cost fallacy to the relationship. I didn’t want to give up because I had already put so much time into this person, I did care about him as a person, and my residency in the U.K. depended on our relationship. I found myself fantasizing that he would do something to hurt me so that I’d have no choice to get out of the relationship. I would go out and get drunk and fool around with strangers in club toilets but tell myself it wasn’t cheating because I didn’t know them and it didn’t mean anything. Then, after a drunken night out where my co-worker and I flirted relentlessly and then slept together, I knew I had to be the one to take the step to end the relationship.”
Eileen, for her part, believes in true love. “I know our relationship began unconventionally, but that doesn’t make it any less of a love story than anyone else’s,” she says. “Humans are messy and our relationships are messier.”
For Laura, the hardest thing about her breakup was becoming the “villain” of the narrative to her ex’s family, whom she loved. “It devastated me,” she said. But in the end, “I don’t regret anything — I only wish I had been a bit kinder to my ex in the process.” If she hadn’t given it a try with her co-worker, “I think I would’ve massively regretted letting a connection like that pass. We’ve been together for eight years and I can’t imagine my life without him.”
So much of these conversations boil down to doing our own crisis PR, in the hopes we might vault ourselves into the ranks of TJ and Amy, Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton, Gabrielle Union and Dwayne Wade. If we’re really fantasizing, why not shoot for the icon status of Carrie and Big, Meredith and McDreamy, Alicia Florick and Will Gardner — the list goes on and on. In the year between his college ex kicking him out for cheating and when he started dating the new guy he’d fallen for, Theo became “fairly obsessed” with rewatching Frasier. “It has a lot of charms, but the thread that really hooked me was Frasier’s brother Niles’s unrequited love for Daphne,” he says. “It’s tragicomic in the TV show, but it was an almost perfect mirror for how I’d felt: in a relationship with one person but in love with another; then, finally, single but afraid to confess my feelings. Getting invested in their narrative let me play out a storyline I wanted in my own life.”
I think a lot of affair-havers who leave their exes for new love try to spin the stories they tell their friends and family, if only to spare their exes more heartache: Nobody’s fault, true love intervened, what can you do! But who would step out on their relationship if there wasn’t anything going wrong to begin with?
Comedian John Mulaney and actress Olivia Munn tied the knot earlier this month. Mulaney told Seth Meyers on his late show back in 2021 that he’d gone to rehab for a cocaine addiction, asked for a divorce from his ex, the artist Anna Marie Tendler, moved out of their shared home, and “then met and started to date a wonderful woman named Olivia,” with whom he was expecting a baby — in that order. But a lot of people were extremely suspicious of this proposed timeline, and regardless of whether it was true, many fans were angry and heartbroken that such a loud and proud “wife guy” would move on so quickly from someone he’d publicly loved so much.
I, too, am no stranger to massaging a timeline and doing some aggressive messaging about the merits of my new relationship (see a few paragraphs ago). Still, the years have rolled on, and Mulaney and Munn are still together, now married, with a young son, and Munn has publicly praised her husband for stepping up in the child-care department when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023. They seem pretty happy, and the foggy timeline seems to matter less and less.
When Katie, a 32-year-old Scot, recently heard that her ex went on to marry the person he’d cheated on her with, it “made all the hurt and his mistakes seem worthwhile, if that makes sense? Plus, after breaking up I did some traveling, worked in America for a while, and came out [as a lesbian], so I felt like he’d done me a favor in the long run.” She’s since met the love of her life, whom she’s been with for five a half years; they have “a house and a fur baby, so things worked out a lot better for me too.”
Isn’t that exactly what we all want to hear after leaving our exes and feeling badly about the ways things ended: that eventually they realize the explosion of your relationship was all for the best after all?
When Lynette recently reread the story I wrote about how we met, she found the grand romance of it all a little overblown. “It was just intense infatuation, really, wasn’t it?” she said. “I was so high on my own supply.”
“What?????” I said. “You told me you loved me!”
“I did love you,” she said. “But how could I have been in love with you? We didn’t know each other.” She’s right, of course; I hadn’t returned her earliest “I love yous” because I knew we’d both been showing each other the best and brightest versions of ourselves in the heady bubble of the cruise, an alternate universe far removed from real life. In reality, we were both going home to different countries, me to my longtime partner. There were no guarantees that she and I would work out.
I had enough faith in the possibility of our love then to take the leap. But looking back now, I realize that the actual love of my life I’d left my relationship for was me. I wanted something radically different for myself. I wanted more. It just took falling in love with someone else to see it.
From our living room in Liverpool with our dog, I can easily envision having taken a different path, where what eventually became our love story — dating long-distance through the pandemic; holding out for many long, scary, miserable months apart; me making a big international move so we could be together full-time at last — never came to be. Where we buckled under the pressure of our circumstances and drifted apart. But even if we hadn’t worked out, it still would have been more than worth it to try. I know that now.
I think I’d needed to pretend for a little while that what we’d had was something otherworldly and rare — love at first sight, or something like it — so I could justify blowing up my life. But maybe I didn’t need the concept of “true love,” something I’m still not even sure I believe in, to pursue a radically different future than the one I thought I’d have with my ex. Maybe all I needed was to trust my own intuition, and to not worry so much about what other people might think. Maybe the person worth doing it all for was me, after all.