Is It Cheating If He Knows? (Spoiler: No, It’s Not.)
TikTok video from 2022-08-26
Every now and then, a question lands in my inbox or comments that feels less like curiosity and more like judgment wrapped in disbelief. One of the most common ones?
“You’re okay with going out and cheating on your husband?”
At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss this kind of question—it usually comes from someone scrolling quickly, reacting before researching. But I’ve also come to understand that many people genuinely don’t know the difference between polyamory and infidelity. So today, I want to pause and answer that question with the care and clarity it deserves.
No, I’m not cheating on my husband.
And yes, he and I are very much okay with how we live our lives.
Let’s start here: Cheating is about deception. It involves breaking an agreement, hiding the truth, or violating the trust that a relationship is built on.
Polyamory, on the other hand, is built on transparency, honesty, and consent. It’s a relationship structure where both people agree—fully and freely—that loving and connecting with more than one person can exist alongside a stable, primary partnership.
My husband and I have been married for 35 years. We’ve grown up together. We’ve raised a family together. We’ve supported each other through career shifts, relocations, health scares, and quiet Sunday mornings. We are each other’s home base, and we want to spend the rest of our lives together.
But we also married young. And as we approached midlife, we both realized there was something we wanted to explore—not because our marriage was broken, but because we were still growing.
That’s when we opened our marriage.
And not in secret.
Not as a workaround.
Not as a “get out of jail free” card.
But with mutual agreement, with shared values, and with a foundation of ongoing communication.
We both date other people.
We both experience intimacy outside of our marriage.
We both support each other’s autonomy, while choosing—every day—to remain in partnership with each other.
That’s not cheating. That’s choice.
I want to acknowledge something here: if you’ve been cheated on, your pain is real. That kind of betrayal cuts deep. It shakes your sense of trust and safety. So I understand why seeing someone in a “non-traditional” relationship might bring up some hard feelings.
But projecting that pain onto someone who is living honestly and consensually doesn’t serve anyone. In fact, it distracts from the real issue: that healthy relationships are defined by the agreements made between the people in them—not by social norms or outside expectations.
My husband and I have never had affairs. Not before polyamory, and not since we began living this way. Everything we do—every date, every partner, every connection—is out in the open. We talk. We debrief. We support. We check in. We renegotiate when needed.
Is it always easy? No.
Is it always worth it? For us, yes.
There’s this cultural myth that a successful marriage must look one particular way: two people, monogamous forever, one bed, one person to meet every need until death do them part.
And for some, that model works beautifully.
But for others—including myself and my husband—that model became too small.
We realized we didn’t have to choose between being married and being curious. We didn’t have to end our relationship to explore new kinds of love. We just had to expand the terms of what commitment meant to us.
For the past three years, we’ve been polyamorous. That means we’ve built relationships with other people—emotionally, physically, intimately—while continuing to invest in our marriage. It has required more communication, more trust, more vulnerability. And it has given us more freedom, more joy, and more depth.
We are still married. Still in love. Still choosing each other.
Only now, we’re doing it from a place of honesty—not obligation.
So to those who wonder if I’m “okay with cheating on my husband,” the answer is: I’ve never cheated. Neither has he. We simply love differently.
We love each other enough to make space.
We love ourselves enough to be honest.
And we love our partners enough to honor their full humanity too.
Polyamory isn’t a betrayal of marriage.
For us, it’s an evolution of it.
If you’re open to learning more about how this works—or even just open to the idea that love doesn’t always look the way we were taught—I invite you to stay curious.
Because life is big. And love can be bigger still.
