The cheater's dilemma

You better carry that weight.

A human lives three lifes. The first ends with the loss of naivety, the second with the loss of innocence and the third with the loss of life itself. It is inevitable that we will go through all three stages

- Dark

This article’s intended audience is for everyone who’s cheated and feels bad about it. For those of you who haven’t cheated, for those of you who cheated and don’t feel bad about, and for those of you here to laugh about monogamy- feel free to stick around, but know this will likely only make sense if you’re one of the guilty.

The cheater’s dilemma

So you cheated. That sucks. Why’d you do that? Listen, it doesn’t matter, it’s done now. Let’s be pragmatic.

Here are the conditions required to set up the cheater’s dilemma:

1. You cheat.

2. You realize cheating was a mistake, and genuinely believe you’ll never cheat again.

3. You intend to stay with your partner for keeps.

Do you tell your partner about the infidelity?

This is a fascinating moral dilemma to me because it involves intention, forecasting and recidivism. If you truly have your partner’s best interest in mind, does it make sense to tell them and risk scarring them emotionally?

Assertion: The only defensible moral choice is to stay silent.

Here’s the flashpoint.

Postulate 1: ‘Mistakes’ exist.

Do you believe in ‘mistakes’? I do.

A ‘mistake’ is the idea that infidelity can be the result of a series of bad decisions that were later recognized as misguided or wrong. I’m comfortable with this idea. It’s childish to think that human beings operate to 100% efficiency all the time, we will have faulty reasoning, we will lose our tempers, we will fail.

What’s important is what you do after.

Postulate 2: ‘Extended mistakes’ do not exist.

Do you believe that someone can make a ‘mistake’ repeatedly for days, months, years on end? That’s a hard question- one of remorse. Is a sinner welcomed into the gates of heaven if he repents only with his dying breath?

What is the time horizon on a mistake? Here we get back to self awareness. Only you can know if you feel bad about something you did. And only if you feel remorse can you know that what you did was wrong.

I can tell you personally that if you lack the self awareness to recognize that you did something wrong after a night’s sleep, then you aren’t the intended guilty audience of this post, you who cheated and don’t feel bad about.

Everybody gets one. If you do it a second time you’ve voided your period of self reflection and plunged head on into the selfish-piece-of-shit zone.

Yes, it’s arbitrary. I’m open to suggestions for more rigorously derived time horizons for remorse, but (normative statement alert) I think it’s telling that we’ve never tried someone for serial manslaughter (manslaughter denotes an accidental killing).

Postulate 3: Intention obscured; the guilty must self appraise.

This is going to be the part of the article where we lose remorseless cheaters and the dogmatic monogamists.

This dilemma is the cheater’s own. No one else can throw the switch except the trolley driver.

Well, actually, we’ll see later that sometimes cheaters are sloppy and there’s potential for a passenger to appoint themselves Grand Poobah of level pulling.

Outside of the case that someone seeing you cheat and telling your partner, the buck stops with you, the cheater, the guilty.

Only you can know if you were acting selfishly or making a mistake.

When I posted “Saying you’ll do something and not doing it is worse than not doing it in the first place,” a redditor replied:

“It’s called lying.”

I disagreed, saying that if you have the earnest intention to do something when you promise you’ll do it, it’s not lying as much as bad forecasting.

The redditor came back with a definition:

Lying: marked by or containing untrue statements : FALSE

I rejected that definition for one cherry picked to suit my argument:

Lying: to speak falsely or utter untruth knowingly, as with intent to deceive.

Here’s what I said:

This approach to lying is dogmatic and only useful for post-facto justification.

Let’s suppose you need someone to deliver your rent to your landlord. You have two friends, the Liar and the Saint, who each owe you half your rent. As a favor, you ask them to deliver it directly to the landlord for you. They each say that they will do it.

The first of the month, the Saint shows up and the Liar doesn’t. However, upon arriving at your landlord’s house the Saint finds the landlord dead. Their task is now impossible.

Even though the Saint committed the necessary action they did not achieve the promised result.

Your framework would call the Saint a liar for not delivering their half of the money. I wouldn’t; circumstances out of their control prevented them from making good on their promise. They still tried- the other person didn’t even show up.

The future is unknowable. In the moment the promise is made, intention is the only determinant we have to know if they’re a Liar, or a Saint.

This is the essence of the cheater’s dilemma: you cannot know your future, only your intentions. That’s all we’ll ever get when it comes to reasoning about future actions (unless you’re like, a serial cheater and real piece of shit. but, again, that means this dilemma isn’t for you).

Postulate 4: Not their actions? Not their problem.

Relationships, in large part, are about shared responsibility. You can count on a responsible partner to hold their own, and inform you if they can’t.

In think about the last few episodes of Big Little Lies, *SPOILERS* in which Renata’s relationship with a spoiled man-child dissolves. Despite being successful in her own right she is dragged back down to poverty by foolish decisions on the part of her husband. Only during their bankruptcy hearing, when a former nanny reveals Gordon promised her compensation for sex, does Renata snap and leave him. Cheating is the straw that breaks the grossly overloaded camel’s back.

I like this example because even before it’s over, the relationship’s economy of responsibility is underwater. Gordon sold the floor out from under Renata while she was out of the room, leaving her to step into empty air.

This all leads to on of my favorite scenes in television:

This all speaks to compartmentalization. In the case of Renata and Gordon, Gordon’s lack of responsibility collapsed the entire foundation of the family. His problems seethed and overflowed into Renata’s life. The dramatic tension for us as the audience comes from how egregiously unfair it is that Renata has to stand for her husband’s incompetence and malicious misrepresentations.

If you tell your partner, you are not helping them. You are forcing them to deal with your problem. You are alleviating your guilt by recruiting another emotional party. They are being blindsided by your incompetence.

Executing innocence

I chose the Dark quote in the beginning of the article for how well it frames the decision to reveal the truth as an execution of our partner’s innocence.

Who are you to end their life in the sun? Death will come eventually. Must we add insult to injury by making our lovers our executioners? What utility springs from the corpse of innocence?

One day I’ll talk to a dogmatic monogamy truther about what benefit they believe is created by informing people they’ve been cheated on long after the cheating is over.

A post in /r/BestOfRedditorUpdates (by way of /r/Marriage) recently posed a time-delayed cheater's dilemma. The original poster cheated on her then-boyfriend of three years by making out with a rando in a bar. Fast forward six years, her friend that was present that night delivers an ultimatum: you tell him or I will.

In this story, I’m not interested by the cheater or the cheated. I’m fascinated by the ultimatum-happy friend (we’ll call her Ultimata). We’re told the friend was cheated on recently and has realized that she would want someone to tell her in that situation.

Now, there’s a number of extremely immoral assumptions our ‘friend’ made in this situation:

• The cheated feels the same about knowing as Ultimata

• Ultimata has the right as a third party to impose her moral code on those around her

• This isn’t just a way of externalizing Ultimata’s pain over her own betrayal. After all, hurt people hurt people.

Funny enough, all of these assumptions are operative in the personal decision to tell your partner as well. Almost as if breaking someone’s innocence is a selfish immoral thing to do.

The edge case: STI's

The case in which this argument falls to shreds is if someone contracts an STI during a ‘mistake’. Then all of this goes out with the bathwater.

Where I’m from if you knowingly pass on an STI, that’s sexual battery (a lesson Geico unfortunately learned the hard way).

The dilemma solved: children

When you have dependents, you are responsible for their wellbeing- emotional and physical. Since dependents aren’t capable of fending for themselves, your obligation to them outweighs your obligation to your partner (I know these are unsupported normative statements, and I look forward to speaking with whoever decides to argue them). There’s a sort of instrumental convergence that occurs when children show up: everything becomes a means to an end of giving them the best life you can.

When children come into the picture, the dilemma is solved. This is no longer about you or your spouses emotions. Those emotions only matter to the degree they affect care of those that can’t care for themselves. Taking the risk of exploding the relationship at this point is tantamount to selfish emotional neglect of the children. It rings a similar note of selfish as suicide without first figuring stuff out for your dependents, albeit a few magnitudes removed.

Proposition: include the cheater’s dilemma on the “decisions in my stead” list

You know the list. Sometimes you might get into a dark mood, or maybe you just learned about locked-in syndrome.

So why not in addition to “If I ever end up as a vegetable…”, also including “If you ever find yourself facing the cheater’s dilemma… tell me/don’t tell me” is probably a good idea. Ultimately, making these decisions for others feels odd when we’ve just spent so long talking about internal truth.

In fact, a “blind will” for decisions you can’t be party to isn’t a bad idea.

I had a flatmate once who had a schizoid break. They lost touch with reality and believed others were reading their thoughts. I have no way of knowing whether their personality completely changed, or whether they started communicating what was on the inside all along. Either way- it was nasty.

Needless to say, myself and the other tenants had no idea what to do. Possessing responsibility for decisions that will change the entire course of another’s life without their input is not a fun position to be in. Eventually we made a series of difficult decisions centering what we thought would be best for our friend, even if it meant sacrificing our friendship.

What would have been best is if we could crack a blind will and see their wishes should they lose touch with reality. Do they want to be hospitalized? Do they want to be put into the care of their parents? Their partner?

You should write down your wishes should these situations arise and you aren’t around to be asked for consent, then discuss it with the important people in your life.

Conclusion

If this really was a one time thing, telling your partner you cheated hurts more people than it helps. The best practice is to discuss this hypothetical early on in the relationship, and ask if they would want to know.

There are some things I didn’t get to include today because of time constraints, if you’d like me to expand with a second article in the series, let me know in the comments. It would include:

• Dan Savage

• I’m not convinced that people’s dogmatic convictions of needing to know they’ve been cheated on is anything more than worrying a sore tooth.

• A deeper investigation of the role of responsibility.

I wanted to shout out to Huan, who became my first paid subscriber today! Thank you so much for supporting me, it means the world :)

Paying isn’t the only way to show support if you’re interested- any like, comment, share, or subscription goes a long way to helping me get the word out, get more eyes, and thus more critique to improve my writing!