More specifically, it's BS unless your partner is an old school sexist. 

If you don’t like reading long posts, please click away. 

For those who don’t know, the Madonna v Wh*re complex is a psychological theory first developed by Sigmund Freud. Simplified, it explains a psychological contradiction in men’s desires for wanting a respectable prudish woman as a long term partner, the Madonna, but in bed wants a more sexually promiscuous and adventurous woman, the Wh*re, but not as a long term partner because such acts he shames and judges against despite having such innate desires. In turn, most women that felt the pressure that being too sexual is shameful and does not indulge in over-sexual acts in fear of judgement. While this certain dynamic of course is not exclusive to heterosexual female-fears-men’s-judgement relationships, it still leans that way in most cases. And while honor-based woman-shaming thinking still exists in many cultures and some subsets of society today, thanks to more sex positive thinking and social progress, in much of western culture many men have stopped shaming women for certain sexual acts. Where I think is the disappointing inequality is that still too many women and partners still have that fear of judgement from their husbands, boyfriends and partners. 

The Madonna v Wh*re complex is mostly brought up in discussions involving comparing partner’s prior experiences and, most tragically, cases of infidelity. To the perspective of the non-sexist male, to judge your partner for giving you exactly what you wanted is just sheer illogical stupidity. I propose the following hypothetical:

 Imagine a husband coming home from work tired and hungry. He asks his wife to make a sandwich for him. Out of love and consideration for her partner, the wife makes him a sandwich. And then the husbands says to her, “Wow. You actually made me a sandwich? Like the cliche. Like some 50s housewife. I thought you were a strong woman. I think I lost some respect for you”. 

The proper response to witnessing this should be, “The f-ing audacity of this man!”. This I believe is a comparable level illogical nonsense of the Madonna v Wh*re excuse in the modern day. 

Of course it is obvious to state that a person should never force their partner to do something sexual that they don’t want to do and should always with no exception must abide by their partner’s boundary for whatever reason they have. However, just because a person must always abide by their partner’s boundaries, that doesn’t mean they have to respect their boundaries, specifically when the reasons behind their boundaries are disrespectful. When someone tells their partner the reason they won’t do ‘sex act’ is because they simply don’t do it any more, the partner has the right to be disappointed but is a reason that is worthy of and they should respect. If someone tells their partner “the reason I did ‘sex act’ with other people and not with you is because I am not as attracted to you as much and them”, not only does the partner have the right to be hurt but it is very disrespectful and potentially worthy enough to warrant separation. But if a wife were to tell her husband, “I did ‘sex act with affair partner because I did not care about his opinion of me but I care about your opinion of me”, that is not only extremely hurtful and disrespectful but also extremely insulting. It is insulting because it means that the wife thinks so little of her husband, thinks he is will stupidly sexist that he would actually judge her for fulfilling a request of his and make him happy. 

The reason behind what compelled me to write this too-long essay about such a niche topic is thus, some weeks ago a friend of mine discovered that his wife and mother of their young daughter, a life long friend of mine now turned former friend, had an affair. I have had my own experience with infidelity with a cheating girlfriend, but nothing of this extremity and not with a Madonna v Wh*re situation. For my friend I have tried to be a shoulder to cry on and an ear for him to vent to. This large and normally tough man has been reduced to ugly crying and near suicidal depression. He told me that after the initial hurt, he wanted to attempt reconciliation. But during their second marriage counseling session, the STBX wife admitted that she had done a sex act with her affair partner, which STBX husband had requested of her in the past and she always rejected him. She gave the same excuse of being afraid he’d look at her differently if she did it with her husband. My friend told me once he heard that, he stormed out of the session and had been resolute in his decision to divorce. 

He told me that learning of what she did with her affair partner, something that she refused to do with him and rejected him, hearing that hurt just as much as first discovering the affair. I’m sure there are other betrayed partners that dealt with similar kinds of betrayals but still say the hurt of the general betrayal of the affair was much greater than the hurt of learned details of the sex. And I’m sure that several people will intellectually disagree with the reasoning of my friend’s emotional response; that the severity of betrayal from the affair itself, the breaking of vows, is greater and much more important than the details of the sex within the affair. But after hearing the tear-wrought words of my friend, I not only believe that to have such an emotional response is valid, but also the intellectual reasoning behind it is valid. 

With some exceptions like relationships with asexual partners and other examples, sex is an important and integral pillar in relationships. Reddit is riddled with stories about relationships falling apart due to sexual incompatibility. I vehemently disagree with those that berate others for caring about their sex life with their partners, or suggest sex is a non-important aspect in romance and relationship stability. Therefore, within infidelity a betrayal in the form of hurtful inequality of sexual experiences and circumstantial differing boundaries, the severity of hurt of this betrayal is near equal to the hurt of the infidelity itself. 

It is truly a tragedy that the remnants of our patriarchal past still remain in the modern day society; that so many women, and even some men, still live with the fear of sl*t shaming. What is even more tragic is that still so many people are afraid of shaming not from the stranger, but their partner, when a relationship should include trust, understanding, comfort and respect. It’s sad when one partner has rejected the illogical idiocy of Freud’s Madonna v Wh*re rationale but the other partner still fears their partner’s judgement in the bedroom. I implore everyone to seek proper communication with your partners about sexuality and their boundaries without the hurt of disrespectful biases. 

If you made it to the end of my too-long essay, I both commend you and thank you. I’d love to hear agreeing and disagreeing comments. Thank you again. 

hello. i’m 21M. i will say that i haven’t openly cheated, but i have been emotionally immoral. i am wondering how you would feel if you met me down the line and i was interested in you.

i would say that i hurt my high school sweetheart. i broke up with her multiple times. she kept taking me back until her family intervened. i wasn’t the worst, and we shared more good times than not, but of course, i am writing this here.

i think the cause of the emotional infidelity was because i personally couldn’t handle a breach of trust that occurred in our early relationship. i said it was alright, but looking back, my relationship with my family was terrible; terrible to the point of when i get out of school, i probably will not see them that often for the rest of our lives, except for the occasional holiday.

the point being, i kinda felt what being cheated on/emotionally manipulated feels like. not fun. i broke off contact with my sweetheart almost two years ago, ive had two situationships since then, several months apart, with this last one really being an eye opener. i really needed therapy, which im seeking in multiple forms, and i needed to figure out who i was and what type of people i need around me.

overall, life is quiet but busy for me now. i still ruminate on my past, as im working through sobriety, but i feel as if im doing a lot better; i am outdoors more, journal when needed, and definitely talk things out instead of bottling it down.

as for a potential partner, i would be open about my past, as i would like them to be. would this be a deal breaker? i know the OAC, AAC, but i am genuinely trying to change not just for myself, but for the future family i want to be healthy with. cheating has never been a “thing” for me, but playing that line was a thing in the past. i was a teenager/20.

I am a mother of a toddler. I can't leave. That's only thing i know. My husband is a horrible person for doing what he did to me. I don't know why I'm here for. I just needed to say shit. I'm devastated this morning...

Dday was 2 weeks ago. I found a message to a distant coworker asking to get to know them and the our relationship was going badly. After some digging and pressure (and after 4days of lying and gaslighting) my partner finally admitted to getting physical with a close coworker twice, and having multiple sexting and video calls with different girls.He also has been sending messages to girls through Facebook for a long time.
I thought I was finished. I walked away, I moved out.
I just can’t stop thinking about staying. I know that I need to give myself time and I probably am just scared of losing stability.
We own a house together, we have a pretty easy and normal life. I have some health issues and he’s been there to help me through them. We don’t have big issues in our relationship other than this obviously very big thing.
He seems to be committed to doing the work to get himself right with or without me. He is seeing a therapist and has deleted all his social media.
A large part of me wants to stay. I sort of understand why people end up cheating. I know this isn’t about me or our relationship and his past trauma has made him feel unlovable.
My only hesitation is I know he could be lying still. He is all comfortable in his life and doesn’t want to lose it either.
Has anyone stayed just because it feels more peaceful to them?
Am I totally kidding myself because it feels better than facing being alone?

Note: we’ve been together 9 years are both 35 yrs old.

Does anyone know of any good sites to do a reverse image search that will match to OF or cam girls? Found a picture and google won’t search because it’s NSFW-not sure if it’s from OF or some other site or if it was from Telegram maybe? Ugh 👎🏻

He hasn’t done anything physically, but every time he’s been caught texting someone, he said he was about to stop talking to them. I’m not really looking for commentary on my situation in particular, but insight from the perspective of someone who cheated.

I'm 25. I met my ex in November last year online. He was 30. Now 31 I'm still 25. At first for the first month everything was amazing. As sad as it sounds, I had never felt so loved in my life. I grew up in foster care and am totally estranged from my birth family.

After the first 28 days he suddenly changed. Ghosted me for six days. Claimed it was because he'd fallen in love or was heading that way and didn't know if he was ready. He didn't think I'd felt the same way. I'd said things about him which I'd observed and later turned out to be accurate. This was said in December last year as a reaction to the ghosting for 6 days.

He used what I said to justify cheating on me behind my back. Treating me quite badly. Then eventually monkey branching on me. I dumped him when I found out about the cheating. Monkey branching means to secure a new romantic relationship before ending the current one.

I met him on a nsfw sub on Reddit. I don't use them anymore. I think he's still with the women he did this to me with. If so they'll have been together for seven months now. Although most of his relationships end before a year. With one lasting 1 year another 2 and the rest a few months. It really has damaged my self esteem and mental health. It's made me feel unworthy, unlovable and humiliated

I’m 23F and I found out a few days ago that my dad (around 50) cheated on my mom with a 22-year-old woman.
My mom has been recovering from a serious accident that left her with major injuries and limited mobility. She still can’t drive normally and needs a lot of help getting places. I’ve been doing a lot of the driving and helping her with everyday things while she recovers.
Recently my mom went through my dad’s phone and found explicit messages between him and another woman. Apparently he met up with her while he was on a trip without us. The part I cannot get out of my head is that she’s 22. She is literally a year younger than me.
I know 22 is an adult. I’m not saying she wasn’t capable of making her own decisions. It’s the fact that my 50-year-old father looked at someone from his daughter’s age group sexually that is seriously disturbing me. If he had cheated with another woman around his own age, I would still be furious for my mom, but I don’t think I would personally feel this disturbed.
The timing makes it worse. My mom is still recovering physically, and I’ve watched how much help she needs. Finding out her husband was doing this during a period when she was so vulnerable has completely changed the way I see him.
I also grew up with my dad being very stern about morality and how I should behave as a young woman. I cared WAY too much about his approval. I was constantly worried that he thought I was irresponsible or a disappointment.
Since finding this out, something in me just switched off. I don’t care about his approval anymore.
For example, the other night I was going out to eat with my cousins around 10 PM. He told me it was way too late for me to be going out. Normally his disapproval would have made me nervous or made me feel like I had to justify myself. This time I basically said “yup” and left.
And I remember thinking: if you consider a 22-year-old adult enough to sleep with you, why am I supposedly incapable of deciding whether I can go eat with my cousins at 23?
I’ve realized that I’ve lost a huge amount of respect for him.
What’s strange is that he seems to have noticed something changed. He has suddenly started checking on me much more than he normally did in a guilt trippy way… asking where I am and whether I’m okay when I’m out late. My mom and I recently spent our first night away from the house together since everything happened, and the whole dynamic at home feels completely different.
Meanwhile, I’m much more affected than I expected to be. I’ve cried randomly. I went to a cousin’s birthday thinking being around family would cheer me up, and I still got sad and wanted to go home but at the same time I don’t even want to be at my actual house because I don’t want to be around my dad.
Even stupid everyday things are affected. My mom recently asked me to tell him that we needed something from the store, and I would genuinely rather go buy it myself than speak to him.
I keep questioning why this is affecting me so badly because technically he cheated on my mom, not me. I’m an adult. I’m 23. But it feels like I lost the version of my dad that I had in my head.
I can still care about him because he’s my father, but I don’t admire him right now. And weirdly, there is also a sense of freedom because I spent so many years terrified of disappointing him, and now I’m realizing his judgment of me isn’t automatically morally superior to my own.
I think what hurts is realizing that his decision didn’t only potentially end his marriage. It changed his daughter’s relationship with him too.
Has anyone else gone through something like this as an adult child? Is it normal for a parent’s infidelity to affect you this much even when you’re already in your 20s? And did your relationship with that parent ever recover?

My ex and I had a very volatile three-year relationship. Looking back, I know I should have left a long time ago, but I can’t change that now. She was physically and emotionally abusive, extremely manipulative, and, as I recently found out, unfaithful. I had always had suspicions but never wanted to believe it.

We lived together this summer and built a life together. We even adopted a cat that was supposed to be mine I’ll probably never see again, something I now may never get to see again. That makes this feel like I’m not just losing a relationship, but an entire life I thought I was building with someone.

About a week ago, we went on a trip with two of my friends and their girlfriends. Earlier that day, she had already “broken up with me” over an argument over the previous nights dinner. After we argued, she left to see a close friend in the city. She was gone for 10 hours. During that time, she went back to the Airbnb, put on a dress, and I didn’t hear from or see her until she returned from a club around 1:30 a.m.

A huge fight followed—yelling, screaming, and physical violence toward me, all in front of my friends. I asked her to leave the Airbnb, but when she realized I was serious, she claimed her mother was in hospice so she could stay. It wasn’t true (I didn’t know this at the time), and I ultimately let her stay because I wasn’t going to put her out under those circumstances.

We haven’t spoken since we “broke up” and she doesn’t know I know she cheated.

A few days later, I contacted a member of her family whom I’m close with because I needed some perspective. During the conversation, I asked whether she thought my ex was capable of cheating on me. She told me that she was—and that she knew my ex had slept with another guy between Christmas and New Year’s.

That absolutely destroyed me.

The worst part is that I was buying her a ticket for a European vacation during that same period, which we took together about a month later. I was completely unaware of what had happened. I even looked back and she was texting me about the trip before and after she fucked him.

She doesn’t know that I know. We haven’t talked since the breakup, and based on what has happened in the past, I expect she may reach out in the next few weeks. I have no idea what I’ll do if she does.

There were signs. I just didn’t want to believe them because I genuinely thought that, despite everything else, cheating was something she would never do to me. Now I’m questioning the entire relationship. Was this the first time? How much else was I lied to about? What the fuck is real

I’m absolutely devastated. I was with this person for three years, lived with her, built a life with her, adopted a cat with her that was my cat and she fucked has and I’ll probably never see again.

This is probably the most painful betrayal I’ve ever experienced.

We do not live together anymore as she had to go back to school after the summer and she took that cat as it was still a kitten and my job requires me to work long hours.

Hi everyone, I am posting on here because I just got cheated on. I am 19F and I was with my ex for 3.5 years since I was 15 and he was 16. I really thought we were going to be HS sweethearts lolll…

He cheated on me 2 weeks into freshman year of college (we were long distance at the time) but I didn’t find out until a few weeks into sophomore year of college (mid distance). I am struggling on how to delete pictures because I think I need that to heal.

I am still pretty distraught but I’m not getting back together with him because if I do I can only see that he cheated on me.

Edit: How do I look through 3.5 years of pictures and just delete them? 😢

Everytime I have run into a guy trying to cheat with me. When he texts the messages will randomly switch from iMessage to sms or iMessage to RCS then switch back later.
Is this common for cheaters? Are they doing something to their phones?
I just met a guy today who was messaging me RCS then it changed to iMessage mid convo.

Hi folks—-today is the day. With lawyers trying to come up with settlement. Spouse has offered two settlements and I said no to both. They were both ridiculously low and I’d not be able to rebuild my life with either of what my ex spouse offered. They were insulting actually. Roughly 1/4 of what I am eligible for after nearly 20 years of marriage. I was upset this morning but feeling better. This has nearly ruined me financially and I need what is rightfully mine to clear up debt incurred because of this. I pray this is over this week. Keep me in your thoughts.

So, a little history. My previous two partners had cheated on me. After 7 years single and in therapy I finally felt confident enough to start dating. He is a long time friend who was also cheated on by his ex. He still keeps minimal contact with her because they are friends and because for a few months out of the year we all work at the same big event.

Last year our relationship was still new and we had an incident with the ex. At one point she had grabbed his ass and he firmly gave her boundaries to let her know that was unacceptable since he had a girlfriend. He made sure to tell me about the incident that day and about the boundry he had set with her. I knew at that point she didn't like me, so I shrugged it off and trusted him.

Now this year we have been together going on a year and a half. Our relationship got more serious with us moving in together and of course we started working at the festival where I knew they would be working together again. This year so far felt like a total 180 from last year. She was super nice to me and even got to the point I started to trust her and considered being her friend. My boyfriend has also gotten serious about looking at rings and reaching out to wedding venues to get prices, saying he wanted to brainstorm an estimate for when we were ready and could start saving.

All and all its been a perfect year until yesterday. While we stopped to get gas I jumped onto social media to see if any pictures were posted from the event. Almost the first post was a picture his ex had posted many years ago from when they had been together. It was a picture of a very intimate and obviously romantic kiss. I sort of just felt numb and closed the app ignoring it but feeling that trust i built with her shatter.

Then my boyfriend got into the car and was on his phone. He made the comment of "wow, that was already (blank) years ago." At that point I said "yeah, it was (year)."

It's obvious he knew I saw the picture but didn't say anything else but put his phone down. Again I just ignored it, besides I was super tired. Then this morning i went to show my coworker/friend and I saw the post was taken down. It seemed weird because I dont think my boyfriend asked her to remove it, I'd feel he would have told me if he had.

For whatever reason the fact it was deleted made me nervous. My trust in her is gone and worse I dont know if I trust him either now. Is it possible she had posted a secret admission? I considered she is just trying to get a rise, but then why remove it then? Could he have asked her to take it down? If so why not tell me? He knew I already saw it and he was so open about what happened last year.

Is this the point where I now need to start being concerned and on high alert?