I found my husband’s racy texts with another woman. My reaction is seriously messed up.

How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous!

Dear How to Do It,

I (38F) find myself in an absurd situation with my husband (36M) and I desperately need some perspective. We met in college and he insisted he was “not the marrying type.” So when we were tying the knot (including the standard promise of monogamy), I was very pleased with myself for taming the lady-killer. While our marriage is happy and the sex is great for me, I’ve always known he isn’t satisfied.

He has a very high drive (I would estimate my own at “average”) and, based on what little porn he has been willing to share with me, he enjoys rougher sex than I do. I also don’t like to give head or do anything outside what would be considered “vanilla.” He has never complained or made demands… and yet, I have always felt guilty. He is an attentive and talented lover, and I have always struggled with feeling like I’m letting him down in the bedroom.

Well recently, I discovered he is having an affair with someone in our friend group after stumbling onto his texts with her; their steamy exchanges aren’t limited to sexting, either. The messages explicitly referred to meetups. The worst part is that I’m not even angry at him… I’m angry at myself for being relieved. He promised to be sexually loyal to me when we married, and now I’m relieved to find out he’s in bed with another woman? What’s the matter with me! But the self-inflicted pressure to perform is gone, and I find myself enjoying our sex life much more without being weighed down with guilt. What’s worse is that lately, I find myself fantasizing about the two of them together when I masturbate. I’m straight, and have no desire to join them but if I could just get a video of their hookups for my own enjoyment, I wouldn’t complain. I don’t even like the kind of sex he appears to be having with her, so why does thinking about him doing it with her turn me on so much?

I haven’t told him that I know yet, and I don’t believe he suspects. Our life is otherwise happy. What should I do? Should I tell him I know? Would it be insane to ask if I could watch? Should I just let this slide and be thankful that everyone is getting what they want, or is his infidelity (the only one I am aware of) a sign of worse things to come? Is this my fault for thinking I could tame a kinky, promiscuous guy into being husband-material?

—Way Out of My Depth

Sex advice from Rich and Stoya, plus exclusive letter follow-ups, delivered weekly.

Rich Juzwiak: I don’t think that the worst part is that she’s not even angry with him. I think that’s the best part. That’s the silver lining of a situation that could be devastating.

Jessica Stoya: I feel empathy for our letter writer, who is essentially realizing, “Oh my God, I have to think about my sexuality.” Now she has to do all that introspection, communication, and discussion of boundaries that often those of us who aren’t monogamous or heterosexual have a bit more practice in. It’s difficult.

Rich: Right. There’s the internal conflict over her own assumptions about who she is versus the reality, and she’s hitting up against that. She’s having a hard time accepting the fact that she seems to inherently or reflexively accept this non-monogamous situation. Regarding the last question, “Is this my fault for thinking I could tame a promiscuous guy into being husband material?” Being cheated on is not your fault in virtually any thinkable scenario. It’s not your fault. He is an adult man, as you point out, who decided to be in a monogamous relationship. That’s on him. He’s the one who said, “I can do this despite how I’ve lived my life previously or what I know about my sexuality.”

I also think that this illustrates something that we tell people often who are coming into this kind of non-monogamous arrangement. We get questions along the lines of, “I want to open things up, but I’m not sure if it’s going to mess things up. Is it even worth doing?” And the answer is, “Well, you don’t know until you get there.” That’s the scary thing about opening things up. What our writer describes is the exact opposite of the worst-case scenario this kind of decision may trigger, but it’s the same kind of mechanism where you don’t know what it’s going to be like until you get there. You just happen to get there completely inadvertently in terms of your intentions. And now you’re realizing, “Oh, actually, I can deal with this.”

Jessica: Yes. And nobody reading should take this to mean that perhaps they should just go ahead and cheat.

This could’ve gone very differently if the husband had not gotten married, not agreed to monogamy, not cheated, or even broached the conversation with his wife. Our writer could have said, “No, husband, we’re not getting married or promising each other monogamy because you insist you’re not the marrying type.” But none of that happened. Now they’re here and the situation does seem fine except for this internal consternation that our writer is going through.

Rich: I suspect that it’s all going to be easier from here. Once you get over telling the husband, “I’m aware of your affair, and I’m totally OK with it. You don’t have to sneak around and do this. In fact, I might want to be involved in some way,” it will likely get easier.

It’s hard to say because we do get the sense from reading all of the letters we receive that sometimes it seems like transgressing is part of what’s making cheating fun and attractive to people. It’s about more than the sex. It’s not just this practical deduction like, “I need sex I’m not getting,” or “I need a different kind of sex I’m not getting,” or “I need sex with other people because that’s part of what I like in addition to having sex with people that are my primary.” It’s the “it’s fun being bad” type of thing. So that could be at work here, but there’s a chance that he feels that he’s fulfilling this need that he has to do, and now, with his wife on board, that’s going to be simpler for him.

Now, his internal struggle could potentially dissipate because it’s like, “All of this can be above board. We can do this out in the open. I don’t have to sneak around. I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to spend my life worrying that my wife is going to catch me.” Again, this is a rare case where it works out for the other person, because, for whatever reason, the person who was cheated on doesn’t care about the deception at play.

Jessica: Yeah.

Rich: As for her question, “Is this infidelity a sign of worse things to come?” Could be. I don’t think one bad act makes a bad person, but I also don’t think that one bad act is always one isolated bad act. So that’s another thing that you’re just going to have to think about. Is the guy otherwise trustworthy? Is this just a sex thing, or does he lie in other contexts?

Jessica: Yes. And what comes to mind for me in the context of worse things to come is also sexual health. That’s a point where I feel like it’s very reasonable for our writer to say, “Hey, I want to know what’s going on to some degree and know what my exposure risk is as far as sexually transmittable infections.”

Rich: 100 percent. Keep in mind that STIs in an open arrangement can really change the color of it all. People can be completely on board with being open. Then one of them gets an STI, and it puts the arrangement in a new kind of light. It makes it tangible. You can have your partner’s extracurriculars out of your head until it’s brought to their body and potentially yours.

So it does have a way of making shit more real in some contexts. And again, this is the kind of thing where there’s no roadmap. Even if there were a roadmap, it would be really hard to follow because people just have different emotional reactions to different things, and you don’t know how you’re going to deal with it until you’re in the thick of it. You can predict it, but you won’t actually know. So it’s a tough thing. But the signs so far suggest that this is probably going to be, as these things go, an easier ride for this person, given her lack of rage or hurt. She doesn’t seem particularly hurt.

I do think it’s very mature to say, “Actually, this system is working for me,” as opposed to, “I’m going to dwell on the principle. Even though I’m fine with this, you still lied to me.” It’s totally fine to react in that way, but to be so practical that you’re not even going to pick at the things you have every right to strikes me as a healthy way to approach this.

Jessica: Also, our writer might not be as vanilla as she perceives herself as and might have a kink that involves her husband stepping out on her or simply her husband having sex with other people. So doing some introspection around that and trying to think about what about this turns her on can help her consider what she thinks she wants to tell her husband what she wants as far as involvement in this.

Rich: I think that she’s asking us to introspect for her, which is basically impossible. We can only speculate as to what’s going on with her, but I think she answers some of it herself. “The self-inflicted pressure to perform is gone. I find myself enjoying our sex life much more without being weighed down with guilt.” Sometimes that’s all you need. Pressure can make erotic scenes way less erotic just because it puts you in your head. The goal of many people in those scenarios is to get to a flow state where you’re kind of out of your head, where you’re not thinking.

She had some kind of suspicion, at least, if not firsthand knowledge of the kind of sex her husband wanted and the frequency he wanted, and that she couldn’t provide this. Maybe that’s been bothering her for a long time, and now she has a solution to that. It could be that easy. But also, when she asks, “Why does thinking about him doing it with her turn me on so much?” the answer is who knows? Some people can point to an event where they say, “This is where this kink or preference started.” And in other people, they say, “I don’t know. This just developed. Somebody showed me something, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s perfect. That hit the spot that I didn’t even know I had.’” So that’s really for the writer to decide.

Jessica: But whether they’re going to do ethical non-monogamy or half-swinger-esque sort of situations, I strongly encourage the writer to, yes, bring it up with her husband. Even don’t ask, don’t tell requires a conversation in which there is consent.

Rich: Right. She’s just going to have to see what this is like and figure out if it is indeed for her. But there’s a lot of blaming language in the letter. “What’s wrong with me?” The answer is nothing and none of this is your fault. You seem to have fallen into a situation that seems like it’ll work for you. So just make it work for you. Use the aforementioned leverage and create an outline of what you would like to see in this relationship. Use this to your advantage.

Jessica: That conversation could start with something like, “I know you’re having an affair, and it turns me on. Let’s talk about that.” She doesn’t need to come in with a PowerPoint presentation laying out what she wants to relationship to look like moving forward. She can state the facts very simply, and then they can talk through it together.

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