I’m Not a Cheater — I’m a ‘Cake Eater’
Polyamory wasn’t on the table for Alyssa, a 30-year-old Canadian woman who had been in a serious relationship for eight years before she started hooking up with an old friend. Neither was breaking up with her boyfriend, who had lost interest in sex. “One evening while he was away, we were talking on the phone and had a fight,” says Alyssa, who, like everyone else in this story, requested a pseudonym. “After I hung up on him, I contacted a friend who lived nearby to talk and cheer me up since he lived within walking distance from my apartment. I did not expect to at the time, but that evening I hooked up with said friend, and it was a bit of a Pandora’s box from there on.” The hookups continued, but so did her relationship with her boyfriend.
“After not getting much for a while, it was like getting a fresh cold bottle of water after walking through the desert,” she says.
Alyssa is one of many who see themselves as having their cake and eating it, too: people who maintain “monogamous” relationships with a committed partner while secretly having affairs on the side. This is, of course, a dynamic as old as time — cheating is nothing new — but like so many other sexual identities, a community has more recently emerged around it. Cake eaters, as they call themselves, are defined as “a person who is married, generally happy and satisfied, has regular sex with their SO, is not planning on divorcing or separating or looking for an exit affair, and is additionally having sex with other partners,” according to the r/Cakeeater sub-Reddit. That is, these are not people in any way looking to leave their primary partner or pursue some sort of open relationship. Instead, they want to cheat — and ideally get away with it.
Their reasons for wanting to stay vary. For Alyssa, breaking up would mean needing to live alone in a high-cost-of-living city, something she can’t afford to do. And besides, sex with her partner has picked back up again, and their relationship has improved. But even so, the side hookups, which occur anywhere from twice a week to once a month depending on their schedules, haven’t stopped. “There is very much an addictive quality to the whole thing,” she says.
The population of those who identify as cake eaters is small but growing. The sub-Reddit currently has just over 8,000 members, four times as many as it did this time two years ago. A similar but broader sub-Reddit, r/adultery, has over 167,000 members. Everyone involved in these groups would surely be pursuing the same practices were there not an online space to give them a name and place to convene, but the pervading element of encouragement here doesn’t hurt.
As John tells me with a smiling-purple-devil emoji, r/Cakeeater has taught him “good habits” like using a burner phone, never charging things to a credit card, and maintaining a routine in order to keep up appearances. John has been married to his wife for 25 years and has three children. He and his wife have sex once or twice per week, but it’s not enough. “I need enthusiasm,” he says. So a few times a month, he meets a woman on a dating app. While the methods have evolved, he has been seeing other women the entirety of his marriage.
He says he feels some guilt about the dynamic. “But the thing is I only have control over me. I can try to date, romance, flirt with the wife, and I do … but the ‘brake pedals of sexuality,’” he says, referencing Emily Nagoski’s book Come As You Are, “always seem to screw things up.” His wife has lots of sensitive “brake pedals” that slow down her desire for sex, while he, on the other hand, has an abundance of accelerators.
A number of recent stories have featured polyamorous people who emphasize their belief that non-monogamy can offer a salve to these familiar woes when practiced “ethically.” This idea has been met with a sense of fatigue: Nobody really cares how many people you sleep with; they’d just prefer not to hear about it. As someone recently joked on Twitter, “A relationship where we both think being poly is cringe so if someone asks us if we are poly we say ‘no we cheat.’”
But much of that fatigue seems tied to the preoccupation with labels, too, something that the term cake eater certainly does not avoid. On r/adultery, one user recently asked fellow members to create a taxonomy of “sub-types” of affairs they’ve pursued, such as relationships in which they see the person they’re cheating with as their boyfriend/girlfriend or friend with benefits. That all of these messy interpersonal entanglements can be so clearly delineated provides some sense of justification — or, at the very least, ease.
Using cake eater versus, say, cheater is due in part to its less overt stigmatization, some people tell me, though they didn’t seem too hung up on the specifics. “I think some people think cake eaters are a lower form of adulterer,” says John. “But I don’t really see the distinction … either you’re a cheater or you’re not!”
“I saw it on Reddit and found it to be a more palatable way of saying ‘I’m a cheater’ in a public forum,” Rob, a Floridian in his late 30s who uses the term cake eater on dating apps, tells me. Rob has no desire to actually date the women he sleeps with. The fact that it’s wrong and secretive is part of what he enjoys. “I get off on the thrill of the illicit act,” he says.
He’d be hurt if his wife cheated on him, especially if there was an emotional component to the affair. For his indiscretions, he reports that no feelings are involved. He does, however, wish his wife were more interested in his kinks or perhaps wanted to pursue a male-male-female threesome. Neither of these will happen, so he gets his rocks off elsewhere. “Nothing justifies my behavior,” he says. “I know it’s fucked up.”
Whether polyamory or an open relationship is preferable to this lifestyle is a frequent source of discussion in these online groups. For Alyssa, John, and Rob, polyamory isn’t even desirable. “I don’t think I have it in me to care about the emotional needs of other men and date other people,” says Alyssa. “I also don’t think I’d like my partner getting that sort of attention from others.”
John, meanwhile, wishes he were happier with the sex in his marriage. “It sounds selfish, but I would like lots of passionate sex with my wife,” he says. “Since that’s not her thing, I stray.”
Of course, they could simply choose not to cheat, but for myriad reasons like John’s, this is often not presented as an option, either. What they’re all looking for is more: more sex, more passion, more kink, more fulfillment. And for the time being, at least, they’ve found some means of acquiring it. Maybe like John, they’ll manage to keep it up for decades. Alyssa is less optimistic. “I know I’ll have to stop at some point,” she says.
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