I Became the Submissive Woman My Wife Cheated With

I’ve been turning this over in my head for a long time, and it was a friend who finally pushed me to write it down. I need to get out what I’ve carried alone for years, that weight nobody teaches you how to bear because nobody raises you to accept it. I’m going to tell it as faithfully as I can. The names aren’t the real ones and I’ve changed a few details to protect the people I’m talking about, but everything that truly matters happened exactly as I’m telling it.

My name is Marc and I’m about to turn forty-seven. I’ve been married to Núria for fourteen years; she’s forty-one, and we have two daughters. We’ve always lived in the same village on the Costa Brava, near Palamós. She works in insurance at a bank office and I run my own accounting firm. Like any marriage, we’ve had good times and bad, but I have no doubt there was a lot of love, and in some way there still is.

Núria is beautiful and takes excellent care of herself. Elegant, always perfectly put together, with a character that grew more self-assured and open over the years. She’s dark-haired, slim, does yoga and hiking, and naked she looks fantastic. She’s enjoyed nude sunbathing in discreet places since long before she met me. I, by contrast, was always the shy one of the two. Polite, too trusting, incapable of asserting myself. I’m almost six foot two, I try to eat healthily, and for years I’ve liked shaving everything, although she doesn’t like that at all.

Because for a long time I’ve felt things that are hard to explain. Even as a teenager I was confused. In the football locker rooms I’d shower with my shorts on, or hide in the individual showers, while I watched everyone else’s bodies get stronger, hairier, more manly. That change never came for me, or I never felt like it was mine. I let three or four girls I really liked slip away simply because I didn’t dare get intimate. I didn’t know how to name it until many years later.

I lost my virginity very late, at twenty, with Patricia, a girl who used to spend summers in the village and stayed on to live there when her parents separated. She was studying nursing and was cheerful, fun, much more experienced than I was. The first time was at a friend’s house, with a blanket, a film playing in the background, and her guiding me step by step. I remember coming too quickly and her saying, “Already?” with tenderness. I adored her, but that old curiosity came flooding back without warning.

When I went to wait for her at her apartment in the city, I’d find myself opening her underwear drawers. And her roommate’s. Some of the pieces were gorgeous, and I could feel my body heating up just from holding them. I ended up trying them on alone in her bathroom, with immediate erections, making sure not to stain them, feeling like I was flying. Afterward I forced myself to stop, mortified. I stopped completely when a friend told me Patricia was cheating on me with a guy from university. She admitted it. It shattered me, and I moved to Barcelona to study.

***

Those years alone in Barcelona changed me without my understanding why. I missed a woman’s affection, or that’s what I told myself. One day, I’m not sure exactly how, I started buying things. Earrings, a dress, underwear. The in-person stuff I’d buy as if it were a gift for someone else; makeup, wigs, and a few toys arrived by courier. The first time I really saw myself in the mirror, I felt something I had never felt before: good and bad at the same time, but unable to stop being her. I kept everything in a cardboard box at the top of the wardrobe and, very occasionally, I let that woman come out and breathe for a while.

Then I met Lorena at a company dinner. She was from the area, coming out of a complicated relationship, and we clicked right away. I was twenty-six and she was twenty-two. She found in me the support she was looking for and I found, once again, an excuse to cover up the other thing. We moved in together, rented a flat, and for a couple of years it seemed everything was going well. Until I caught myself rummaging through her drawers again, choosing her prettiest lingerie with a shiver running down my spine, holding in my mind the moment she’d leave the house so I could put it on.

Even before we were parents there were things that didn’t work. In bed, Lorena barely showed whether she liked anything. I’d ask her and she’d tell me that “like that” she felt nothing, and we’d change positions until we gave up half of them. We had the girls early, and that made us focus on being good parents while the desire between us cooled. I kept stealing her underwear in secret. More than once she asked me why her drawers were messed up. “No, of course I haven’t touched anything,” I lied, burning with shame.

Sex became scarce and frustrating. She kept slipping off my erection, saying she felt nothing, and I could feel how hard it was for me to stay hard, as if her impatience intimidated me. Over the years she became the active one: before I was the one seeking her out, now she sought me out, and I did what I could because I loved her. Until one day, with all the tenderness in the world, she told me that at almost thirty-five I was no longer satisfying her.

***

We decided to buy toys together. A big one arrived, with a suction base, about eight inches long. One summer night, before a trip we were taking without the girls, she whispered in bed that she had already tried it in the shower and loved it. She went to get it, asked me to sit upright, and straddled it in front of me, looking me in the eye, moving nonstop until she came. Then she finished herself with her mouth. It felt strange and at the same time I liked it enormously. It was better than anything we did ourselves, and I told myself that was fine.

What happened was that it stopped being an exception and became the rule. The toy was always between us. Knowing full well it wasn’t right, I started pretending I wasn’t getting hard so she would take it. Watching her give herself over to it, using it standing up, on the sofa, on the floor, while I touched myself watching her, became our way of having sex. When she asked me, “Now you, darling,” I took her, feeling as if I were too small for her, as if she were laughing affectionately at me, and far from bothering me, that made me fly. That same night I again took her panties in secret, touching myself thinking of her and of any man.

That summer, at a nude cove, I started fantasizing about some man watching us. Seeing her there, beautiful, feminine, and me beside her, wanting another man to want her and wanting her to want another man. Imagining myself reduced, mocked, the husband both of them laughed at. Something clicked in my head and in my body that I never came back from. My morning erections disappeared and in their place remained a stinging heat, a different kind of urgency. On my “work” trips I started planning my shaving, buying clothes, losing myself completely.

One weekend when Núria went away with the girls, I took her toy. I cleaned it, looked up how to do it properly, got myself ready. On the bathroom floor, slowly, I stuck it to the wall the way I knew she did. I saw myself head-on in the mirror, shaved, aroused, and an old friend from the gym came to mind, one of those with a great build and a beautiful wife. I imagined him fucking my wife and having me there on the floor, his. I pushed back, slowly at first, then faster, watching my body respond without being touched, until I had an orgasm standing up against that wall. Something I’d been dreaming of for half my life. I was never the same again.

***

For about three years I lived like that, in secret. I had my own clothes, my own toy. We loved and respected each other, but there was barely any sex between us. I no longer thought of anything but her with another man, and that man having me as well. More than once, full of rage and fear, I threw everything in the trash. “This isn’t right,” I told myself. “No, this isn’t.” And a few weeks later the desires would return and I’d buy everything again, looking for the moment to be myself. They say you have to be careful what you wish for.

One early morning, Núria left her phone charging in the dining room. I know it was wrong to look at it, but I did. And that’s how I found out she’d been with someone else for eight months. Raúl, a bank client, divorced, older than me, someone from the village I’d always disliked because of his reputation. Night after night I read the messages, saw the photos, the daily voice notes telling each other what they’d done, talking about me between the lines. I cried. I didn’t know what to do. I saved screenshots I still keep, unable to believe she’d hidden it from me instead of being honest, instead of saying, “I’d like to try with someone else.”

A few days later she noticed I was off, distant, and asked me about it. I told her everything. “I’m sorry, forgive me, it’s not what you think, it was only sex, I love you.” We screamed at each other, I tried to leave the house and she wouldn’t let me. We spent months sleeping separately, barely speaking. And meanwhile, they kept writing to each other every day. She had told him she felt unsatisfied with me, that he dominated her in a way I never knew how to. I read it all. I saw she was crazy about him, that they met on Thursdays, that they booked hotel rooms when I went on “work trips” and turned into a woman.

The hardest thing to admit is what I discovered about myself down in that hole. I had a terrible time, yes, she insisted on fixing things and I found it impossible. But beneath the pain there was something else I was too afraid to look at directly: I liked it. I loved feeling that way. A submissive, cuckolded woman who loves her wife and, at the same time, longs to surrender. That contradiction is me, and it took me years to be able to name it without hating myself.

They say time heals almost everything. We started speaking again, tried to be intimate like before, and it even worked for a while because she really makes the effort. But I’ve got all of that too deeply embedded inside me. Today I’m telling it for the first time and I feel a little lighter. So much lighter that in a few days I’ve arranged, privately, to meet a wonderful woman I’ve gotten to know. It will be my first real encounter as my true self, and I trust I won’t be too nervous. I love my wife, I adore her, and I’m going to fight to stay by her side. But I’m never again going to hide the woman I always was. Kisses, ladies.