Will Cheating On Your Husband Save Your Marriage?

Marriage is hard, says everyone who is married. All that co-dinner eating and Netflix queue consolidating and trying to match someone else’s socks and only sleeping with one person forevermore. It’s enough to bore a lady to tears! Some women swear that the best way to overcome these terrible doldrums and be happy is to just cheat on your husband and not tell him.

This “cheating will save your relationship” phenomenon is chronicled in a new book called The Secret Lives of Wives. In it, author Iris Krasnow claims that many women who are in the happiest marriages are happy because they’re always doing things without their husbands. They go on vacations separately, they hang out with ex boyfriends and other male friends separately. They even have things called a “boyfriend with boundaries,” which is just a guy who hangs around the married woman and gets flirted with and, I don’t know, flexes his pecs sometimes, but who is just there to keep the married woman excited. And sometimes, they just go on ahead and cheat on their husbands. The Daily Beast reports,

“If you avoid getting caught, a little affair can perk up a marriage,” says Lucy, a 50-something Californian.

“My husband is only capable of doing so much, and it’s not enough,” says Shauna, who keeps a garden landscaper on the side.

“A husband is your costar and a rock in your life,” says Lana, a 59-year-old actress. “But if you’re a multidimensional person, you need a lot of different colors on your palette.”

The gardenerboinker, when asked about breaking up with either her husband or her landscaper, says she wouldn’t dream of getting rid of either one. (It sounds like a lot of wives interviewed for the book have some pretty serious daddy issues.)

The book explains that these women seek excitement outside of their marriages because expecting one man to be enough to satisfy someone for an entire lifetime is unrealistic. Women who end up in marriages that fail, Krasnow argues, end up there because they think their husbands will keep them entertained and stimulated forever. But wives need fun and excitement outside of their relationship with their husbands; they need hobbies and activities that they partake in on their own time, without a man around stinking up the joint. Some women choose pottery or volunteering. Others choose fucking the pool boy.

Secrets, it turns out, are the secret to a happy marriage. Secrets, lying, and being away from the person you married for long periods of time so they don’t annoy the shit out of you. Kind of like the secret to being a successful pedestrian is to avoid all the signs that say you shouldn’t cross the street, and then crossing the street anyway and almost get hit by cars like four times and then on the other side of the street saying that your secret to crossing the street was your sense of adventure and impeccable reflexes, when the secret to crossing the street is actually to wait until the conditions are right for you to cross the street rather than just running out into a crosswalk without looking or thinking.

If the happiest elements of your marriage are those times that wives aren’t around their smelly husbands, then why do couples marry in the first place? Why not accept the idea that the institution of marriage isn’t ideal for every single person in the whole world, and it’s okay to remain unmarried if that’s what blows your skirt up, and it’s okay to have an open marriage if that’s what everyone wants? The book doesn’t explain.