Reply to the Diarist: When Secrecy Isn't Sexy

Source: The Cut, Sex Diaries

Published: 2025-12-19

Summary

This week’s Sex Diary follows a wedding planner in a monogamous relationship who starts sleeping with her ex while helping raise her partner’s children and keeping a carefully ordered domestic life intact. She frames the affair as strictly physical ("it's just sex"), something to get out of her system, and reassures herself that her primary relationship is still solid and enough.

Throughout the diary, she keeps asking whether she’s delusional, even as she sidesteps the deeper dissatisfaction driving her choices. The sex with her ex is vivid and charged with nostalgia, but it reads less like freedom and more like an Instant Pot release valve. Each encounter lets her delay a harder conversation about desire, aging, and the life she has quietly accepted.

What comes through isn’t a story of passion spiraling out of control. It’s a story about secrecy used as a stalling tactic. The diary lives in that uneasy middle space between wanting more and being afraid to disturb the stability already built.

My Reply to the Diarist

Dear Diarist,

When you wrote, “maybe I’m delusional,” I found myself answering quietly but firmly: "BECAUSE YOU ARE!" Not because you’re reckless or cruel, but because you’re telling yourself you’re content while repeatedly acting like someone who isn’t. You’ve built a life that is comfortable, caring, and orderly, and you’re afraid to risk it.

The fear is understandable. But calling it happiness doesn’t make it true.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” framing doesn’t hold up either. DADT is an agreement between two people, not a one-sided story you use to rationalize secrecy. What’s happening here isn’t ethical ambiguity; it’s avoidance. And avoidance always extracts its cost from the person practicing it first.

What troubles me most isn’t the affair itself. It’s the way you keep circling a conversation you won’t have, with Eric or with yourself. Ethical non-monogamy exists precisely for situations like this, not as an excuse, but as a framework for honesty. You can want stability and desire. You can want care and great sex. And spoiler: you can have both!

But you can’t keep lying, even gently, and expect the tension to disappear. Secrecy has momentum. If you don’t interrupt it, it will eventually decide the ending for you.

If you do nothing, here’s what I predict for your future:

• You keep the secret.
• You continue to tell yourself you got Zach out of her system.
• The affair continues to gnaw at you.
• You keep wondering about where your life is going, especially when you hit 40.
• One night, after a few glasses of wine, you tearfully confess. Eric probably either confesses to his own infidelity or breaks up with you.

The whole thing could’ve been avoided if you had a real, honest conversation or two about what you both really wanted or talked with someone (hint hint) about polyamory or ENM.

Warmly,
Harper

The ENM Angle:
This diary is a case study in why secrecy doesn’t solve avoidance. Whether the solution is monogamy renegotiated, ethical non-monogamy, recommitment, or separation, none of those paths work without truth.

What stands out is how carefully the diarist manages optics. She washes sheets, renames contacts, rehearses rationales. The affair is less about the ex than about preserving the image of herself as a good partner who simply has needs. That split identity is unsustainable.

From an ENM perspective, the issue isn’t desire outside the relationship. It’s the refusal to acknowledge desire inside the relationship. Ethical non-monogamy doesn’t eliminate conflict. It demands courage earlier, when the cost of honesty is lower.

This diary doesn’t depict a villain. It depicts a woman standing at the edge of a conversation she hasn’t decided she’s brave enough to have yet.

One-Line Takeaway: Secrecy can feel like preserving stability, but guilt is your constant companion if left unchecked.