Why My Master and I Will Probably Never Cheat

I'm not normal. Master and I are not normal.

My psychologist wouldn't let me use that word. He'd stop me right there and ask me what normal means, and who decided it, and why I keep measuring myself against it. He'd be right. He usually was. I also haven't seen him in almost four years, so today I'm going to use it anyway.

We're not normal, and it's the best thing about us.

Here's the part that makes people uncomfortable. There's almost no chance that Master and I will ever cheat on each other. Not "we promised." Not "we're in love, so we'd never." I mean the odds are lower for us than for almost any couple I know, and it has very little to do with how good we are.

Nobody is above it

We figured something out early, and we never really argued about it.

Almost anyone will cheat. Give a person enough time alone, add a drink or two, add someone persistent who keeps showing up and keeps being interested, and most people eventually fold. Not because they're bad people, and not because they stopped loving anyone. Because that's what people are like when the opportunity sits in front of them long enough.

I know how that sounds. Most couples want to believe they're the exception, that their love is the thing standing between them and the affair. Maybe some of them are right. I just didn't want to bet my whole life on being one of them.

So we didn't build our relationship on willpower. We built it so the opportunity almost never shows up.

We just stopped being apart

It started small, and honestly it wasn't some grand plan.

In the beginning we just tried to keep those situations rare. Fewer nights out separately, fewer long stretches where one of us was somewhere the other had never been. Nothing dramatic, nothing that felt like a rule. It was more like a preference we both happened to have at the same time.

And then it wasn't the beginning anymore. We were together more and more, and it just kept being better. I saw my friends with him there. He saw his friends with me there. Two separate lives quietly turned into one life with more people in it.

Then one day the question flipped. It stopped being "how much time should we spend apart" and became "why would we be apart at all?"

We never really answered that one. And now we're here.

Relationship, business, roommates, everything

We're not just a couple. We live together, we work together, we build everything together. Call it a relationship, call it love, call it a business, call it roommates who happen to be obsessed with each other. We're all of it at once, and we're everything to each other.

That's the part people call codependency.

I think about that word a lot, because here's what's strange about it. When you're a kid, you're allowed to have this. You have a best friend, you're inseparable, you do every single thing together, and the adults think it's adorable. Teenagers do it too. Nobody sends them to therapy for it. It's sweet, it's a phase, look at those two.

Then you turn twenty-five and the same closeness becomes a diagnosis. You need your own space. You need your own friends. You need a life outside the relationship. Tell someone you spend all your time with the person you love and they'll explain to you, gently, that this is not healthy.

What is wrong with people.

I wanted this my whole life. That bond. That love and that desire and that I-know-what-you're-thinking-before-you-say-it thing. I dreamt about it before I had the words for it. I finally have it, and there's a diagnosis waiting for me at the door.

The difference nobody checks for

Real codependency has a shape. You lose yourself in the other person. You can't function on your own. You stay because you're scared of what happens if you leave. That's real and it's worth worrying about, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't exist.

That's not what this is.

I know that because I did the alone version first. I lived on my own and I traveled on my own, four different countries before I ever met Master, sorting out the trains and the hotels and the mistakes by myself.

I can be alone. I just don't want to be. Those are two completely different sentences, and nobody ever checks which one they're looking at, because we don't have a good word for two adults who genuinely like each other this much. So they reach for the clinical one.

What it actually protects

Being together all the time isn't a cage. It's the reason I never have to wonder.

I'm not watching him and he's not watching me. There's no phone-checking in this house, no timeline questions, none of that quiet accounting so many couples do without ever admitting they're doing it. We're not policing each other, because the situation where cheating happens doesn't come up. You can't drift toward someone at 2 AM in a bar when neither of you is at the bar.

Trust isn't the thing holding us together. The life we built is holding us together, and the trust is what we get to enjoy on top of it.

This isn't advice. It works for us, and it might not translate to a single other couple on the planet. Plenty of people would suffocate in it, and that's completely fine.

But if you've ever wanted this and been told it's too much, I want you to hear it from someone who's living it. It isn't too much. It's just rare, and it's the only version of this I ever actually wanted.