No, You Don’t Have to Console Her: The Ethicist, the “Consent” Charade, and the Marriage That Became Emotional Servitude
Thursday, January 29, 2026.
First, I need to confess. I did not pay the New York Times $1/week to read an advice column about a man being asked to become the grief doula for his wife’s affair.
Instead, I read the letter and the Ethicist’s response as reproduced in public commentary—specifically the full excerpted text in Anne Kennedy’s write-up and the parallel discussion in ChumpLady’s post. That’s what I’m responding to.
Now. The question:
A husband says his wife had an affair for a year, and he “knew about it from the beginning.” She said she “needed it,” it gave her “vitality,” she wanted “sexual freedom,” and she didn’t want to do it “in secret” without his “consent.”
He agreed.
He also admits he “always suffered” when she was away. She ended it for the marriage. Now she’s grieving.
He feels relieved. Does he have to console her? (Again: in the reproduced text.) Kennedy.
Here is the answer, in the cleanest possible English:
You can be decent to your spouse. You are not required to become her mourning partner for her affair.
That’s not bitterness. That’s epistemic safety.
Because once a marriage starts demanding that the injured partner provide emotional aftercare for the injury, the marriage has stopped being a relationship and started being a system for extracting regulation.
The first lie is in the word “let”
“I let my wife have an affair” is not a sentence. It’s a magic trick.
It tries to sound magnanimous while quietly revealing the marriage has essentially become a hostage negotiation.
You don’t “let” another adult do anything. You either:
want a nonmonogamous arrangement too and negotiate it like adults, or
tolerate something you hate because you’re afraid of what happens if you don’t.
The husband tells you which one this is when he says he “always suffered.” Kennedy
That is not “consent.” That is endurance with a polite label taped on top.
.
If the choice is:
“Agree to this,”
or“Lose your spouse / be branded controlling / be told you’re sexually immature / be replaced,”
then what you have is not free consent.
You have consent under constraint.
And (in the reproduced answer) even the Ethicist gestures at this when he notes that beneath the “sweet reasonableness” there were “unspoken ultimatums.” Kennedy
Exactly.
The problem is that modern couples have learned to weaponize therapeutic language. “Consent” becomes a laundering term. It turns coercion into something that sounds enlightened.
This is what I mean by epistemic safety: the ability to name what’s happening without being forced to narrate your own injury as personal weakness.
The Ethicist’s mistake: turning emotional labor into moral duty
In the reproduced response, the Ethicist suggests the husband might console her “out of gratitude,” and frames solace as part of marital love. Kennedy
Gratitude.
For what?
For the privilege of staying home while your spouse visited her second relationship and you practiced “coping” like it was a spiritual discipline?
For the opportunity to discover that your nervous system does not accept moral arguments as payment?
This is how emotional labor becomes a moral obligation: you’re told that if you’re truly mature, you will absorb what harms you with tenderness—and if you won’t, you’re small.
That is not ethics. That is a halo-shaped performance review.
It’s also classic “emotion work,” the kind Arlie Hochschild described: managing feelings to comply with the expected emotional script. (If you want the original conceptual frame, start with The Managed Heart.) Hochschild
Comfort is not one thing. It’s four things. Two are fine. Two are insane.
When someone says “console me,” they might mean:
“Don’t punish me for having feelings.”
Fine. Basic decency.
“Please reassure me I’m still lovable.”
Sometimes fine—if reassurance isn’t being used to silence the injured partner.
“Please validate that the affair mattered.”
Not fine if it requires the injured spouse to endorse the injury.
“Please hold me while I mourn him.”
Absolutely not.
You do not get to recruit the person you harmed as the primary container for the grief of the harm.
A spouse can acknowledge sadness without being conscripted into the mourning of the affair itself.
That line is not cruelty. It is boundary hygiene.
“Ethical nonmonogamy” is not “an affair with permission”
Let’s be adults for ten seconds: many of my colleagues argue that consensual nonmonogamy can be healthy when it’s genuinely consensual and structured; in the research literature, it’s often associated with comparable relationship quality and well-being relative to monogamy when it’s actually consensual. Rubel & Bogaert
But this letter—again, as reproduced—does not read like mutual desire and careful structure.
It reads like: “I need this,” and “I will endure it,” and “please call my endurance consent so I can keep my dignity.”
That is not a relationship style.
That is leverage.
The Nervous-System Reality Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Betrayal—yes, including betrayal you were talked into permitting—can land like trauma: intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, numbing, shame, disrupted attachment security.
A qualitative study in Stress and Health explicitly explores romantic partner betrayal as potentially traumatic, with clinically meaningful distress in a substantial portion of betrayed individuals. Lonergan et al.
So his relief is not proof he’s cold.
It may be proof his body is finally unclenching.
And if your spouse interprets your relief as “failure to be supportive,” congratulations: you’re now being asked to apologize for your own nervous system.
What a Morally Coherent Stance Actually Looks Like
If you’re the husband in this scenario:
You owe her some decency.
“I’m sorry you’re hurting. I’m not glad you’re suffering.”
You do not owe participation in her romantic grief.
“I’m not the right person to process the loss of that relationship with.”
You owe the marriage truth
“I agreed because I didn’t want to lose you. It hurt the entire time. If we’re rebuilding, we start by naming that.”
If she wants to mourn the affair, she can take that grief to a therapist, a trusted friend, a journal, or the quiet existential air above the sink at 2:00 a.m. like the rest of humanity.
What she cannot do is insist that her husband become the emotional support system for the consequences of what harmed him.
If you’re the wife, here is the repair task you don’t get to outsource:
You can have grief and still have respect.
That looks like:
“I’m grieving.”
“I understand why you can’t hold this with me.”
“I’ll take the mourning somewhere else.”
“With you, I want to focus on repair.”
If you can’t do that, then the affair is not over.
It has simply changed forms.
Now it lives inside the marriage as a demand: “Prove your love by soothing me about the thing that harmed you.”
No.
The Repair Checklist for Couples Who Want to Survive this Without Becoming Monsters
Name what this was.
Was it mutual desire—or consent under ultimatum pressure? Kennedy
Separate grief from repair.
Grief needs a container. Repair needs a marriage.
Build an “aftercare map”
Who gets what kind of support from whom?
Basic kindness: yes.
Repair conversations: yes.
Affair-mourning intimacy: no.
Stop Grading Emotions
Relief is data. Sadness is data. Neither is a moral verdict.
Put it in structure
If you’re staying married, stop improvising this at midnight with tears and accusations. Get a structured process.
FAQ
If I agreed, do I still get to feel hurt?
Yes. “Agreement” doesn’t erase injury—especially when agreement was the price of staying married.
Do I have to console my spouse when their affair ends?
You can offer basic decency. You do not have to provide grief counseling for the affair.
Is refusing to console the same as punishment?
Sometimes it’s punishment. Often it’s a boundary. The difference is whether you’re withholding to injure—or refusing a role that injures you.
Is this ethical nonmonogamy?
Not as described in the reproduced letter. Ethical arrangements rely on mutual desire, explicit agreements, renegotiation, and real consent—not one partner’s vitality funded by the other partner’s suffering. Rubel & Bogaert
Should we try couples therapy?
If you’re staying, a structured repair process is usually safer than endless “talks” that turn into either a trial or a truce.
Therapist’s Note
If your relationship has reached the point where one person’s “vitality” requires the other person’s chronic suffering, you are not negotiating intimacy. You are negotiating surrender. Kennedy
And if you’re being asked to console someone for the consequences of what harmed you, you are allowed to refuse the role—cleanly, calmly, without cruelty.
If you want help building repair without self-erasure—repair that restores safety, truth, and adult boundaries—I work with couples on exactly this.
Final Thoughts
You can be kind without being recruited.
You can acknowledge sadness without laundering the affair into something noble.
And you can refuse to become the grief attendant for your own wound.
That’s not petty.
That’s sanity.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Kennedy, A. (2026, January 27). You let your wife have an affair? Substack.
Lonergan, M., Brunet, A., Rivest-Beauregard, M., & Groleau, D. (2021). Is romantic partner betrayal a form of traumatic experience? A qualitative study. Stress and Health, 37(1), 19–31. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2968
Rubel, A. N., & Bogaert, A. F. (2015). Consensual nonmonogamy: Psychological well-being and relationship quality correlates. The Journal of Sex Research, 52(9), 961–982. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2014.942722
Schorn, T. (2026, January 26). UBT: I let my wife have an affair. ChumpLady.com.
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