Cheating & Affair Stories

There is a particular silence at a South African family lunch when everybody finds out. Not shouting. Silence. An aunty stops mid-sentence. Somebody who didn't cook starts clearing plates. And the woman in the middle of it becomes a story other people tell at other people's lunches.

That is what most cheating stories get wrong. They hand you a villain, a victim and a punishment, and everyone goes home satisfied. The honest version is less comfortable, because everybody in it is a person — including the other woman, who is somebody's daughter with her own mother phoning on a Sunday. So we don't pick a side. We give you all of them.

The woman on the outside, in her own words

Safe Love, by Tracy Nxumalo, is where to start — written in the first person by the woman this genre usually refuses to give a voice to.

Tracy is twenty-eight, working reception at a hospital, when Mr Siyabonga Ntuli asks for her number in a corridor. Tall, glasses, calm. Over dinner on their first date he tells her he's married with four children. She stays.

What follows isn't cruelty. It's politeness. Texts a day late. Weekends that always end. A man who never asks her to give anything up, because he isn't asking her for anything — he simply accepts what she keeps offering. She calls it safe. It takes her years to hear how that word sounds.

Then a Thursday. A multi-vehicle accident ten kilometres out, fifteen injured, the floor short-staffed. Tracy slings a woman's broken arm, the woman goes under, and three cycles of CPR bring her back. The woman says her husband is coming, he works here. He arrives, looks straight through Tracy the way you look at anyone in scrubs, and says baby to the woman on the floor. The wife thanks her.

Five chapters, and Tracy is the one who ends it — still loving him, walking anyway. Side chicks need safe love too, she writes, which is either the most generous or the most devastating sentence on this website.

Both sides of the same wrong marriage

Nontsikelelo Mabaso writes the whole betrayal, then writes it again from the other person's chair.

The Wrong One belongs to Lindiwe Dlamini, a financial advisor in Middelburg who ranks men on a private system — family, career, money habits, weighted and scored. She built it watching her mother choose with her heart and then count coins at the kitchen table for it. Langa Mkhize, property developer, house going up off the R35, is her number one. Then a mechanic called Sibusiso fixes her car in under a minute, doesn't ask for her number, and the system goes offline. She is already sleeping with Langa the evening she invents a fault, drives out to that workshop and lets Sibusiso lift her onto the workbench. Her phone buzzes twice. She doesn't check it.

She marries the spreadsheet anyway, and it works — Sunday lunches, a young lawn under the security light, a life as tidy as a balance sheet. Then Zanele phones with something that travelled three people from a braai: Langa kept a list too. Lindiwe wasn't number one. She wasn't number two either.

The Wrong One: His Side is the same months from Langa's seat, and no exoneration. He was already seeing Lindiwe the night he stopped at a salon near his site for a late haircut and walked out nine hours later. Esther Mutombo is Congolese, twenty-five, six chairs built from nothing in a country that isn't hers, and she calls him Mr Property. She asked who was going to dance in his kitchen. He had no answer, so he left before she woke and married the correct woman.

Read them in order. Lindiwe ends her book barefoot on cold tile while Sibusiso's name rings on the counter — she doesn't answer and she doesn't decline. Langa ends his in the dark at the edge of a braai, playing a twenty-three-second voice note twice, thumb over reply. Neither of them moves. Deliberately: this is a shelf about the moment before.

The affair you only find out about twenty years later

Khotso le Palesa is the one that follows you around. Palesa Mokoena is a Maseru pharmacist whose policy on men in her inbox is delete, until Facebook suggests a safety officer on a Rustenburg mine — one mutual friend, and an opening line that isn't hey beautiful. She tells her mother it's a workshop, packs the burgundy lace, and crosses the border at twenty to six in the morning.

The night is everything she drove six hours for. The morning is a watch on the nightstand carrying her own surname and twenty-five years of service to a platinum mine. Every family on that corridor has a man the mines kept, and Palesa has just found out about hers. Her mother, shelling beans, doesn't look up: he was two men. I married the one who came home.

Eight chapters, and the tenderest book here — told from the seat nobody writes from, by the child who gets the bill.

When the line gets moved instead of broken

Sindiswa, by Zakes Mdluli, asks whether it counts when your husband said yes.

Thabo and Sindiswa Mokoena live behind a boom gate in Midrand. Her boss sends an explicit photo to the wrong number; the neighbour it was meant for has an open arrangement with her own husband, and talks Sindiswa into wanting the same. Thabo isn't supposed to know. He does — he recorded the lunch and went through her phone, so nobody here walks in clean. Then he gives permission. Once, for one named man. Five days later she takes somebody he never sanctioned, and Thabo finds out what he actually is standing in a neighbour's shrubs on a hot Highveld night, watching his wife through a lit window.

Know what it is: twelve chapters, explicit throughout, told from inside the husband's head, no villains. The marriage comes out stronger for having said things out loud. If you came for consequences, start with Safe Love. If it's the negotiation, start here.

Zasha House and Umoya aren't here, before you ask: everything in those happens in the same room, together. Different appetite, different aisle.

What to read next

If what pulls you is betrayal rather than the sex, try The Tenant. Irene Mavuso runs a backyard laundry in Chiawelo, Soweto, and the man at her gate with a toolbox carries a photocopied affidavit with her signature on it. Not an affair — the same wound from another direction. For desire with the guilt still on it, taboo stories is next door; for the long build before the line gets crossed, sensual stories.

Start free

You shouldn't have to pay to find out whether a story gets under your skin. Chapter one of every story here is free — the whole chapter, no login, no card. Open Safe Love and see what Tracy's voice does to you. If it lands, the rest unlocks with a free account, for R29 a story (yours forever) or R55 a month for the library (cancel anytime).

Start with Safe Love →