I am a 30-year-old straight man married to a wonderful 29-year-old bisexual woman. We have been married almost three years and together for five, and we have a beautiful two-year-old son. Our marriage is monogamish—occasional threesomes, leeway to make out with other people with prior consent—and despite the normal stressors of parenting and work life, our relationship is happy, stable, and fulfilling. I love my wife, and she is the best thing to ever happen to me. Even though I feel like I have hit the jackpot, today, I am very stressed.

This past weekend I attended an arts event in a large city two states over with my wife, our son, and several of our friends. At this festival, one of my best friends ran into a girl whose name he did not know. But despite not knowing her name, he knew her face—three years prior, in the same city, he hooked up with her at my bachelor party. She approached my friend and me at a bar, told us how hot we were, and asked if she could party with us that night. Being drunk and high out of our minds, having a hot girl hitting on us with absolutely no effort on our part? It felt like the best idea in the world.

After the bar closed, we went back and partied at another friend’s house with the rest of the bachelor party group. At some point, my best friend and I wound up in a room with this girl, and there was kissing between all three of us. I don’t remember all of the details concerning exactly how things progressed, but I do know that once it felt like sex was an inevitability, I managed to pull it together and leave the room. I did make out with this girl, but I kept all of my clothes on, and we did not fuck each other—orally, manually, or otherwise. My friend stayed with her that night, presumably having the time of his life, and the next morning she was gone. No names exchanged, no friendship on social media, no photos, no nothing.

After this occurred, I struggled deeply over whether to tell my soon-to-be-wife. Before leaving for the bachelor trip, she requested that I not make out with any strippers, and I agreed. Given this entirely reasonable request, I felt like making out with someone from the real world was several orders of magnitude worse than making out with a stripper. I felt extremely guilty. I thought long and hard about what to do and decided that because I didn’t do anything sexually that could jeopardize my wife’s health or my own AND given that our wedding was just two months away at the time AND not wanting to add to my wife’s stress AND given that this occurred in a large city with over a million people AND my friends and I were never going to see this girl again... I concluded that the considerate thing to do was to shove the whole ordeal down the memory hole. I didn’t see any benefit to telling my wife beyond unburdening myself of my own guilt.

Fast-forward to the present, and my best friend and this girl have really hit it off. They spent all evening at the arts event together, and he slept at her house that night. I am thrilled that my friend has found someone he is enthusiastic about—a rarity for him—but the bottom line is I imagine that this girl will be around my friend group (and my wife) on a semi-regular basis from here on out. So now, despite astronomically improbable odds, it appears that fate has intervened and I have to once again decide whether to tell my wife what happened at the bachelor party. I am relatively certain that if I don’t tell her—and tell her quickly—lies about the situation will compound and turn what was once a considerate omission into a betrayal. I love my wife more than anything and am devastated that this issue has come up again, let alone when our relationship and openness/communication seem to be at a high point. I don’t want to keep anything from her. Am I doing the right thing by telling her now? Set me straight, Dan.

Stupid Husband In Trouble

Two hookups—two hookups that took place three years apart—could lead to a loving (for your friend) and complicating (for you) long-term relationship, SHIT, but odds are better that nothing will come of this. Your friend and this girl don't really know each other, and almost all new relationships fall apart early in the discovery process, aka the getting-to-fuck-you-on-the-regular process. So if you can trust your friend and his new girlfriend not to blurt out all the boozy details of the night they met in front your wife for now—if you can trust them to omit your rather limited participation in their first hookup—you might wanna wait a few months before coming clean, SHIT, as that night could wind up safely back in the memory hole.

But if your friend and his new GF wind up making a go of it, SHIT, you should get in front of the scandal and disclose what happened that night to your wife. You don't want her to find out from someone else—from them or from a mutual friend they shared the unabridged version story with—and even if that never happens, SHIT, you don't want to live with the stress of worrying about whether she'll find out for the next four or five decades.

And however angry your wife is when you let her know what happened—and we're both assuming she'll be angry—it's hard to imagine that she won't come to see your booze-addled behavior that night for what it was: a violation of the letter of law, not a violation of the spirit of the law. You made out with someone else—permissible under the terms of your monogamish agreement—but you failed to get the required okay from her in advance. If a monogamish couple, a couple that has three-ways and allows for some making out with other people, can't forgive a relatively minor violation like that, SHIT, what hope is there for all the monogamous couples working through the fallout of an actual affair? (And a lot of couples do manage to work though an affair—and many come out stronger for it, says Esther Perel.)

And who knows? After you disclose your transgression, SHIT, your wife may disclose one or two of her own.