Diary of a Hotwife

I met my husband in high school and knew almost immediately that we were going to be together. We wanted the same things—namely to get out of our small town and never look back—but we were different enough to keep things interesting. He’s calm and analytical. I’m emotional and empathetic. I know that lots of couples reflexively say their partner is their best friend, but in our case it’s true. We don’t have a large social network, and we don’t want one. We’ve always been happiest in each other’s company.

After moving to Toronto for work and school, we spent most of our 20s building our careers (me in mental health, him in finance). We wanted kids—lots of them—but we weren’t ready to leave the city. We were living in a condo when we had our first child, then we upsized to a semi after our second. But, when I gave birth to our third, it was clear that we needed more space. It was time to move to the suburbs.

Surprisingly, life remained more or less the same. We barely had time to miss Toronto. I got pregnant again, then the pandemic hit. In lockdown with the kids and our menagerie of pets, we realized we couldn’t keep up the pace of juggling a busy household and two careers. I earned a lot less money than my husband, so it made sense that I would put my work on hold. Suddenly, instead of seeing clients and collaborating with colleagues, I was living solely for my family. My days became a relentless cycle of school pickup and drop-off, taking care of the animals, cleaning the house, prepping meals, homework, playtime, bath time, bedtime.

Related: “I got married to a guy I’d known for only a few months. Then he got cold feet”

Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and marvel at what an archetype I’d become—an avatar for stay-at-home suburban moms. My long hair is perpetually pulled back in a messy bun. I wear Lululemon leggings year-round, with Bogs boots in winter and Birkenstocks in summer. After spending more than a decade either pregnant or breastfeeding, my body is forever transformed: my boobs are lopsided, and I have stretch marks running across my midsection.

Much like our household, my relationship with my husband often runs on ­autopilot: spontaneity is the first casualty of parenthood. But, in the decades we’ve been together, our desire for each other hasn’t waned. We’ve had lulls, sure, but sex is something we’ve always prioritized. Despite its predictability, our life has been good. Better than good: our kids are healthy, we own a nice home, we are financially stable, and my husband and I don’t just love each other—we legitimately like and respect each other. It never occurred to me that anything was missing.

One afternoon this past November, on one of his work-from-home days, my husband and I were alone in the house—a rare occurrence—and we were both feeling a little frisky. He suggested we watch a video on Pornhub. Two minutes in, I jumped up and hit pause. The woman on the screen wasn’t some stranger; she was my former colleague. I couldn’t believe it—not just because I knew her but because of the subject of the video. She was documenting her adventures in something called hotwifing, a phenomenon where women hook up with men outside their marriage with their husbands’ consent.

I had never heard the term before, and I’ll admit it: I judged her. Why would she do this? How was her husband okay with it? Their marriage must be in serious trouble. What do her friends think? Does her family know? Most disturbingly of all, there was a kernel of fascination mixed in with my horror. My former colleague was well educated, like me. She was middle-aged, like me. She was a wife and a mom too—yet there she was, exploring her sexuality. Not only that, she was filming her encounters and sharing the videos on places like Pornhub and Reddit (via Redgifs, which hosts video-sharing and can link to Reddit). Until that moment, I honestly thought people only used Reddit to yell at one another about politics or trade video game tips.

I couldn’t shake my curiosity, so we watched a follow-up video in which my former colleague explained how hotwifing worked and why it appealed to her and her husband. As I stared at this person who was similar to me in so many ways, I began to wonder if my pearl-clutching had less to do with her behaviour and more to do with envy. She seemed so powerful, so confident, so desired. I knew my husband loved me and wanted me, but he was the only person I’d ever had sex with. I couldn’t imagine anyone else thinking of me that way. Hell, I was so tied up in my roles of wife and mother that I couldn’t even see over the mountain of laundry in front of me. Was it possible that, having never questioned my own desires, I knew next to nothing about them?

A couple of weeks later, I was working out with my husband in our home gym when he suggested we take some boudoir-style pictures of me on his phone. He told me I was just as hot as my former colleague. At first I laughed him off, but then I started thinking: if she could post videos for anyone to see, surely I could take private photos with my husband. We snuck up to his office and locked the door.

When we were done, I could hardly look at the pictures. I had come of age in the 1990s, the decade of Kate Moss, “heroin chic” and yo-yo dieting. As a kid, I’d been overweight, nerdy, bullied. It was hard to shake that image of myself. My husband, however, loved the photos and gently floated the idea of posting one online, anonymously. I was hesitant, but I could see how proud and turned on he was at the thought of showing me off. I liked the way that made me feel—sexy, wanted, feminine. Besides, the pictures showed me in a G-string from behind—no one would be able to recognize me. So we created a Reddit account, uploaded a photo with the tagline “Who wants me?” and clicked “post.”

Related: “I saw my friend’s boyfriend on Tinder. We decided to ambush him”

Within minutes, my account was flooded with DMs. Despite how I thought of myself, dozens of strangers clearly disagreed. They weren’t looking at my body thinking, She should cut down on carbs and hide her cellulite. As I read their messages, I felt suddenly untethered from the person I thought I would always be. These men wanted to know more; some sent me explicit pictures of themselves and even asked to meet up in person. It was intoxicating.

My husband and I brought this newfound thrill into our bedroom, fantasizing and role playing what I would do with these men if we ever met up. We kept taking photos and even started filming a few videos and uploading them: me in lingerie, me naked, us having sex—but with our faces always obscured. Suddenly, I had thousands of followers on Reddit and Redgifs, and they didn’t see me as an exhausted mother. They had no clue I slept in oversized T-shirts and my husband’s flannel pyjama pants. They saw a woman who knew what she liked and went for it.

---

Spend enough time in certain corners of the internet and you’ll discover that Torontonians are anything but repressed and puritanical. Beneath the city’s buttoned-up exterior lies a dirty underbelly

---

By early January, our dozen or so posts hit a million views. The number was both incomprehensible and emboldening. Reading Fifty Shades of Grey, bingeing Bridgerton and watching the occasional smutty video used to be the extent of my sexual daring. Now I was opening up to my husband and to strangers about things I wanted to try.

The anonymity of Reddit gave me courage. A universe I never knew existed was now available to me. I messaged with a firefighter. An ICU doctor asked if I had pictures of myself pregnant and if I was still lactating. He said that, after dealing with so much death, he was turned on by the idea of new life. (I ignored his request.) One man wanted to meet in a clothing store and have sex in a change room while his wife listened in. Most of the men messaging me were well educated and in high-paying professions—they were doctors, Bay Streeters, tech guys. Many were married, and their partners usually had similar jobs. I started to wonder if keeping up with such demanding professions put so much pressure on relationships that there was little energy left for intimacy.

When I first started posting on Reddit, I was expecting messages from guys in their 20s who got off on the idea of being with an older woman. While I did hear from them, the overwhelming majority were men who were partnered—and parents. Their pictures contained hints of their real lives, like toys lying abandoned in the background or a T-shirt that read “Disney Dad.” For the most part, they weren’t trying to hide their relationship status. They wanted to talk about it, about their marriages that had gone stale or fallen victim to incompatible sex drives. One man lamented, “I don’t get to express my wild side.” Another, a police officer in the GTA, told me he was in an open relationship, but when I pressed him, he confessed that he’d lied. A Toronto doctor told me that his marriage was headed for a split. “The sex is nonexistent,” he wrote. “And we are basically living in separate parts of the house.”

Their messages were raunchy, but there was an undercurrent of melancholy beneath the bravado, and the senders seemed to be seeking my sympathy. It wasn’t hard to get drawn in to their narratives. I’ve always been interested in the lives of others. Working in mental health gave me the opportunity to interact with all kinds of people and hear about their successes and struggles. After four years in mommy mode, I was eager to listen to new stories and share my thoughts. These connections were initially about kinks, but they soon grew to encompass relationship struggles, job stress, and the twin tightropes of loneliness and shame.

Literature is littered with wives who wanted something different, something more, and were punished for stepping out of marital bounds. Anna Karenina’s story concludes with her throwing herself under a train. Emma Bovary swallows arsenic. Lady Chatterley survives but ends up pregnant by her lover, living with her sister and praying for a divorce that will probably never come. Unlike those hapless heroines, I wasn’t cheating, but I was running the risk of becoming a cautionary tale. My husband’s buy-in didn’t bubble-wrap our relationship or safeguard against possible miscommunication, angst, jealousy or separation. It did, however, mean that we were on this journey together, making up the rules as we went along.

The same can’t be said of the men who were messaging me without their partners’ knowledge. While hotwifing can attract cheaters, that isn’t its raison d’être. Rather, it’s part of a recent wave of sexual trends in which participants openly seek out extramarital partners. The hotwife’s husband is an eager participant who might hear about encounters after the fact or take part in them as they happen. Although cuckolding—when a man watches his wife have sex with someone else and gets off on the humiliation—isn’t my husband’s thing, it can overlap with hotwifing. The goal is that both partners derive satisfaction from the encounters.

---

I could feel myself splintering into two people. The first was the same old mom who stood in the pickup line at school every afternoon making small talk. The other did unspeakable things on Reddit

---

According to the Journal of Sex Research, 20 per cent of people surveyed across multiple studies in Canada have been in open relationships. Ethical non-­monogamy, or consensual non-monogamy, an umbrella term under which hotwifing falls, isn’t a 21st-century invention, but it’s now enough of a movement to have an acronym—ENM—that doubles as a hashtag. The digital world has facilitated the spread of alternative relationship models, giving couples immediate access to like-minded people. If you live in the Toronto area and you have an itch, there’s a community waiting to scratch it for you. Feeld is the go-to location-based app for the ENM crowd; AdultFriendFinder focuses on no-strings hookups; Fetlife caters to BDSM, kink and fetish communities. On Reddit, swinger couples look for partners to join them at local sex clubs such as M4 in Mississauga and Oasis Aqualounge at Mutual and Carlton.

Spend enough time in certain corners of the internet and you’ll discover that Torontonians are anything but repressed and puritanical. Beneath the city’s buttoned-up exterior lies a dirty underbelly. In February, I jumped into a Toronto-specific thread on Reddit for the first time. My inaugural post, a photo of my husband’s hand on my ass with the tagline “It’s better in the burbs,” went up early on a weekday and hit 9,800 views by mid-afternoon. I was bombarded by so many DMs from men writing to me from work—including a cop who sent me a lewd selfie from a bathroom stall at his division—I could barely keep up.

Hotwifing made me feel alive in a way I never had before, but I had nagging doubts that would wallop me without warning. I could be playing Lego with my kids or helping my parents grocery shop and wham! What kind of mother shares graphic pictures and videos of herself for the world to see? What kind of daughter? I must be damaged. I could feel myself splintering into two people. The first was the same old mom who stood in the pickup line at school every afternoon making small talk. The other did unspeakable things on Reddit.

My hesitation was muted when other women reached out online. They told me they loved that I was confident enough to share my post-baby body and thought it was inspiring to see how much I enjoyed sex. One of them, a 30-something government employee in Ottawa, regularly sent me words of encouragement about controlling my sexual destiny. Together, we formed a community of like-minded women who support and push each other to be as truthful as possible about what we want.

Related: The Kink Club—Inside the secret world of BDSM

Where was my husband in all of this? From the outset, we agreed that everything would be open and shared. He saw most of the DMs I was getting and my replies. He found it funny that I’d never thought of myself as sexy and now had lots of evidence to the contrary. He assured me that he supported me, that there was no threat to our relationship. There seemed to be no jealousy there, but I knew that if the situation were reversed, if my partner received messages and pictures from strangers and sent back notes detailing the fantasies he had about them, I wouldn’t have been okay with it.

Still, there is a chasm between fantasy and reality. Lots of people imagine trying something and never follow through. There was a certain comfort in what we were doing, a kind of safe remove—I wasn’t actually having sex with other people. Even if part of me wanted to take the risk, I wasn’t convinced that we could successfully sidestep the landmines of in-person extramarital sexual encounters.

Shortly after my first post went up, I’d started texting with a young construction worker and single dad I’ll call Craig. He was fun to talk to, and over time, we exchanged dirty pictures and described our turn-ons. Craig pitched himself as an expert in male-female-male, or MFM, threesomes. My husband was intrigued by the idea, so we started doing “virtual threesomes,” taking pictures of ourselves having sex (again, without showing our faces) and sending them to people I’d been chatting with. Riding high on the enthusiastic responses, my husband dared me to contact Craig and arrange a face-to-face threesome. Surprised but thrilled, I reached out. Within the hour, we’d set up a rendezvous with Craig for the following day. We also established ground rules: condoms for intercourse, no anal sex and no cuck dynamic.

That night, neither my husband nor I could sleep. This would be my first time having sex with someone else, and I was about to do it in front of my husband in our bedroom. We were at once nervous and excited. We spent the morning cleaning the house, putting fresh sheets on our king-sized bed.

Craig arrived on time. When the doorbell rang, I ran away and made my husband answer. Craig was a former pro athlete, so I knew he was going to be a big guy, but I wasn’t expecting him to be six foot four. In an over-the-top attempt to cover up his jitters, my husband welcomed Craig with a friendly “Hey there, big guy!” and invited him to sit beside me on the couch. Craig was as anxious as we were—his hands were trembling as he made small talk about the housing market. After a few minutes, in a voice I prayed came off as seductive, I suggested we head up to the bedroom. We walked slowly up the stairs, parading past pictures of our children on the wall, and stopped near the foot of the bed. Nothing happened. Finally, I said, “Let’s take off our clothes.” They removed their jeans, and I took off my sweats and sweater, revealing a lacy bra and G-string. At that moment, part of me wanted to yell, “Stop!” and throw my clothes back on, then hide in the bathroom. But the other part felt a surge of power.

The feeling didn’t last. Despite Craig’s boasts about his sexual prowess, his nervousness never dissipated, and he couldn’t perform. We said our awkward goodbyes, and I took a hot shower to slough off my embarrassment. My first encounter hadn’t come close to what I’d hoped for. I had wanted to appear sexy and ­confident—an IRL manifestation of my Reddit profile. Now I was worried that I didn’t do or say the right thing to put Craig at ease and turn him on. I’ve always been a people pleaser, a lifelong “good kid” who got straight As and never tested limits. I had wanted to please Craig, my husband and myself. Instead, I felt like I had failed everyone.

I needed to reset. I got dressed, told my husband I wanted some fresh air and went for a walk. The cold whipped me back to real life. School pickup was in an hour, and I had to find a way back to the person who chats with other parents and has snacks waiting for her kids. So I returned home, changed the sheets on the bed and took one last look around the house to make sure there was no lingering evidence of the day’s activities.

My online alter ego and her lacy underwear were tucked away at the back of the drawer, but not for long. About a week after our botched encounter with Craig, I was longing for a do-over. I didn’t want to be held back by awkwardness and regret. I wanted to recapture the rush of confidence I’d experienced with Craig and my husband before everything fell apart. I wanted to focus on this new woman I was becoming.

One of the first men who had messaged me on Reddit was a 30-something married police officer in southeastern Ontario I’ll call Michael. He considered himself happily married—he loved his wife—but the sex between them was infrequent and had long since lost its passion. He was looking for connection and intimacy.

I felt guilty that my posts were soliciting so many messages from married men, especially when I thought of their wives, who, like me, might be overwhelmed by the demands of family. It’s hard to make the time or conjure the desire for sex when your day has been spent rushing from work to school to the grocery store or accomplishing any of the dozen household tasks that loom large. Who has the bandwidth to sit down with their partner and navigate sexual fantasies? Watching Netflix with a glass of wine or reading romance novels is more relaxing. While these women were scrolling and chilling, their husbands found me on Reddit.

At first, I was put off, even disgusted by the messages I was receiving. I advocated for the men’s marriages and tried to encourage them to repair their relationships via tough, honest talks with their wives, by introducing sexual ideas through woman-produced pornography or by going to couples therapy. But I couldn’t help sympathizing with some of the men—they felt unwanted and unneeded by their partners outside of the financial and social security they provided. They thought sex wasn’t as important to their wives as it was to them, that it seemed like yet another task to be checked off a long to-do list. For the most part, I believed them when they told me how much they valued their marriages and didn’t want to leave them. I could offer the husbands a way of having their needs met without risking their relationships, so long as it stayed secret. I wished they were being transparent with their partners, but I figured that was more their business than it was mine.

When we started talking about hot­wifing, I told my husband that I equated sex with intimacy and couldn’t imagine having sex with someone I didn’t have a connection with. Sex for me had always been tied up in feelings of love and tenderness and safety. So when Michael and I began sharing details about our daily lives—he sent me pictures of his dogs and told me what he’d packed for lunch, and I shared how I love to bake and play Nerf with my kids—I knew that plans to meet up weren’t far behind.

After the Craig incident, my husband and I had decided that we wouldn’t host hook-ups at our house—we felt too exposed. I wanted to establish a clear boundary between my Reddit self and my identity as a mom, wife, community volunteer, daughter. Michael didn’t even know my real name, but that didn’t discourage him—he was eager to get together but wasn’t into MFM arrangements. My husband and I agreed that a solo adventure was fine as long as I texted him every half hour or so during the encounter to let him know I was safe and told him all about it after the fact.

Michael and I set a date to meet at a hotel in Oshawa. After dropping the kids off at school, I took an Uber to the hotel and registered for a room. As I waited for Michael’s knock on the door, I paced, texted my husband and adjusted the G-string I was wearing under my tights. My face was still burning from the check-in. I had asked for the day rate, avoiding eye contact with the clerk, and handed over my credit card. Michael had offered to float the cost of the entire room, but I insisted on a 50-50 split. It seemed less transactional.

When Michael showed up, he was wearing an Under Armour tracksuit. I had joked that so many police officers wear the brand that the company should give them a discount (I have since learned that they actually do). It was strange seeing him face-to-face after weeks of texts. We were together, alone, for hours if we wanted. I felt a rising panic—should we be doing this?—but I did my best to push it down. This was what I’d been dreaming of.

During the first hour of my meeting with Michael, I texted my husband twice and even shared pictures and videos. But, as I got swept up in the intensity of my connection with Michael, the promise slipped from my mind. An hour and a half later, I picked up my phone to send my husband a message and saw that he’d left me a series of increasingly frantic texts. I quickly apologized and assured him that I was fine, but he was furious. Rightfully so—this was not what we had agreed to. I scooped up my belongings and said goodbye to Michael. I spent the ride home agonizing over what I had done and the impact it could have on my marriage. My husband had trusted and supported me, and I’d taken him for granted and hurt him terribly in the process. Not only had I dis­regarded how worried he would be about my safety, but I had allowed my desire for new experiences, for sex, to supersede our relationship.

For the rest of the afternoon, my husband and I exchanged text messages that were pleading (mine) and curt (his). I choked back tears through school pickup and homework, dinner with the kids and bedtime. When my husband arrived home from work later that night, we locked ourselves in our bedroom and turned on the shower to mask our conversation. We stood facing each other across our bed, neither of us knowing how to start. “I’m a slut,” I finally muttered, then hid my reddening face in my hands. That horrible word had been hovering in my mind, unspoken, throughout all the Reddit posts and messages I’d sent since December. Until this moment, what we’d been doing seemed harmless, so far removed from my everyday self that it almost felt like someone else posting.

But, in our bedroom, the full weight of every decision that we’d made, that I’d made, swept over me, and I started sobbing uncontrollably. My husband rushed to comfort me, but the tears wouldn’t stop. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done to our marriage.” It may have been his idea to start hot­wifing, but he was on the sidelines supporting my exploration. For our entire adult lives, it had been just us, and we weren’t alone anymore.

We talked late into the night about what we’d been through, what it meant for our marriage and the way forward. My husband shared how opening up our relationship had brought back unresolved childhood fears of being abandoned or not measuring up. But he also believed that our marriage had grown since that first post and told me he felt great joy seeing me put aside my “mom cape” and become more confident and in touch with my sexuality.

At one point, my husband asked me point blank if I wanted to stop. I paused, looked down and said no. Yes, there were moments of shame, but I knew I didn’t want to go back. I’m not even sure I could.

Over the past few months, my husband and I have become closer than I thought possible. The sex has never been better. Our conversations have a new degree of intimacy—we can discuss anything, without judgment. We spend a lot of time tending to our marriage and checking in with each other, no matter how difficult the topic or what feelings it might stir up. I can’t imagine going through this with anyone else.

Since my encounter with Michael, I have hooked up with a 30-something single father. I’ve also taken part in my first successful threesome, with a married couple, at their place near the Scotiabank Arena. My husband and I even tried another MFM threesome—it was awkward but better than our attempt with Craig. We’ve also learned from past mistakes: when I connect with someone new, my husband is involved in my communications with them, and together he and I hash out the plans to meet. We try to mitigate risks as best we can—I get tested monthly for STIs, and I expect potential playmates to get tested too. We always have our first meeting in a public place. We discuss boundaries in detail, going over likes and dislikes, non-­negotiables and what we hope to get out of the experience.

My husband knows he has my permission to seek outside partners, but he’s not interested—for now at least. We have, however, recently joined an app that matches singles and couples with each other based on desires and geography. There are lots of middle-aged couples on there; we even came across a couple I recognized from my kids’ school. When I started this journey, I felt like an outlier, but I’ve come to realize that’s not the case. Many of us are looking to clear the fog of parenthood, if only for a short while, and claim—or reclaim—our sexuality.

This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.