Jodi Cheats on Johnny Several Times a Year – Kellan Jansen

June 11, 2026

Jodi cheats on Johnny several times a year. It’s his first serious relationship and her seventh. His parents divorced; hers stayed together. Her mother was the same age when she began cheating. Jodi still says I love you.

Jodi comes home from work at 2 in the afternoon, smelling like coffee. Johnny doesn’t work, except for what he can do from home. He has become strangely afraid of the world and the people in it. They have been together seven years.

In the first year, in their first hometown apartment, they had a large fight, which Jodi made physical, and Johnny ran away from. She picked him up from the park, in his truck, at 2 am, and said: “I was THIS close to driving to my ex’s.” Johnny ran away from that statement, too. It was not worth losing her over, the statement.

They moved cities again and again. There were always attractive men popping up in Jodi’s stories, all of whom happened to be gay or bisexual. Johnny got fat and isolated himself from everyone but her. He took up drinking. He had suspicions, but Jodi reassured him. These were all gay or bisexual men.

He checked their Facebooks. They weren’t. But it wasn’t worth losing her over, the Facebook.

Once, Jodi’s friend told Johnny about the night she helped one of those men pull up his pants. She and the man were in class together often, then studying together after class, then hanging out at night. She began talking about going to grad school somewhere Johnny wouldn’t be able to follow. Until one day, he offered to follow anyway, and she dropped it.

Jodi gave a different gay or bisexual coworker many rides home in Johnny’s car. She cried when a third coworker, this one married, moved across the country. She let a fourth coworker kiss her several times before telling Johnny about him. She let a fifth guy at a party text Johnny from her phone and say he’d have her home soon, with a winking emoji.

She wanted to fuck when she got home, and he wouldn’t, and she was frustrated. And he was not even yelling at her then because she had promised it was innocent, and Johnny was still in the habit of believing her rather than himself.

He was also failing in front of her. A youthful exploratory drive had been replaced by stagnant isolation, an inability to connect with others, an inability to sit in a classroom, an inability to lose weight, and, in his head, Johnny ran away from all of it, drinking.

He was failing and still loved her, and she still said it back, and it was not worth losing her over, all the failing and the men with innocent explanations. Until she finally met one worth leaving for.

A decade later, Johnny still sometimes wonders how Jodi did it when they were kids.

How she cheated through seven years with the regularity of seasons, and could not just lie about it but make him feel bad for even asking. What kind of interiority did it take to do that to a partner?

It’s possible, Johnny thinks, that there are many things still wrong with him. For one, he’s fat and ugly and lazy. For two, she never told him outright — still hasn’t, ten years later. So maybe he’s still imagining it.

Jodi made him feel crazy whenever he made accusations. She would tell him it was his insecurity creeping out. She said he needed to make friends — the only problem in their relationship was that he was too reliant on her.

But in time and separation, Johnny came to see that even if this were all true, he would not cry over a coworker he’d known for only a few months moving. He would not be driving to an ex’s house after a rare argument. He would not be lying about gay and bisexual men. He would not let women text her from his phone, taunting messages.

Johnny used to ask himself if Jodi had no conscience. And at the same time, he used to want her back. Such, he realized, was the power of the first serious relationship.

But the world has changed, he thinks. Romanticism is dead, he thinks. The new relationship is a Machiavellian institution. It’s about how much you can get away with. It’s about satisfying every want — family and fucking.

Or was it something in Jodi’s past, he wonders? And here, he realized her mother was exactly the same way. Always accused of cheating by a husband who never actually left. Still hasn’t left.

And in that sense, Jodi finally telling Johnny that she had kissed another man, who she actually had been sleeping with, was a mercy her mother had never given. Just as her continuing to say I love you to Johnny had been a mercy, maybe, in her eyes, or somewhere below them.

Johnny imagines Jodi walking in on her mother fucking some guy at six years old. How hurt she might be at her father’s betrayal. How watching her mother cheat for 20 years might normalize the behavior. How her mother could explain it away as a problem of a faulty husband.

How much pain might accrue, watching the betrayal of her father in real time, slow motion, suspended? How might she deal with that pain?

Maybe, like Johnny, she would look away from it.
But in doing so, she had betrayed him over and over again for years.
The cycle, in many ways, repeated itself.

Even seven years after they’d broken up, when in one of those months he wanted her back. She kept the door open with no intention of letting him through. Johnny thought he would not have done that in her shoes. Then he thought, How can the closest person to you treat you so evilly?

It’s no surprise, Johnny thinks, that he isolates himself from all the people in the world. How could he not? And she had done it to him! She had stabbed him and lied about it so often, and still said I love you, and even visited his family with him again and again.

Johnny has gotten very philosophical in his isolation. Actually, he had always been that way, but the topics have changed. Where before he studied Buddhism, now he studies people.

Those who live to serve themselves at the expense of everyone else.
And cut you deeper than you thought possible while telling you they love you.
And who, Johnny thinks, are bad, awful, evil people.

But who are also perhaps operating in some system that guides them there. Systems like mothers who cheat on fathers, and the pain of living with it. And going to work every day and living with it. And being around infinite people and not knowing any of them. And suddenly, competing in a global community. And suddenly, seeing your insignificance shoved back at you a million ways every day. Knowing that you are never the best at anything or entirely safe, even within the family.

Specks of dust, cosmically.
Who will benefit themselves at everyone else’s expense.
Not believing in any GOD or creed.
But the god of pleasure.

That’s life today, Johnny thinks — only many years later.

These insignificant beings, internalizing their insignificance on a scale never seen before with globalized social media. And now everything is as meaningless as the individual feels.

All institutions are dust. All people are Speck — pork in a meat market.

Still,

Jodi is married now, and probably happy, and entirely irrelevant.
And Johnny is alone now, and probably happy, and entirely irrelevant.

And you can probably treat people however you want to treat them with no repercussions beyond losing the relationship itself.

And if you know that most people don’t care about you, and will use you for the pleasure you can provide for as long as you can provide it, then you might first feel deeply hurt by it, and then adopt their mannerisms as your own, thinking, “That’s just the way the world is. I won’t be the sucker.”

If you think about any of this at all, that is. Before returning to the cosmic orgy.

Maybe, like Johnny, you never trust people again.
Maybe, like Johnny, you forgive the people closest to you for living in insignificance and dealing with it in their many ways.
After some years and separation.

And maybe you think you made your own betrayals, too.

And maybe what we should all be doing is using the time and agency we have left to try to show that another approach is possible. To bring that approach into the world, which will not enter it except through us. That kindness can also suit a betrayal. That self-flagellation is largely worthless. That people are less in control of themselves than they tend to think, even in recognizing their insignificance.

And in the end, Jodi finally said something, and Johnny finally stood up for himself and left her, and maybe that is mercy, and maybe we are slowly making progress somewhere, generation by generation, each doing a little less damage than the one before. Or will we release ourselves into the anarchy, giving up?