“I’ve been very honest with him from the get-go. I think women are beautiful. I’ve had a lot of fun with women, and I’m not ashamed of it. The problem is that I also love a well-endowed man. But just because I enjoy women doesn’t mean I’m allowed to have affairs in my relationship. I learned through talking with my therapist that it is still cheating even if it’s with girls, so there is a rule there.”

— Fergie tells the Advocate about her policy on cheating. Apparently, her husband, Josh Duhamel, didn’t get the memo. [via US Weekly]

Who among us hasn’t had some explaining to do after sending a sexy email to the wrong person? Most of the time your unlucky recipient laughs it off and everything’s cool. But that’s not what happened to John, Lisa and everyone at Cornell University who now (accidentally!) knows about their affair.

John is a married tech guy at Cornell. Lisa is his married mistress at the Cornell Business School. And at 2 p.m. on Friday afternoon, when John accidentally included another email address on a reply back to Lisa, everyone at Cornell received a sexy, sexy email exchange that the pair had been writing back-and-forth since 8:30 a.m. By 3 o’clock, the whole dirty email exchange was posted online and now the whole world knows what kind of panties Lisa wore on Friday ... and much more. I wish I could feel bad for these people, but haven’t they ever heard of iChat?

After the jump, the dirtiest, most cringe-worthy bits from John and Lisa’s email blunder:

Like the David Letterman Debacle wasn’t bad enough, now we have the story of Steve Phillips, the ESPN analyst, who had an affair with a 22-year-old coworker. Unfortunately for the 46-year-old sports dude and married father of four, his latest dalliance (and apparently there’ve been many before her) turned into a bunny boiler when he broke it off with her.

Brooke Hundley, the jilted junior, went ballistic, repeatedly emailing and calling Phillips’ long-suffering wife, tricking their 16-year-old son into an online flirtation, and then finally showing up at the family home, scaring the crap out of everyone.

Lucky for Hundley, the Phillips declined to press charges, but her reputation, both professionally and personally, is shot. (His too. He’s since been fired from ESPN and has entered a treatment facility.) Obviously, being some cad’s side action is always a sucker’s game, but if you’re going to do it, do it right.

How would you feel if your boyfriend or husband had a virtual girlfriend? I don’t mean what if he had a relationship with someone, as in a real person; I’m talking about a digitally animated girlfriend “brought to life” through Nintendo DS. There’s a new, popular dating sims (or dating simulation) video game on the market called Love Plus and, according to Boing Boing, an article posted on a Japanese tech site in September reported that several women had complained that their family lives were disrupted by their husbands’ addiction to the game. Boing Boing spoke with one San Francisco couple, Koh and Yurie, who say that Koh’s one-week addiction to his virtual girlfriend on Love Plus was “gross,” but basically harmless.

Despite valiant human rights work on behalf of Angelina Jolie to make “the other woman” not look like a big ol’ skank, the truth is most people still think “the other woman” is ... well, a big ol’ skank. And guess what, ladies?! There’s this awesome double standard where people shrug their shoulders at Mr. Married But Couldn’t Keep His Pants Zipped and say, “Boys will be boys,” while they give you the stink-eye, you home-wreckin’ ho! So you have your work cut out for you!  Unfortunately, instead of hopping a cheap-o flight out of town to wash that man right out of her hair, some “other women” go a little bonkers when the man doesn’t ditch his wife.

After being in an 11-year relationship with someone I met when we were 18, a mix of drugs and bad attitudes finally came to a head this past January and we ended things.  About four months ago I met a really great guy. He is successful and stable — pretty much everything my ex wasn’t.  We have a great time together and spend almost every minute we aren’t working together. Unfortunately, there isn’t that “chemistry” I had with my ex. And my ex has suddenly decided to barge back into my life. After our last phone conversation, well I wouldn’t really call it a conversation, more like him cursing me out for emotionally abandoning him and moving on with my life (gotta love the drug addict), he’s now saying he’s now completely reformed and wants to give me everything he wasn’t able to before when he was so screwed up. Like an idiot I continue to answer his phone calls and have even seen him on two different occasions.  My question is, is it still considered cheating if it is with your ex who you were with for 11 years? I am not emotionally attached to my ex anymore but that chemistry or “fire” that has always been there attracts me and causes me to do things I normally would never do in my right mind. I have told him (my ex) how horrible I feel about what I have done to my new guy but he assures me that it is okay because to him, these are “special circumstances”.  Do you agree with that?  Or is cheating, cheating regardless? — Dazed and Confused

As many times as I’ve tried to recall the evening, I don’t remember the first time I met Marc*, although he seems to remember it well. He claims we met in a hot tub at a party that my then-boyfriend was throwing. Apparently, he thought I was “hot,” but I only had eyes for my BF Rick*, who was a friend of Marc’s. That was six years ago.

Marc and I saw each other again many times over the years. He was a peripheral part of my circle of friends—one of those people that pop up in your world every once in a while. The first time I actually do remember meeting Marc was at a get-together at a downtown NYC bar. It was a few months after the hot tub night. Rick and I were still madly in love. Marc showed up at the bar alone. I was wearing a short skirt – it was a humid summer night.

Post-failed engagement, I’m not sure how into the idea of marriage I am. I think it’s great for other people and maybe I’ll really want to get married eventually, but for now, I don’t really see it as the end-all, be-all of my romantic future. That said, I’m all about commitment and monogamy, just without a legal document decreeing it so. But according to a conversation on “The View” this morning, this kind of commitment—the wedding band-less kind—is not as serious. The gals were talking about David Letterman of course, and Whoopi kept exclaiming that during the time that Letterman was schtooping his staff, he may have been with Regina Lasko for nearly 20 years, but he hadn’t married her yet. And based on all the clatter Whoopi has heard around the Hot Topics table over the years, that made his cheating not as bad. I think that’s ridiculous.

A dishy new book proposal by a former aide says former Senator John Edwards wasn’t merely cheating on his long-suffering wife Elizabeth Edwards. According to Andrew Young, the senator promised Rielle Hunter he’d marry her after Elizabeth died from cancer in a rooftop ceremony in NYC with the Dave Matthews Band playing.

Urgent memo to Senator Edwards: Making romantic plans for after your wife’s death = tacky! [New York Times]

I once told my mother about a girl I had a crush on. At the time, I think I was about 16, and I had so much acne that if I fell asleep at a library, when I woke up, a blind guy would be trying to read my face. 

“Just go for her,” my mother said.

“It’s not that simple,” I said, while filling out my order form for 25 crates of Noxzema. “She’s got a boyfriend.”

When something is written up in The New York Times’ style section, it means it has hit the mainstream. For example, vampires had been hot for more than a year when the Times gave them an article on the section’s front page. The paper doesn’t jump the gun on anything, so we were surprised by the couple the Times chose to feature in its “Vows” column, even though they’ve recently included a tattooed couple and one that was married in candy wrapper outfits.

Some new studies suggest men cheat up to five percent more than women, but apparently ladies are “bigger liars” about it. Hmm ... bigger liars or just better at not getting caught? According to some recent studies, women are having more affairs than ever—around 15 percent, while the figure is closer to 20 percent for men—but they behave very differently from men when they cheat. Dr. David Holmes, a psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, says: “The biggest difference is that women are much better at keeping their affairs secret. If you look at the studies into paternity, even conservative figures show that between eight and 15 per cent of children haven’t been fathered by the man who thinks he’s the biological parent.”

Apparently unaware of the many ways this could backfire terribly, Wikler Moran-Mora, pastor of the Seventh Day Adventist Church of Reform in Tampa, FL, faked his own kidnapping so he could two-time his wife. According to police, Moran-Mora texted his wife last Tuesday evening to say he had been kidnapped, but that she should not worry because he was working to get released. But when police tracked down Moran-Mora’s location via his cell phone, they discovered “negotiating with kidnappers” actually meant “boning another woman.” The pastor has been charged with filing a false police report—and coming up with a really bad alibi. [ABC Action News]

But Moran-Mora actually isn’t the first genius who got caught being a liar, liar, pants on fire. A trip down memory lane, after the jump:

Why didn’t we think of this? Apparently, this guy’s wife busted him sending nudie photos to someone else via text message. As punishment, she made him stand on a heavily trafficked corner in their hometown while wearing this sign. Brilliant. [Self Preservation]

#Itsnotcheating is a trending topic that’s been all the rage on Twitter. The glimpse into the human psyche’s thoughts on infidelity that it provides is terrifying! As in “It’s not cheating if it happens in Cancun!” terrifying.

After the jump, check out Twitter’s list of mucho slippery ways to cheat that some peeps shockingly think are a-OK. We’re hoping some of these are jokes!

“Recently my boyfriend/ex-boyfriend has been going through some financially hard times. He still has his job but some other really difficult things have happened to him that would make anyone want to run and hide. He decided to face these problems head-on but it’s been incredibly stressful, and just recently I found out he had cheated on me. The last two months of our two years together had been the hardest and it was like he was no longer the man I fell in love with. Now that I have confronted him he said that he would do everything in his power to turn things around, get his life together, and then try and win me back

What I want to know is can you ever get over being cheated on?  I know it’s very easy to say kick him to the curb, there are more fish in the sea, but I truly want to know if anyone has made a relationship work after someone has not been faithful.”

See my reply after the jump.

“I also feel sorry for the other woman. I am sure she is a fine person. It can’t be fun for her, though I do sometimes question her judgment. If she knew the newspaper had those E-mails back in December, why did she want him to come in June? But I can’t go there too much. All I can do is pray for her because she made some poor choices.”

— Jenny Sanford, in an interview for the ever-important September issue of Vogue, speaking of Maria Belén Chapur, the Argentine woman with whom her husband, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, was discovered earlier this year to be having an extramarital affair. [via WashingtonPost]

A cheating Guatemalan woman faked her own kidnapping in Barcelona, so she could keep cheating with her Spanish lover. Ay carumba! Mark Sanford, are you taking notes? A woman in Spain texted her hubby in Guatemala that she’d been kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and held against her will with other kidnappees. In truth, the two-timer was boning a guy she met online. Her worried hubby alerted the Embassy of Spain in Guatemala, who called cops in Spain. Police found her in Barcelona, where she claimed she’d escaped her captors. However, when a medical examination found she had no injuries befitting a rape or kidnapping, the woman admitted the whole charade. And she did it all for a little nookie on the side. [Barcelona Reporter, Euro Weekly]

You don’t have to be Jennifer Aniston to think the four women who Krazy-Glued a cheater’s penis to his stomach were way harsh and beyond psycho.

But in our less scrupulous/mature moments, many of us want to punish our ex, especially if he was a cheater. Ladies, let’s keep it legal (and Krazy Glue-free), OK? Refer to our list after the jump for some ideas:

The first time I met my now-close friend Gina, she was rhapsodizing about her awesome boyfriend, Eugene. After a few minutes, I realized I’d already met him. But he wasn’t the sweetheart she was describing. 

I was familiar with Eugene because the weekend before he had propositioned me in a particularly crude manner.  I realized I had two choices: tell her what kind of loathsome dirtbag she was dating or keep my mouth shut in the hopes that she’d someday figure it out on her own.

I went with Option A. I told Gina that she could do much better than that jerk and blurted out the whole tacky tale. She was understandably upset, but appreciated my candor. I was lucky—she dumped him, but kept me as a friend.