Learn English – A wife who knows and accepts her husband’s infidelity

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What do you call a wife or woman who knows their spouse or partner is unfaithful but pretends either to (1) not care or (2) to not know? In this scenario it's important that the cheating spouse or partner believes his wife or partner hasn't found out. That he is having one or more love affairs without being caught.

I did manage to unearth an archaic term wittol, which The Chambers Dictionary defines as
a man who knows his wife's unfaithfulness, and accepts it.

The Collins English Dictionary online says:

wittol (ˈwɪtəl)
a man who tolerates his wife's unfaithfulness
[C15 wetewold, from witen to know (see wit²) + –wold, perhaps from cokewold cuckold]

I'm curious if there is a modern-day female version. I can't think of any off-hand and yet I'm sure we all know someone in our lives who has knowingly accepted their partner's infidelities be it for religious convictions; a sense of loyalty; pride; love; fear of loneliness; fear of hardship or merely motivated by social status.

A modern literary example:

In Gillian Flynn's novel Gone Girl, although the beautiful pro/antagonist Amy Elliott Dunne is fully aware her husband has been cheating for over a year, she pretends not to know and is far from being acquiescent. Only the reader is privy to that information.

(I realize it doesn't match the description perfectly, but it's important that Nick Dunne is unaware of his wife's discovery.)

Best Answer

Cuckquean is the word you need, a female cuckold (cuckold being the more common word for wittol).

Cuckquean refers to a woman with an adulterous husband. In modern English it generally refers to the sexual fetish in which sexual gratification is gained from maintenance or observation of sexual relations by a man with a woman or a number of women besides his girlfriend, wife or long-term female sex partner, and therefore, the reversed gender roles of a cuckold relationship.

Sadly there is a Wikipedia page so probably counts as sort of general reference.

But to make it a little less general reference I could add some other stuff...

While cuckold and cuckquean are not directly related to the word cuck (passing excrement, shit) as such, the term cucking-stool (corrupted to ducking-stool) has also been called the coqueene-stool and the cockqueane-stool.

OED says of the cucking-stool:

An instrument of punishment formerly in use for scolds, disorderly women, fraudulent tradespeople, etc., consisting of a chair (sometimes in the form of a close-stool), in which the offender was fastened and exposed to the jeers of the bystanders, or conveyed to a pond or river and ducked.

Seems to me that a cucking-stool is more than a dip in the river. If I can find anything ruder or more vulgar I'll add it in.

Wikipedia contributors, "Cuckquean," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cuckquean&oldid=641764807 (accessed February 9, 2015).

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