Hunter Schafer Reminds Us That Getting Cheated On Isn’t Your Fault
Arturo Holmes
Over a year after her split with fellow Euphoria actor Dominic Fike, Hunter Schafer is shining a light on why they broke up—and the lasting impact of that relationship on her life. During an interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Schafer told host Alex Cooper that she and her co-star boyfriend experienced “a mutually agreed upon” breakup, and shared that both of them had “a lot to work on.”
“It’s one of the cleaner breakups I’ve had. We both recognized that this is not working, and we can’t do this. We gotta go our own separate ways,” Schafer said during the interview.
Despite there being no hard feelings after the breakup, Schafer divulged more background on the potential reasons for the split, describing the “life changing” experience of being cheated on for the first time. “It’s part of my truth, but that fundamentally changed me as a person. And it was this whole process of realizing that cheating has nothing to do with you at all,” Schafer explained.
“And it has everything to do with that person and whatever kind of pain they’re in or whatever they’re dealing with. It’s all of that, but it’s so hard.”
Her relationship with Fike, Schafter shared, was a profound and truly unique experience: it was Schafer’s first time in a monogamous relationship, and first relationship with a cisgender man, after exclusively dating trans women, trans men and cis women. “Most, if not all of my deeply painful experiences I’ve had in life have been with men,” she shared. “And so I really came into this complex of, I never want to let a man back close to me in my life. I don’t see a world in which it’s possible.”
With Fike, she was able to enjoy both the intimacy of the relationship as well as comfort with being in the public eye, particularly as a trans woman. “This is a straight guy who is in the music scene, too. And we are in a public relationship. He’s dating a trans woman, and he’s completely straight. He’s only dated cis women before, and he’s toting me around, happy to be my boyfriend in front of the world. And people are saying horrible, nasty shit because it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re so gay.’ He didn’t care at all.”
Still, the eventual end to the relationship provided both with the opportunity for self reflection. “It was a clean parting, and he has a lot to work on,” Schafer continued. “I also have a lot to work on. I think that’s also why I’m in this era of, I gotta figure my sh*t out.” She added, “We had a really good thing. But there were things in our own selves that had nothing to do with each other that kept coming up in the way of the relationship.”
Related: Hunter Schafer Reveals She Dated Rosalía in 2019: “She’s Family No Matter What”
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
