A wife who knows and accepts her husband's infidelity

Question

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.

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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.)}

Answer 1

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.

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

Answer 2

Descriptively wittol is currently attached to men who know their wives are unfaithful. Prescriptively, it seems like a prime candidate for gender neutrality. Being formed from the root wit and the pejorative suffix -ault, there is no natural gender:

(n.) "compliant cuckold," late 15c., witewold,

probably from witen "to know" (see wit (v.)) + ending from noun cuckold (Middle English cokewold).

Emphasis mine

wit

"to know" (archaic), Old English witan (past tense wast, past participle witen) "to know, beware of or conscious of, understand, observe, ascertain, learn,"

from Proto-Germanic *witan "to have seen," hence "to know"

(cognates: Old Saxon witan, Old Norse vita, Old Frisian wita, Middle Dutch, Dutch weten, Old High German wizzan, German wissen, Gothic witan "to know"), from PIE *weid- (see wit (n.)). The phrase to wit, almost the only surviving use of the verb, is first recorded 1570s, from earlier that is to wit (mid-14c.), probably a loan-translation of Anglo-French cestasavoir, used to render Latin videlicet (see viz.)

cuckold

mid-13c., kukewald, from Old French cucuault,

from cocu (see cuckoo) + pejorative suffix -ault, of Germanic origin. So called from the female bird's alleged habit of changing mates, or her authentic habit of leaving eggs in another bird's nest.

In Modern French the identity is more obvious: Coucou for the bird and cocu for the betrayed husband. German Hahnrei (13c.), from Low German, is of obscure origin. The second element seems to be connected to words for "ardent," and suggests perhaps "sexually aggressive hen," with transferal to humans, but Kluge suggests rather a connection to words for "capon" and "castrated." Related: Cuckoldry.

Why should there be a gender distinction in this matter? In the 15th century, when these words were being formed, women had no recourse. Whether they knew of their husbands' unfaithful ventures or not was absolutely irrelevant. Now that the playing field has been leveled, women can co-opt this unfamiliar derogatory word from men to affront their spineless sisters.

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If you must have a gender distinction, then mari complaisant (complacent husband) for the men becomes femme complaisante for the women.

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www.etymonline.com

en.wiktionary.org

Answer 3

A spouse of either sex willing to tolerate infidelity might be called complaisant:-

complaisant - showing a cheerful willingness to do favors for others; "to close one's eyes like a complaisant husband whose wife has taken a lover"; [The Free Dictionary]

Answer 4

I think I'd call this type of woman an infidelity pragmatist - she knows what's probably going on, after all, its not exactly uncommon is it, but chooses to ignore it because of other benefits, presumably. Plus she's probably sensible enough to have recognised the possibility of infidelity on the part of her husband as extremely high even before the marriage, which is why she is not making a fuss about it - it hasn't come as a real shock or an insult. She may choose to acknowledge it, or just ignore it, whether or not it causes her pain or disappointment.

Most women know when infidelity is happening, men are usually very poor at covering their tracks (unlike women); I guess there's no word for it because historically, it was expected that men would be unfaithful and wives were expected to put up with it, so it simply wasn't important enough, whereas 'cuckold' does exist because men, again historically, did not expect their wives to be unfaithful and are usually pretty poor at detecting the signs.

Answer 5

Earlier answers appear to fully answer the precise question; which is a search for a particular noun.

Notwithstanding this, modern British usage (and by this I mean journalistic usage) is to use the adjective 'long-suffering' for this,

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2447852/No-10-turned-blind-eye-Alan-Clark-affairs-Thatcher-aware-liaisons-minister.html

Answer 6

'passive' - accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance (as per Google) - is simple and effective.

Answer 7

If you want to use some old words, there's:

Bedswerver (noun) unisex - can apply to either husband or wife

unleal (adjective) meaning 'unfaithful'.