Hunter Schafer Says Experiencing Infidelity With Dominic Fike 'Fundamentally' Changed Her
Hunter Schafer is speaking her truth when it comes to reflecting on her relationship with ex-boyfriend Dominic Fike.
During a guest appearance on the latest episode of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, Schafer opened up about how experiencing infidelity 'fundamentally changed' her perspective as a trans woman.
She told Cooper that Fike, whom she met on the set of Euphoria, was her first monogamous relationship and her first relationship with a man, having previously only ever been in polyamorous relationships with queer people. 'You will find cis people who do know and just get it, and that’s what was so amazing about my ex-boyfriend, was from the get-go, he saw me exactly for who I was, which is amazing,' she said.
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Still, the public pressure on the both of them was immense. 'This is a straight guy who is in the music scene, too, and we’re in a public relationship, he’s dating a trans woman. He’s completely straight; he’s only dated cis women before,' Schafer said of Fike, whom she split from in 2023. '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, so he’s gay?" He didn’t care at all. … I wasn’t anxious, but I was also head over heels in love and happy to be doing it.'
Schafer added that Fike 'was not perfect,' confirming that he was not faithful to her.
'It’s part of why the relationship ended, I got cheated on for the first time,' she said. 'He’s talked about this, too—in his songs, he writes about it—so it’s fine to be talking about it today and it’s part of my truth. But that fundamentally changed me as a person. And it was this whole process of realising that cheating has nothing to do with you at all. It has everything to do with that person and whatever kind of pain they’re in, or whatever they’re dealing with.'
Besides dealing with the infidelity itself, Schafer explained how being trans complicated her healing process. 'As a trans woman with a man who has never dated [a trans woman] before, then it’s [in] my mind. I knew it wasn’t the truth … but my brain, because of the way I’ve been socialised as a trans woman, and it’s been this crux in my life of, like, why life has been so hard sometimes. I’m like ‘Oh my god, is this it?’'
She added that she discovered Fike’s cheating after looking through his phone. 'I kind of knew,' she said. 'I went into the phone, which I’m not proud of.'
After going through such a public romance, she also wants to keep certain details of their relationship private. 'It makes me so nervous to talk about this stuff, because I have no interest in letting the public into what happened and everything,' she told Cooper. 'What happened with that was between me and him, and I want to keep it, and I want to protect that.'
When it comes to establishing a foundation for romance, Schafer said she is grateful for her first-ever relationship, which was with a trans woman. 'It was my entrance into sex, romance, all of that stuff. All of those were firsts in that relationship, and it was with another trans woman—thank god,' she recalled. 'She kind of showed me the ropes because dating as a trans person—it’s complicated. … To know in my first relationship and in my first really being in this mutual love thing, first time having sex, that I got to do it with somebody who completely understands my gender—I’m so thankful for it.'
Having trans people in her life as opposed to partners who are cisgender—the denotation for someone who identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth—showed Schafer that 'there’s a lens that you sort of acquire.'
She continued, 'It’s something that ignorant people who have no idea how to engage with trans people or think about trans people, they don’t have the lens that allows them to see whatever person as the gender that they are presenting as … It’s interesting branching out from there into cis people, cis women or cis men, where I’m not sure they have the lens.'
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