Mr. Sugar

Mr. Sugar is Cheryl Strayed / Sugar’s husband and partner, whose significance lies in the practical, imperfect work of intimacy. In her recollections, he is neither an idealized rescuer nor merely the source of a rupture: he listens, speaks honestly about difficult subjects, fails her, and takes part in the conversations through which their relationship changes. Their shared life is presented as something made through candor and repair rather than guaranteed by the idea that they are a perfect couple.

Identity and Relationship Background

Cheryl Strayed / Sugar describes meeting her former husband shortly after her nineteenth birthday and marrying him before she turned twenty. That marriage ended, and she later began a relationship with Mr. Sugar. The contrast matters to her account: the earlier marriage was to a man she loved and respected but ultimately wanted to leave, while her relationship with Mr. Sugar would become a long partnership whose durability was tested by conflict rather than secured by romantic certainty.

About fifteen years before one of her recollections, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar and Mr. Sugar had been lovers for roughly a month and were already sharing intensely personal histories. Their conversations were not simply declarations of affection; they became a way to learn what each person actually wanted and feared. In recalling their early relationship, she emphasizes that intimacy required the courage to state truths about themselves, including truths that did not match the selves either might have preferred to present.

Mr. Sugar also appears in the ordinary setting of their early domestic life. After moving in together, the couple had little furniture beyond two worn, matching couches placed opposite each other in the living room. They read side by side, sometimes silently and sometimes aloud, including books whose titles later carried associations with their early closeness. The sparse room and shared reading provide a concrete counterpoint to the grand language of a perfect match: their relationship was made in everyday time, in a home they were still furnishing, as well as in moments of emotional intensity.

Candor, Desire, and Vulnerability

An episode about sexual communication shows how easily each partner could mistake the other’s wishes. Early in their relationship, Mr. Sugar and Cheryl Strayed / Sugar acted on assumptions about what the other found appealing. When they recognized the misunderstanding, they were able to discuss it, laugh, and trace it to an earlier conversation that had been interpreted differently than intended. The point of the anecdote is not the particular behavior but the correction: neither partner had to keep performing a desire that was not actually theirs.

Cheryl Strayed / Sugar presents that exchange as the beginning of a durable habit. Their relationship proceeded through questions and answers, with each person attempting to say what was true rather than relying on a romantic script. She acknowledges that a person’s actual desires may be surprising or uncomfortable even to that person. Mr. Sugar’s role in this account is reciprocal: he asks, answers, and participates in the work of making private subjects speakable rather than treating early passion as proof that they already understand one another.

A related memory comes from a café, when the couple had been lovers for about a month. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar was telling Mr. Sugar about becoming pregnant the previous year, having an abortion, and the distress and self-harm that had surrounded that experience. He interrupted to make clear that she did not need to present herself as damaged in order to earn his love. She remembers his words as a painful recognition: his response made visible a belief she had not understood she was carrying. The episode later gives its name to the principle “You Don't Have to Be Broken for Me,” and characterizes Mr. Sugar as someone who could challenge the terms on which she sought acceptance without withdrawing his care.

Shared Life and Everyday Care

The couple’s domestic partnership included the pressures of work and parenting. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar and Mr. Sugar both made their livings as artists, without what she calls a conventional real job. When their children were babies, they employed a part-time nanny for twenty hours a week at fifteen dollars an hour and divided childcare between them the rest of the time. During the nanny’s hours, they worked in a shared basement office, each trying to attend to their own work. The arrangement made the connection between income and care immediate: she often wondered whether she had earned even the cost of an hour of childcare.

Later, when their children were four and six, preschool tuition had nearly bankrupted the couple. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar uses these circumstances to explain the practical demands of parenting, not to suggest that Mr. Sugar alone carried or resolved them. The evidence instead places both adults within a shared household of artistic work, childcare decisions, and financial strain. Their life as parents also appears in her recollection of taking the children to a Christmas pageant at a large Unitarian church, where she explained the story of Jesus to them. Mr. Sugar is not described as participating in that outing, but the episode situates him within the family life that developed after the couple chose to have children.

His care also appears in the way he and other people respond to Cheryl Strayed / Sugar’s grief for her mother. She says that what Mr. Sugar has done, like the kindness of friends and acquaintances, has not made the loss acceptable but has made it more bearable. That distinction is central to the relationship as she presents it: support does not erase bereavement or solve it, but it can make room for grief in a shared life. Elsewhere, while thinking late at night about how to answer a troubled letter, she tells Mr. Sugar what is on her mind, and he talks the matter through with her before going to sleep. Her account of the night continues with her awake at the kitchen table, still working out the answer; the scene shows both the intimacy of their conversation and the independence of her work.

A small object preserves another aspect of their shared life. Years after they first became lovers, and before they moved out of the house with the bathroom sink where it had been placed, Mr. Sugar carefully removed a sticker reading Made in Argentina. He used it to make Cheryl Strayed / Sugar a card, with the words “But it feels just like home” inside. The object connects a private joke or reference to the idea of home, without explaining its origin further. Its later survival as a card gives the shared domestic setting a modest keepsake: their history is carried not only by major decisions but also by things one partner takes care to preserve for the other.

Infidelity, Conflict, and Repair

About a year after Cheryl Strayed / Sugar and Mr. Sugar moved in together, a woman from a city thousands of miles away called their home and asked to speak to him. He was away, and the caller hesitated before giving her name. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar recognized it as the name of a woman who had sent Mr. Sugar a postcard, someone he had described as an acquaintance and whom he sometimes encountered when traveling for work. The call unsettled her despite the couple’s apparent happiness and their reputation, in her eyes, as a perfect couple.

When Mr. Sugar came home, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar told him what she knew, and the two confronted one another on their opposite couches. She was furious and believed the betrayal had destroyed her trust, their innocence, and her sense of being the only woman he could desire. She told him the relationship was over. He cried, apologized, and asked her to stay. Their conversation continued until she was able to listen to his account: he explained what had happened, what the other woman meant to him, and what his relationship with Cheryl Strayed / Sugar meant. He admitted that he had not been faithful in previous relationships and said that he wanted to change, while recognizing that his difficulties with sex, deception, intimacy, and trust reached beyond this single act and were rooted in his past.

Cheryl Strayed / Sugar’s response was not immediate absolution. She alternated between sympathy and anger, and recognized that his explanation did not undo the harm. At the same time, she understood parts of what he said through her own history of flawed choices. She ultimately took him back and later described staying and working through the betrayal as one of the best decisions of her life. That judgment does not convert the infidelity into a harmless episode: it took her years to feel grateful that it had happened. Rather, she says it opened a continuing conversation about sex, desire, and commitment, and gave them resources to draw on during later difficulties.

Change and Narrative Significance

The couple’s account revises the meaning of their early image of themselves as a perfect match. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar concludes that their first, sweetest period of love did not mean they were already ready for one another. The betrayal and its aftermath forced them to confront what their idealized story could not contain. What emerged was not spotless partnership but a couple capable of having a difficult confrontation when one was necessary. In her advice to another writer, she presents this history as a possible feature of a long relationship, not a promise that every couple should stay together or that every breach will lead to greater closeness.

Mr. Sugar’s significance across these episodes is therefore cumulative. He participates in frank conversations about desire, tells Cheryl Strayed / Sugar she need not earn love through a performance of brokenness, supports her through grief, and also causes serious injury to their trust through infidelity. His willingness to describe his failings and his stated wish to change matter, but the account gives equal weight to her anger and her decision. Their relationship becomes a practical example of intimacy as something neither perfection nor passion can guarantee: it depends on what each person is willing to disclose, hear, and do after the image of the perfect couple has been damaged.