Those who reconciled- and whose WS had sex with you while engaged in affair-
What was their explanation for doing so? I’m currently processing this part and very triggered by the feeling that I was having non-consenting sex .
I feel like I'm overcome with either grief or anger and there's no space for any other emotion.
I'm so angry at WP for what they've done but more so for how they've been since Dday, they've chosen to be with AP and have more or less avoided me since and there's no outlet for this anger I feel about the situation.
I know it makes no difference to my healing really but I want them to understand the absolute devastation they've caused and walked away from so casually. I'm not an angry person and I'm struggling a bit with feeling like this on top of everything else. I know it's a process but any suggestions on how I can manage this in a healthy way?
I thought time was supposed to make things better. I know healing is not linear, I remind myself this when I’m feeling extremely low and in the moments I start to feel vengeful or indignant about what I put up with or even when I start to feel hopeful for a better life. I know there will be ups and downs and mostly I am taking them in stride but I feel like overall I am feeling worse and worse with each passing day, not better. Like the finality is really setting in, the loss and the grief gets worse and worse, the sorrow for the little girl in me that I failed to protect. I know life isn’t over and I can keep building and choosing a new life but somehow the pain still gets worse. I know one day I will let go of him but the pain of this trauma still feels like it will linger with me forever, divorced from him but still haunting me, the lies and the hurt and the confusion of how so much callousness and cruelty can exist in the world.
My life is okay. By many accounts it’s wonderful. from the outside looking in I know many people think I have an amazing, interesting, aspirational life. I just feel so embarrassed to feel this way.
I feel devastated.
19 years, plenty of cheating on her part, she announced her intentions to divorce a few weeks ago. We still live together, neither of us has the money to leave.
She told me that because she wants a divorce and doesn't want to be with me, she can do what she wants. It's just really hurtful and inconsiderate I feel like, I still love her so much, but she refuses to see it that way. She says I'm wrong and since she said her intentions, that's what matters.
I just don't understand how a human being could do that to someone. I really don't. We still sleep in the same bed ffs.
She talked about how she felt a spark with this person that let her know what she is missing with me.
But that's just how new things work. It's going to feel new and fresh and exciting because that person didn't have to go through almost 20 years of hurt and change and work with you. They will say anything that you want to hear because you are having sex with them. They don't have to worry about building anything because the house is already been built, they just get to sleep in it.
She has an exploratory call with a lawyer on the 20th.
I'm having a really hard time.
New here, part of a group no one wants to be in.
A month ago I found out my partner cheated earlier this year, while I was out of town. They got sloppy, and I ended up finding the evidence myself after going through their phone. After confronting them and going through their phone & computer again more thoroughly, I believe this was a one-time thing.
As for my partner, they’ve been apologetic, open (I think?), and clearly ashamed. They’ve answered every question I’ve asked. And damn, some of those answers cut like a knife.
There are a few other issues that have built up in our relationship over the last few years. We’ve been together 20 years, no kids. I still love my partner, and honestly, I hate myself a little for that. I don’t know if it’s just that everything still feels so fresh, but right now I don’t want to end things, I just don’t know how to even begin to forgive and move forward. I also have no comprehension of how to start over if that's what happens.
We've both started individual therapy but I think that for me couples therapy is a must.
I just really needed a place to vent and admit things my friends don’t understand. I always thought I’d be done if cheating was involved, but it’s so much more complex when it’s real and happening to you.
How long did it take you to not have self esteem issues after D-Day? It’s been months and I still have a hard time watching any kind of tv with nudity, enjoying being in public spaces with my SO and just general racing thoughts. This really feels like I’m never going to get over it but I don’t want to just end my marriage if I will. Will I ever get over this blow to my self esteem?
Small note: This isn't an argument for staying or leaving, nor is it a defense of anything that happened. Writing this stuff has become cathartic for me while I sort through my own emotions, and I hope occasionally putting words to it helps someone else doing the same.
There is something betrayal does to your memories that I don't think gets talked about enough. Before discovery, a memory is just a memory. You look at an old camping picture and remember the fire, the kids running around, the rain that wouldn't stop, whatever stupid thing happened that made everyone laugh. You see an old picture of the kids and think, God they were tiny. You hear a song and remember where you were when you first heard it. None of it needs to mean anything more than what it was.
Then betrayal happens and you stop looking at the picture. You start looking at the fucking date.
Where was she then? Was he already around? Was this before or after? Who took the picture? Why do I remember her being on her phone so much that weekend? Was she texting him while I was standing right there? Was that argument actually about what I thought it was about? Was that night she came home late really what she told me it was?
Suddenly memories aren't memories anymore. They're evidence.
I hate that. I genuinely fucking hate it. I hate that someone else's deception has managed to crawl backward through time and infect things that happened years before I ever knew there was anything to look for. I have gone through old phones, pictures, messages, calendars, vacations, birthdays, anniversaries and completely ordinary days that should have been allowed to stay ordinary. Not because I enjoy hurting myself and not because I want to spend the rest of my life staring backward. I do it because once you discover that there was another version of your life happening beside the one you were living, your mind wants to know what the hell was actually real.
A photograph becomes a timestamp, a werd comment you forgot about becomes testimony. A name you were told not to worry about suddenly matters again. An old argument gets dragged out of storage and examined from every possible angle. You remember a feeling you had fifteen years ago and wonder whether your gut knew something before your brain did, you actually convince yourself it did. Things you dismissed because you trusted your spouse suddenly look completely different when viewed through the truth you have now.
And the happy memories are sometimes the worst ones, I hope at least some are recoverable.
There are pictures where I know exactly how happy I was when they were taken. I can remember looking at my wife, my kids, my house, our camping trailer, our stupid little family moments and thinking I had somehow managed to build the life I always wanted. I remember feeling lucky. I remember being proud of it, proud of us through thick and thin.
Now I can look at that exact same picture and wonder what was happening outside the frame.
That phrase bothers the hell out of me. Outside the frame. Because that is where so much of betrayal lives when you are the person who doesn't know. Your life is happening inside the photograph. Your wife is standing beside you. Your kids are smiling. You're thinking this is my family, this is my life, this is real. Meanwhile another life is happening just beyond the edges of what you can see.
Then years later you find yourself staring at your own face in the picture like you're examining a crime scene.
How the fuck did I not know? That question can eat you alive if you let it.
Why didn't I see it? Why did I believe that explanation? Why didn't I push harder? Why did I let that person around us? Why did I ignore that feeling? Why did I believe her when something didn't quite make sense?
Eventually you stop investigating what they did and start investigating yourself, and I was harder on myself than I admitted originally. That might be one of the cruelest parts of all of this. You put the old version of yourself on trial for the crime of trusting the person you were supposed to be able to trust.
I have done that more times than I can count. I have looked back at myself and thought, you fucking idiot, how could you not see this? There were signs. There were moments. There were things that make perfect sense now.
Except they make perfect sense now. I have information that man never had.
He wasn't stupid. He wasn't weak. He wasn't some pathetic fool stumbling through life unable to see what everyone else could see. He was living with information deliberately withheld from him. He believed his wife because husbands are supposed to be able to believe their wives. He respected privacy because privacy isn't supposed to be where an entire second relationship is hidden. He accepted explanations because he had no reason to assume every explanation needed to be cross-examined.
He wasn't a detective because he didn't know he needed to be one.
And I am actually glad he wasn't.
I don't want to look back at the man I used to be and hate him because he loved honestly. I don't want betrayal to convince me that trust itself was some character defect. He gave someone the benefit of the doubt. He believed the person he loved. That isn't stupidity.
That was not his crime.
But fuck, betrayal makes it easy to prosecute him anyway. Every missed clue becomes Exhibit A. Every gut feeling you ignored becomes Exhibit B. Every lie you believed becomes Exhibit C. Before long you can build one hell of a convincing case that you should have known something you were actively prevented from knowing.
That isn't justice. That's hindsight playing prosecutor, judge and fucking jury.
There is another part of this that messes with me too. Sometimes I don't even know what I genuinely remember anymore and what has been coloured by what I know now. Was she actually distant that Christmas or does she only look distant in my memory because I know what came later? Did that conversation really feel strange or am I rebuilding it with information I didn't have at the time? Was that vacation happy? Was she happy? Was I? Was I standing inside something real or was I the only one who thought it was real?
That is where betrayal gets much deeper than simply losing trust in another person. You start losing trust in your own interpretation of your life. That is fucking terrifying when you really think about it.
We build ourselves partly out of memory. That was our wedding. Those were our first years together. That was when the kids were born. Those were our Christmases. Those were our camping trips. That was the rough year we survived together. That was our story.
Then one day somebody gives you information that doesn't just add an ugly chapter to the end, it changes chapters you already read.
The words haven't changed, but somehow the entire story means something different.
I think that is why so many betrayed people become obsessed with dates and timelines. From the outside it probably looks insane. Why does the exact month matter? Why do you care whether it happened before or after the birthday? Why are you looking at pictures from twelve years ago? Why are you trying to remember what car she was driving or where you were living or who was at that barbecue?
Because there are suddenly two timelines.
The life you were living and the life that was actually happening around you.
Those timelines eventually collide, and when they do it is brutal. You remember your anniversary while realizing someone else may remember a message sent that same afternoon. You remember Christmas morning with the kids while wondering if another conversation was happening underneath it. You remember working, providing, parenting, fixing the house, building the life, while somebody else possessed information that would have completely changed the decisions you were making if you had been allowed to know it.
That is why the dates matter. That is why the timeline matters. Sometimes we aren't looking for another affair. Sometimes we are just desperately trying to answer a much bigger question.
What the hell was my life actually made of?
I never understood how valuable innocent memory was until I lost some of it. The ability to look at an old picture without checking the date. To hear a song without calculating where you were in the timeline. To remember a wedding without mentally placing another man inside it. To think about a vacation without wondering who was being texted from the hotel room.
Just remembering. No investigation. No evidence. No fucking footnotes.
I don't know if that innocence ever completely comes back. There are memories I will never see the same way again. I can't unknow what I know, and I can't somehow crawl back inside the head of the man who originally lived those moments.
But I am starting to understand something I refuse to let betrayal take from me. I was real.
Even when somebody else wasn't being honest, I was real.
My love was real. My laughter was real. The way I felt holding my children was real. The pride I felt building a home and a family was real. Those camping fires were real. Christmas mornings were real. The dad in those pictures was real. The husband who showed up every day and believed he was building something with another person was real.
Someone else's deception changes what was happening around those memories. It does not get to erase who I was inside them, I am truly coming to terms and believing myself on this.
Because if I let every good memory become nothing more than evidence of what she was doing, then betrayal gets something else from me. It gets my entire fucking past. And it has already taken enough.
Some memories will always have an ugly footnote now. Some are permanently damaged. Some still hurt like hell and probably always will. Some will probably always feel more like evidence than memories.
But I am trying to stop putting myself on trial every time I look backward.
I didn't create the hidden timeline.
I simply lived the one I was given.
I’m 19 and my boyfriend is 27. We’ve been together for 9 months.
Last month, he cheated on me with an escort. I forgave him, but since then I’ve struggled badly with trust. I’ve started checking his location, and I hate that I’m becoming this anxious and suspicious person.
Last night around 2:40 a.m., his WhatsApp Live Location showed him at a house about a 20-minute drive from his hotel in Annecy. It said “just updated.” I called him almost immediately and he answered right away, said he was asleep at the hotel, and we FaceTimed. He was clearly in his hotel room. His location then changed back to the hotel. During FaceTime, when he shared his live location, it even showed him in the middle of the lake. He swears they never left the hotel, so maybe it was a GPS glitch.
The location isn’t really the main issue, though. Since the cheating, I feel constantly anxious and I couldn’t sleep last night,I had a nightmare. I also recently found out that before we were together, he used to secretly take photos of women’s asses/under their skirts, which really bothers me.
At the same time, he has been very caring and generous with me: he drove me to exams, helped with my business, sent me money when I needed it, bought gifts, paid for trips and dates, provided meals/a place to stay, and supported me with studying. He can be extremely loving and supportive
Update: thank you to everyone. I'm sorry, I don't have enough energy to respond to every comment at the moment but your responses are appreciated and read thoroughly nevertheless. I know that what I need most is time and space, it's just a hard pill to swallow when I'm still in the middle of crisis. Thankfully I have been able to get into both individual and a couple's therapist to help navigate the next steps and provide more clarity as time goes on. The fact that healing, and decision making, is probably something that takes at least months, if not years, is difficult but necessary to hear. Thank you.
Hi everyone. Like so many others, I never thought I would be in this situation. My husband and I have been together for 20 years. We have two kids together, we have never fought, we have been through thick and thin together including the death of his brother, sickness in both him and myself. The works. We have always been open communicators and even previously discussed things like open relationships, agreeing we would always approach each other if we felt we needed something else. Out of respect for each other. Well… that didn’t happen.
I have never, ever been a jealous person. I’ve never checked his phone looking for evidence, never snooped on anything. Three weeks ago I needed to borrow his phone for a 2-factor authentication to sign into our credit card account, and the texts were right there when I opened it. Talking about the fuck they had just had earlier that day when he got home late, saying I love you. All that.
It turns out this has been going on for almost a year, since just after our second honeymoon trip that I had planned and executed for us, and thought we had had a great time reconnecting together after so many years of scraping by and focusing on the kids. Not so, I guess, because two weeks after that he is kissing another woman ten years younger than us.
He’s broken it off with her and after a week of kicking him out, I let him back in the house because the kids were getting upset and confused why he was gone so long. It’s been three and a half weeks now.
He’s agreed to go to both individual and couples therapy because he doesn’t like who he has become, but… he also admitted he didn’t know if he still loved me anymore. He said he wanted to “find” the better man he used to be who did love me. It’s a second devastation to be living with someone who isn’t even sure if they love you when a few weeks ago, I thought everything was fine and good as it ever was.
It’s a cold comfort. It’s hard for me to just turn off loving him, even though I know that sounds stupid after such an enormous betrayal. But I feel like I can’t even begin to heal because I don’t even know what ground I’m standing on anymore. If he doesn’t love me, the decision is easy. I don’t want any part of a loveless marriage. If he does, and had just lost his way, I could see a future in which forgiveness is possible if he does the work, takes responsibility, and fixes himself.
But god, is it painful. And lonely. Part of me thinks it would be easier just to give up, divorce, move on with my life and hope someone else will find it in themselves to love me the way I know I deserve but am starting to think I no longer believe I can have. I don’t know how long someone is supposed to wait until knowing for sure divorce is the right option. Everyone says I should take my time, but sitting on my thumbs waiting to hear if my husband loves me or not is excruciating. How long is enough? How long do I wait? Do I even bother with the painful conversations of couples therapy and hearing all the reasons why our relationship wasn’t enough, just to end up in the same place and alone at the end? How much trauma must I endure for his sake?
My therapist says it’s not unusual for the affair-haver to have ambiguous feelings after being found out, and it’s a good thing he is being honest, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m just waiting around in terrible pain and dragging this out long enough for him to get the courage to say he no longer loves me for good. I don’t know what to do, and all I want to do is cry and cry and cry. I am barely eating, not sleeping. I have been the world’s worst employee since finding out as I am a zombie most of the day. My life is a mess.
Tl:dr husband had an affair, doesn’t know if he still loves me even though he wants to work on himself and the relationship. how long should I wait before giving up?
I'm sorry for posting 3 days in a row, but I'm going through a very tough time and it feels like it just keeps getting worse.
I posted yesterday about going to Mass for the first time and how my wife has been struggling with drug addiction. Today she admitted to me that she's been cheating on me since April, around the time she relapsed. She says she feels broken about what she did to me, and that she still loves me. I've suspected something might be happening but I didn't want to believe it, and she's been lying and gaslighting me about it the whole time. I feel so empty right now, like all the air was knocked out of my lungs and all the blood was knocked out of my heart. We've been together for almost 7 years, married since 2023, I'm 33 and she's 31. She was my first everything, love, sexually, everything. I still love her and I'm still praying for her, but I'm hurting so much right now and I just feel like I have no idea what to do. Please pray for us
am a 44/f SAHM. I am married for 3 years, but have been with my husband for 24years. We have a son 16) together, and we raised his 27y daughter. She was 4 when we got together. We also have full legal custody of our daughter’s 1yo son and have been raising him since he was 4 months old……So yesterday I found out that my husband and my BEST FRIEND since I was 9yo carried on a sexual relationship right after I gave birth to our son. Back then (2010) one of my husbands friends actually told me they were sleeping together, but they both denied it when I asked and even though my gut told me differently, I didn’t want to believe they would be that grimy to me. I have no idea how to process how I’m feeling. Devastated doesn’t even begin to cover it. I feel sick constantly, and literally wish I could erase the fact that I now know. As pathetic as it sounds I love my husband beyond measure and honestly don’t want to leave him. I guess that’s all. Any advice, support or prayers would be greatly appreciated b
Partner had an emotional affair with a colleague at work.. Would love to know any success stories to see if we can get past this or if it’s just beating a dead horse.
Context - been together 6 years, have a 1 yo. Affair was only emotional, they never met in person (large company) and tested for a month. He says he “enjoyed getting to know her” but that was it and never intended on meeting. I found the messages, the affair ended.
Further edit - we have a couples therapy session booked end of the month.
Ty in advance 👋
Might be kind of long but I'll keep it as short as I can as far as filling in the last 10yrs. Im 32 F he's 33 M
Relationship started as a friend's with benefits type of deal but progressed into more, during that time I was constantly being gaslit while he was doing all kinds of dirty things. 4 years in I get pregnant, and he really didn't support me the way he should've. I was hospitalized 7wks for my water leaking and he showed up 4 times, one being the birth and he left immediately after the delivery and never came once during the 11 day nicu stay.
After our first was born he did make good changes. He seemed to be a lot more affectionate with me and communicate good, but after our child was born I found out he'd slept with 10 different women before I'd ever gotten pregnant. And 10 is just what I KNOW about, but I reluctantly worked through because it was years old and he had shown real change. The way he did it all was very disgusting and unsafe for me.
Things went downhill about two years ago when our child was 3. Just get the silent treatment every time I raise an issue. I've broken my back to be there for this man any time he needed it while drowning myself in the process. He was even homeless at one point and I made sure I saved every dollar I could to get us into a place. He got a job after and has always acted stingy with money towards me, never has complimented me or really went out of his way to do anything nice besides a handful of times.
Well I got pregnant again, and this one was rough too. I couldn't work but I saved up enough to split bills and still support our 1st and buy household necessities. Well anyway I had our 2nd in June and my bf lost his job right after. He was there for the birth (after me arguing with him to stay) and visited once the 5 days we were there. After me & baby got home I was still healing from a 2nd degree tear and he basically didn't help much. Our baby has severe acid reflux, along with other stomach issues and really can't be put down. So I've done 99% of the care for the baby plus our 5yr old, feeding, changing, bathing etc.
He'll feed the baby when I bring the baby to him along with a bottle, but he's constantly playing video games while I can't even maintain our house bc of the baby. My stitches didn't heal right bc I was constantly moving taking care of both kids while also trying to clean and also paying all bills alone since he got fired. I don't even care about the video games, but I've noticed theres a certain female he plays with on there from time to time that he basically openly flirts with and I'm kind of at my tipping point. He hasn't even attempted to be intimate with me but super flirty with a random woman on the internet while I'm freshly postpartum taking care of everything. I know when I bring this up I'm gonna be treated like I'm crazy and overreacting. I just feel done and want to just be alone atp but don't even know how I'm gonna swing it.
Also feel partially bad leaving him when he has no job or transportation, but this is the same man who doesn't even know my birthday after 10 years. Like yeah it's a video game, he'll never meet the female but with the history and the fact I'm postpartum and get no attention or help in any capacity I'm like is it justified to end a relationship over or are these postpartum hormones making me crazy?? I went to their chat on the ps and seen a msg where the girl wrote "crazy you get off the game as soon as I get on 🙄" so if it isn't like that then why would she say that?? If he would entertain someone on a video game, then I have no doubt he would do it again if given the right opportunity.
I just don’t know how to gather myself after everything.
I say this humbly, but I have things going for me. My friends say to walk with my head high. I am taking care of what I need to take care of and have built a life for myself.
With that being said, this betrayal and separation, has just made me want to disappear. I deactivated social media completely, I moved to a new place, I cut off all her friends, I changed my phone number, it’s like I died in her world.
But I don’t want to reemerge. I feel like I’m hiding from the world and I don’t have the courage to show myself again. I don’t want her to see me. I certainly don’t want to see her cause that will just kill me.
I simply don’t know how to overcome it.
So to set the scene first, I got cheated on back in May after a random burner account on Instagram DMed me that my boyfriend at the time was on Sniffies. I ended things with him that night where it was constant minimizing and him playing the victim, etc. I blocked him on everything and haven’t said a word to him since, almost never checked his socials or anything.
I chose to download Tinder because the semester is starting again and I kind of want to start dating again. I made sure to block his number using Tinder’s feature. I already knew he was on Tinder based on a gut feeling, however, I just really didn’t wanna see it come up.
I’m led to believe he’s using a fake number which in conjunction with him creating fake accounts and showing up to places I’m at in person (including waving to me and my friends on a random stretch of interstate at one point) was very unsettling.
I cant help but feel a flood of these emotions coming back of betrayal, heartbreak, and pure anger at this person who I thought I was making amazing progress at moving forward from. I’m just angry at the fact that I’ve been doing so well and now I’m starting the year feeling this mix of emotions again. I understand setbacks are part of the healing journey, however, I’m just not sure what to make of all this. I went from being unattached and moving on with my life to hatred for him again in just a couple days.
Long story short. 7 months since D day, 4 months since I kicked WS out, 44 years of marriage down the drain. I knew it was over the minute I heard of their second betrayal. I had forgiven the first. Never confronted. I just knew it happened and it was over after several years. But the second one showed me there was no hope.
Kids are grown anyway which is why I put up with the first affair, if indeed it was not the second or third..who knows?
I have now experienced the ups and downs with good weeks and bad weeks. Having a very bad month or more.
The thing that is bothering me is that I am in my 70s. So when people say, "time will heal". I wonder if there is time enough for me. I wonder how much time I have to build up positive memories after WS took away 44 years of positive memories from me.
I’m 30F and my now ex-boyfriend is 41M. We were together for about a year and a half, and until recently I genuinely believed he was the person I was going to spend my life with.
I’m a doctor. I worked extremely hard to get where I am and I work very long hours, including night shifts. My ex also has a respectable, stable career, but throughout our relationship he repeatedly belittled my profession and my achievements. He sometimes made me feel as though what I had accomplished wasn’t that impressive, despite the fact that I work considerably more hours than he does.
I’m not saying this because I think my career makes me better than him. It doesn’t. But it hurt that the person who was supposed to be proud of me sometimes seemed to need to diminish something I had worked my entire adult life for.
The strange thing is that our first six months together were probably the happiest six months of my life.
He was loving and affectionate. He made me feel chosen. We talked about a future together, marriage, family and having a child. He told me he loved me. We eventually lived together.
And I believed him.
I wasn’t suspicious. I didn’t check his phone. I didn’t track his location. I didn’t investigate women on social media. I didn’t want a relationship in which I had to behave like a detective.
I loved him, and when the man I loved told me something, I chose to believe him.
Then things gradually started becoming strange.
He would sometimes disappear or become unavailable. There were periods when he would disappear for days. Sometimes I would be working a night shift and receive a message from him at 1 a.m. saying that he was leaving and didn’t know when he would be back.
One incident that I now see very differently happened around Easter.
He told me that his mother had been in an accident.
I believed him.
Later, I spoke to his mother and found out that no such accident had happened.
When I confronted him and asked him where he had actually been, his answer was simply:
“Out in the world.”
He never gave me a real explanation.
Even then, I did not start checking his phone, tracking him or investigating him.
I was confused and hurt, but I still wanted to trust the man I loved rather than become suspicious of everything he did.
Looking back now, knowing what I have since discovered about another woman, that incident feels completely different. I keep wondering where he actually was that Easter and why he needed to invent an accident involving his own mother to explain his absence.
As the relationship became increasingly unstable, so did I.
I have a very strong fear of abandonment, and I want to be completely transparent about my own behavior. Eventually I became extremely anxious.
I called him. I sent him messages. Sometimes repeatedly. I desperately wanted reassurance and explanations.
I am not proud of every reaction I had toward the end of this relationship.
But I also don’t believe I was simply “suffocating” a perfectly normal partner for no reason. I was reacting to someone I loved repeatedly disappearing, giving explanations that sometimes turned out not to be true, and making the relationship feel increasingly unstable.
Eventually I did calm down considerably.
At one point I actually asked him directly:
“What did I do wrong in this relationship?”
His answer was:
“Nothing.”
And this is where I am struggling to reconcile the man I thought I knew with what happened afterward.
About a month before he secretly moved out, we were texting about difficult things he had experienced in his life. I told him I believed him, understood him and that if he ever couldn’t sleep at 3 a.m. because he needed someone to talk to, I would always be there.
He replied:
“You are my miracle. Honestly.”
And then:
“You are everything a man could ever want.”
On another occasion he told me:
“You could have anyone. You are every man’s dream.”
These weren’t messages from the honeymoon phase at the beginning of the relationship.
He was saying these things about a month before he left.
Then he secretly moved out.
And eventually I started discovering things.
There is another woman.
I had actually seen her at his place, but initially I didn’t understand the extent of it. Later, I found more and more pieces that seemed to fit together.
She lives in another part of the country. She works in a profession that gives her a long summer break, which suddenly made some of his behavior during the summers make much more sense to me.
Then I discovered something that completely broke me.
Apparently, last summer he attended a wedding with this woman.
At the time, I had no idea.
There are other things as well — their interactions online, things I saw with my own eyes, and details I later connected. I now have reason to believe their relationship may have overlapped with ours for at least a year.
If that timeline is correct, then while I was sleeping next to him, loving him, helping him, planning a future with him and believing his explanations, there was another relationship happening in the background.
And I had no idea.
I also supported him financially when he was struggling.
He asked me for money several times. I gave it willingly because I loved him. When he needed help, my immediate reaction was to help him.
When he moved out and told me he was having financial difficulties, I even gave him a television because he said he didn’t have one where he was staying.
I wasn’t keeping score.
At the time, I genuinely did not want the money back. I wasn’t lending it to him as leverage or expecting something in return.
I loved him.
I thought you helped the person you planned to build a life with when they were struggling.
After discovering everything, however, that generosity started to feel humiliating.
I found myself thinking: I was helping this man financially while he may have been maintaining another relationship behind my back.
Toward the end, things became increasingly ugly between us.
There were arguments, but what ultimately pushed me to block him was the way he started speaking to me.
He insulted me. He called me degrading names. I reached a point where I couldn’t tolerate being spoken to like that anymore.
So I blocked him.
I want to be fair about my own behavior here.
By that point I was extremely emotionally dysregulated. I was hurt, angry, confused and desperate for answers. I wasn’t always calm. I called and messaged him when he disappeared, and after everything fell apart I also said things out of anger that I normally wouldn’t say.
But the block wasn’t some calculated attempt to punish or manipulate him.
At that moment, after being insulted and humiliated by someone I still loved, it was the only way I felt I could stop the interaction.
He subsequently blocked me as well.
And that effectively cut off any possibility of having a real conversation once I started putting together what had actually been happening with the other woman.
That is one of the things I struggle with now.
By the time I understood the extent of the apparent betrayal, I couldn’t even confront him properly or ask him to explain it.
I was left alone with all these pieces of information, trying to reconstruct a relationship I had believed was real.
I’m not pretending I handled the ending perfectly.
I didn’t.
But what is destroying me isn’t simply that he left me or that there is another woman.
It’s that I no longer know which parts of my own relationship were real.
I keep going backwards through memories.
Was he talking to her when he was lying beside me?
When he said he loved me, did he mean it?
When he told me I was his miracle and everything a man could ever want, was he already involved with her?
When we talked about marriage and having a child, did he actually believe in that future?
How can someone tell you that you are everything he has ever wanted while apparently maintaining another relationship?
And perhaps the worst part is that I still love him.
I don’t want the relationship back anymore. I don’t think I could ever trust him again after what I now know.
And yet some irrational part of me still wants him to contact me.
Not necessarily because I would take him back.
I think I want him to tell me that I mattered.
That what we had wasn’t completely fake.
That he understands what he did to me.
That somewhere inside him there is at least some regret for hurting someone who genuinely loved him.
I want to know that losing me hurts him too.
I know that may sound pathetic, but it’s where I am right now.
The truth is that I am completely devastated.
I am depressed. I feel empty. I cry constantly. Sometimes the emotional pain becomes so intense that I physically feel sick and nauseous. I go through my days and continue working because I have to, but internally I feel like something has been ripped out of me.
I don’t know how to recover from this.
And I keep questioning myself.
Maybe I really was too anxious.
Maybe I called too much when he disappeared.
Maybe my fear of abandonment made everything worse.
Maybe I should have handled certain situations differently.
But then I remember that when I directly asked him what I had done wrong in our relationship, he himself said:
“Nothing.”
And I remember that I wasn’t suspicious at the beginning.
I wasn’t checking his phone. I wasn’t tracking him. I wasn’t accusing him of cheating.
Even when things started not adding up, my instinct was still to believe him and give him the benefit of the doubt.
I trusted him because I loved him.
And now I feel almost punished for having done what I thought you were supposed to do in a relationship: trust the person you were building your life with.
Part of me keeps thinking that if I had investigated him earlier, maybe I would have discovered everything and saved myself all this pain.
But I don’t want that to be the lesson I take from this.
I don’t want this experience to turn me into a paranoid person who investigates every future partner.
I don’t want to check phones, locations and social media accounts.
I want to be able to believe someone when they look me in the eyes and tell me they love me.
But after this, I honestly don’t know how I will ever trust my own judgment again.
The first six months with this man were some of the most beautiful months of my life.
If you had asked me then whether this man was capable of doing what I now believe he did, I would have said absolutely not.
I would have trusted him with my life.
And maybe that is what scares me the most.
I have always had a fear of abandonment. But I still chose to trust him instead of becoming controlling or paranoid.
And then the exact thing I was most afraid of happened.
I was lied to, replaced and apparently betrayed for much longer than I ever imagined.
Right now, I genuinely cannot imagine going through something like this again.
So I suppose my questions are:
For people who have experienced long-term infidelity or discovered that their partner had been living some kind of double life, how did you reconcile the loving person you knew with the person who was capable of deceiving you?
Were the loving moments necessarily fake?
Does my behavior toward the end sound like I was genuinely suffocating him, or like someone becoming increasingly anxious in response to a relationship that had become profoundly unstable?
How do you stop blaming yourself for not discovering the truth sooner when the reason you didn’t discover it was that you trusted the person you loved?
And how do you ever trust someone again when the person who betrayed you was once the person you trusted most?
I don’t need people to tell me I’m perfect.
I know I’m not.
I know I made mistakes in how I reacted when everything started falling apart.
But I loved this man with everything I had, and right now I feel completely broken by what I discovered.
I just need some perspective from people who aren’t emotionally involved in this situation.
I’m 30 (f) and looking for advice from people who have had to rebuild after everything seemed to collapse at once.
Over the past year, my brother died unexpectedly. Not long afterward, I had multiple strokes. I haven’t been able to work while recovering, lost much of my independence, and have been dealing with grief and medical trauma. I also lost a lot of my musical ability, while I have built my life around music for the last 10 years.
Throughout all of this, I thought the one thing I still had was my relationship. He was my best friend and the person I thought I would marry. We planned to move to the US (where he’s from) in 2027 on a K1 visa, and have a family, and that future was one of the things keeping me going.
I recently discovered he had been lying and cheating throughout our relationship. I had sensed something was wrong for a long time, but he would lie, fabricate explanations and even evidence, and make me question my own perception. My mental health deteriorated so badly that I genuinely believed I was the problem, sought psychiatric help and started antidepressants. Now I’m finding out that many of the things I thought I was “crazy” for suspecting were actually true. Some of what he hid even affect my sexual health. I feel betrayed, humiliated and violated. I’ve seen so many pictures of him cheating and can’t get the image of them out of my head.
I don’t want him back. I just feel like I lost two years of my life and now have to spend even more time recovering. I know 30 is still young, but in that relationship I realized I actually do want marriage and a family. These are supposed to be my prime years, and instead I feel like my life has become an endless cycle of surviving something and rebuilding afterward.
Before all of this, I was independent, working, studying, making music and excited about my future. Now I’m grieving my brother, recovering from strokes, finishing my thesis and trying to figure out what I even want my life to look like. I feel like I’ll never make it out the town I’ve felt stuck in my whole life.
I don’t want another “healing journey.” I’m tired. For anyone who has had their life fall apart, how did you start wanting your life again when you had no motivation or hope?
What makes a betrayal truly devastating isn't just what was done. It's that they looked you in the eye every single day while doing it.
Smiled. Laughed.
Asked how you were doing.
Sat across from you at the same table. Laid on the same bed with you. And felt nothing.
That level of comfort with deception isn't a mistake or a moment of weakness.
It's who they are. It was always who they were.
You just had the misfortune of finding out late.
I don’t know how else to write this, but I am getting a divorce and a stupidly still kept the location stuff on. He knew that I was still on there and he made no attempt on blocking me or taking me off or anything and recently I had checked and the place that he went to and stayed up for a while was somewhere I I had never been before, so I don’t know who lives there and then they went out to eat and he dropped them off and went back home. I took him off because I had a meltdown and I knew that wasn’t healthy and we are getting a divorce but just at potential of him being on a date I don’t know if he actually was that hurt a lot.
I did this through talk through text so if their errors and what not I’m sorry.