Zoe asks: “I love my boyfriend but things have been a bit of a struggle for us over the past year or so. He’s heavily immersed in his work and he’s had some problems with his child’s mother which seems to have caused him to withdraw somewhat. I try to talk with him and also get us to be positive and move forward but he keeps telling me to leave ‘it’ alone and that he’s dealing with things in his own way.
This is difficult for me to admit……..but I’ve been sleeping with a colleague for the past six weeks.
There is no real justification for what I have been doing. All I know is I have been feeling lonely, uncared for, and ignored by my boyfriend as he uses everything around him as a problem to justify not pulling his weight in the relationship. OK………..I guess I just made a justification!
I don’t know…..I know what I have done is wrong and I realise that what I have with this guy at work is nothing more than a fling. He has a girlfriend too…. He has no intentions of leaving her and I’m not sure that I’d want him to. He’d probably do to me what he’s doing to her.
I’m thinking about telling my boyfriend the truth. The guilt is starting to weigh heavily and maybe it’s time everything was out in the open. I do want my relationship with him to work and I don’t know if I should keep quiet or tell him. I don’t even think he’s suspicious! I’ve been home later and later, the calls, showering as soon as I get back – nada! What would you do?”
Zoe, the first thing I always ask when people want to get on the confessional is to examine their reasons for wanting to unload their secrets:
Are you telling him because you want to be truthful so that you can live your relationship from an honest place and feel he deserves to know the truth?
Or are you telling him for yourself?
The great majority of the time, most people admit to their cheating because they can’t cope with the secret, not because of the other person.
I do believe in honesty in relationships and right now, you’re a long way from that with the cheating, so of course I think that it is best to be truthful about these things.
However, when you tell him, it’s better that you tell him so that you can benefit your relationship with the truth as opposed to just telling him so that you can feel the relief of unloading the burden.
I’d avoid justifying it – I know that these things happen and I don’t doubt for second that you have problems in your relationship (there’s a whole load of emotional unavailability up in he-ere!) but….
Is getting your groove on with another guy really going to solve your problems?
I suspect that the act of creeping out with someone else was a bit like a cry for attention. Normally people who cheat do end up behaving differently, particularly if there are problems in their relationship.
You’d think he’d notice the fact that you might be working later, disinterested in sex, not challenging him anymore, not bothering to argue, or even smelling like another man. I’ve come across people who have left their phone around in the hope that their partner would look through it and discover the truth. Same for receipts, lipstick on the collar and all that jazz.
The point is that all of this has backfired because the man hasn’t noticed. Like a typical Mr Unavailable, his head’s too far up his bum being immersed in his problems, his world, his universe, that not only does it not seem to matter that your relationship seems to be nosediving, but he hasn’t noticed your odd behaviour.
But that’s aside from the point. You want to know if you should tell your boyfriend that you’ve been cheating – If you are certain that you want to pursue a relationship with this guy and that it’s not over, it’s time to fess up.
If the relationship is pretty much over, you can either keep quiet, or tell him to bring things to an almighty crashing end.
There is the other less honest alternative which is not to say anything if this affair is definitely over. But…this is risky at the best of times. The truth has a way of surfacing and if you are the deliverer of the truth, you get to control the tone of the message.
But…remember that the fact that you have been cheating is an indicator that there are big problems in your relationship.
You can stop cheating but you still need to deal with the issues.
Cheating is not the answer and if things are so bad that you’re tempted to seek your comforts elsewhere, it is better to sit down with your boyfriend and force him to have the uncomfortable conversation and spare your relationship any further problems. Right now, you have another one to add on to the load….
Good luck
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Zoe, you might be persuaded once to cheat. The second act of deception is a deliberate choice.
Sleeping with a colleague has so very many things wrong with it. Your BF has a right to think he knows who his sexual partner is. You, sleeping with another guy, who is sleeping with another woman – you place him at risk for things he didn’t choose.
You made an implied promise, when sleeping with your BF, to participate in a relationship. In the US today, that usually means just the two of you. By cheating, you made that promise a lie. Lying and deceiving are character flaws. You need to be able to respect yourself, that when you promise something you know you will make every effort to keep that promise. If you don’t believe yourself, you won’t expect anyone else to. And life will get much worse for you, as you lose trust in yourself and others. What to do? Redeem your word. Go to the colleague, explain you made a grave error, and you don’t like yourself or what you have done. Tell the colleague you intend to be respectful, honest, and faithful the rest of your life – and the affair is over.
Most times when we do wrong, the right thing is to admit our mistake, take our consequences, and take steps to never repeat the error. In this case, I would never *tell* the boyfriend about the cheating. It will be harder on you not to have someone else punish you or forgive you, but confessing out of the blue would be a needless affliction to your BF. Suck it up, clean up the mess as best you can, quietly, and go on. If the BF ever accuses you or asks, you have a problem. If he has found you out, admit it immediately – but if he is just making a wild accusation, then keep mum.
You complain about what your BF brings to the relationship recently. Yet you steal time, attention, and physical responses away, for a distraction. This is grossly unfair to yourself and your BF, as well as to your relationship. As NML stated, you need to make a choice. Your attention wandered. If you were actually, truly engaged in your relationship, you shouldn’t have even noticed the colleague. You have to decide – are you in a relationship with your BF or not? If you are withdrawing, then close it off – without mentioning the cheating. Or get your head on straight, and get back to making life more comfortable, more secure, more joyful for your mate.
If you don’t find satisfaction and joy in supporting your BF, you aren’t really in a relationship. You are using him for a security blanket, a cuddle toy, or just a ‘friend with benefits’.
And then you still have the big issue to deal with. Why doesn’t he trust and respect you enough to share his problems with you? Close off the cheating, first, clean up your part of the relationship, then after a week or three, look harder for answers to why the lack of support for each other. And remember – he deserves either your support, or your honesty about whether you are committed to him. You promised.
My feeling has always been that to confess to infidelity is a selfish act. It may relieve some guilt however, you burden your partner with all types of problems that you haven’t thought about ; obsessive visuals, play by plays in his mind of you with the other person, whether he should forgive you, and this on top of whatever problems he is telling you he has. Quietly end the affair. What you REALLY NEED to say to him concretely “I’m unhappy and I am thinking of leaving this relationship because…………..(talk about how you feel, when you feel it and what you want or you need) If he refuses to discuss, go to counseling, shuts you out,,,,you have your answer. This partnership cruise may have already sailed and you are hanging on to the tiny iddybiddy life preserver in the mid altlantic.
People often cheat as a way of dipping their toes in to single waters OR because they want to scare the other party. What is done is done, move to the next step like a grown up with no drama.
I had to think about his one long and hard, but in th end I would advise that the letter writer confess to the affair in details and push to end the relationship. Firstly, I can’t believe that she really loves her bf with all that’s gone on. Seriously, what is there to love, and what reasons are there to preserve the coupling? There’s no attraction, they don’t fulfill each other emotionally, and they don’t have a family. Oh yeah, she’s having sex with another guy. It’s time to move on.
The reason I would tell the bf all is because HE NEEDS THE REALITY CHECK. The knowledge of the affair is a major change agent and he needs that in order to get his emotional life together and to make himself more available to future partners. If she doesn’t tell him, he’ll always have question marks and he might not make the improvements. It’s tough love, but they both need to go to the bottom before they can bounce back. She’s cheating because of the man that he’s become…he needs to know this in detail.
Oh, NML, I love the site re-design! Big ups for that.
As part of a 12-step program, I had the opportunity to deal with a whole mess of lies and deception with various loved ones. Here’s what I did:
1. I had to write down a brief description of the situation. Then I had to figure out my part – where had I acted out of fear, pride, ego, selflishness, self-centeredness, ambition, etc.? I focused only on my role in the situation – not anybody else’s. I wrote down how I was wrong – I was selfish and that was wrong, etc.
2. Then I had to become willing to have those defects of character removed. This is pivotal. If you’re not ready to give up your pride, selfishness, or ego in this process, everyone loses.
3. I made amends to people where doing so would not injure them or others. I did not tell my exe I cheated on him. That would be continuing my trail of selfishness. The best thing to do in that case is to make a living amends – that is to say, to never do that thing again.
You did what you did, and there’s nothing you can do to take it away. If you can’t live with the guilt, then break up. If you want to change and maintain your relationship, then you’ll need to admit your character defects to your BF without revealing your affair, for his sake. I have a feeling if you were being unfaithful physically, you probably aren’t being the best GF in other ways.