QFT. Any rights you may have had to make that call ended when you chose to break your promises to someone who trusts you to keep them. This makes you not the person the innocent victim in this thought he/she was trusting his/her emotions and physical well-being to, so keeping up the front of being that person is just more betrayal.
Add to that that the innocent partner has a right to know about his/her possible exposure to such fun as HIV, hepatitis, herpes, etc., since he/she is entitled to knowledge about his/her health status and potential risks to same. By continuing the “I’m a faithful partner” lie, the cheater withholds knowledge that the innocent party is entitled to regarding medical risk.
And the idea that you can know that it won’t happen again is just hilarious. Did you magically know before it happened the first time that it was going to happen once, but not twice? So, you cheat a second time, does the same rationale hold? You cheat every day, does it hold?
And just out of curiosity, what other things should we not tell our spouses because it will just make them sad?
I don’t believe that telling is always the best course of action (there are few absolutes in life), but the reasons typically given for not telling strike me as self-serving and cowardly.
Has “I kept it a secret to save you from being hurt!” ever actually worked as a defense when the truth was discovered? Seriously, I can’t imagine being the recipient of this and not being more angry that I otherwise would have been. It’s the sin of topping one lie with another, and then insulting your spouse’s intelligence. Who does this fool? Passing one’s secrecy off as act of selflessness is crazy.
I would personally be more concerned about the relationship if my spouse could cheat on me and then carry on normally, without being noticeably guilt-striken. I mean, I do understand mistakes happen and sometimes people have sex with others in a fit of stupidity. But the whole purpose of guilt is to provide an emotional disincentive for doing unethical things. I would prefer having a mate who is incapable of hiding an affair due to an overactive conscience over one who can keep one bottled up due to an underactive one.
There is a colossal difference here. My marriage is nothing more (or less!) than a lifelong mutual promise of sexual and romantic exclusivity. We love each other, we live together, we are co-parents, we are best friends, but those are all details. At the heart of it, our marriage is an agreement not to fuck or fall in love with anyone else.
Therefore, lying to my wife about whether the jeans make her look fat or not may be a poor choice, but it does not threaten the core of our relationship. Lying to my wife about having cheated on her does.
Fair enough, but I want to make clear that I inferred from the OP that this was a one time thing a long time ago in the distant past.
While I do get the difference in a white lie and not being forthcoming about fucking the pool boy, I think the passage of time with no further indiscretions and a fairly happy marriage after the fact, draws it closer to one.
I have no idea what it’s like to be married for more than five years but I imagine if I had a wife of 25 years or more and she confessed to me that she cheated on me ONCE some 15 years ago, I don’t know what purpose that would serve. I would be hurt, but I sure as hell wouldn’t end the relationship because of it.
Well, that certainly explains why my vagina sucked in my co-worker’s penis the other day without me realizing it.
Ahem. Back to the OP: I’m in the camp that you should shut up and assuage your guilt some other way. Don’t hurt an innocent person because your conscience needs to be cleared.
My BIL did this to my SIL, though the infidelity (with his ex wife) happened before the marriage. He told her a few days before their wedding because he wanted to give her the option of backing out. I wish to God he’d have shut up, because the damage that he caused with his confession was severe. Even though she went ahead and married him, the repercussions to their marriage, her peace of mind, and her self-esteem were profound. I don’t think she’s ever returned to loving him like she did before he confessed.
There’s cheating and there’s cheating. My wife and I have been married for over 40 years, and if she told me she had a one-night stand umpty-years ago, she regretted it and has hated having to hide it from me: well, yes, I’d be hurt, but she’s human and i think I’d shrug it off.
If she told me that she had been having sex with the same guy for eight months, several years ago, I’d be very hurt, and it would be harder to shrug off. No, I wouldn’t end the marriage on account of it, but it would certainly mean the relationship was different.
If I came home early and found her in bed with some guy, so she confessed because she was caught, I don’t know how I’d react. But it would be far, far worse. In the prior scenarios, she may have had a fling, but she came back to me and didn’t want to end the marriage. In the caught-in-the-act scenario, I don’t know whether she’d want the marriage to continue and I wouldn’t be able to trust her answer. And I don’t know whether I’d want ditto.
And, PS, no, I have never cheated on her, and I wouldn’t ever consider it. And I’m sure vice versa.
There’s cheating and there’s cheating. My wife and I have been married for over 40 years, and if she told me she had a one-night stand umpty-years ago, she regretted it and has hated having to hide it from me: well, yes, I’d be hurt, but she’s human and i think I’d shrug it off.
If she told me that she had been having sex with the same guy for eight months, several years ago, I’d be very hurt, and it would be harder to shrug off. No, I wouldn’t end the marriage on account of it, but it would certainly mean the relationship was different.
If I came home early and found her in bed with some guy, so she confessed because she was caught, I don’t know how I’d react. But it would be far, far worse. In the prior scenarios, she may have had a fling, but she came back to me and didn’t want to end the marriage. In the caught-in-the-act scenario, I don’t know whether she’d want the marriage to continue and I wouldn’t be able to trust her answer. And I don’t know whether I’d want ditto.
And, PS, no, I have never cheated on her, and I wouldn’t ever consider it. And I’m sure vice versa.
And that would be your choice, some people would feel different. Some people might feel “i cheated on you 15 years ago and have been lying to you for a decade and a half” is much worse than “i cheated on you yesterday”. The purpose it serves is that it lets you CHOOSE whether you want to continue the relationship knowing who the person really is rather than who they’ve been pretending to be for however long they lied to you. I have a very hard time understanding how people feel living a lie is better than being sad because of the truth.
I think many people would define “living a lie” differently than you, and that it’s only “living a lie” when they are actively cheating. If they are currently being faithful, then the lie was in the past.
Well, no. There have even been examples in this thread of posters saying I’ve never asked my spouse if they’ve cheated on me because I’m certain they never have. In situations like this, not disclosing an affair, no matter how long ago, amounts to living a lie because you are representing yourself to be something that you are not.
That one time indiscretion does not define who you are. If it was a one time thing many years ago, it’s an insignificant part of your life. The good times you shared with your SO after the incident were genuine. I fail to see how that’s “living a lie”.
Whenever this comes up here, there are a lot of posts that claim it is better to keep it secret. If you read any forums on marriage/relationships, especially ones dealing with infidelity, the answers are usually the opposite.
Cheaters usually get caught, eventually. It’s hard to keep secrets, and most people (unless they are completely oblivious) have a sense for these things, “gut” feelings that are often right. I guess when it’s a long ago affair/ONS that was never revisited, it’s possible to never find out. But things happen in life. Sometimes we find out about lies when a loved one dies, or when we accidentally discover evidence cleaning out a closet or checking our email or doing whatever. I don’t think most cheaters completely cover their tracks and destroy all evidence. They also aren’t good at keeping secrets. They have to tell someone, and it must suck when your in-laws or mutual friends or nieces and nephews know all about you being cheated on.
Personally, I’d rather the cheater come completely clean. Being honest with someone is not “cruel,” and lying to "spare their feeling"s is BS. It’s cruel to lie and it’s cruel to ‘trickle truth’ or come out with partial confessions (“it was a kiss on the cheek” when it was really unprotected anal) that only meet the level of evidence revealed.
How is forcing someone to participate in living your lie some kind of benevolent action? Let them make informed decisions.
Freely confessing will not do any harm to a relationship. The harm to the relationship was already done, in the cheating itself. Confessing just lets both parties know that there’s harm done, which is the first step towards trying to repair it.
OK, while the cheating is going on, you’re living a lie. But he’s not going to tell you he’s cheating while he’s cheating, is he? “Dear, I’m busy tonight, I’m getting together with that woman I’m seeing on the side.”
If I were cheating on my wife, I sure as hell wouldn’t tell her it was happening while it was happening.
And if I broke off the affair and decided I was going to be faithful from here on out, I sure wouldn’t tell her right away either, just in case I wasn’t as strong as I thought: “Dear, you know how I said I was done with seeing Delilah, and I would never again cheat on you? Well, oops.” If I’m going to run the risk of having to tell her about my infidelities in real time, then I might as well just leave; it would tear her apart a lot less.
So, when it’s really dead and buried, and not coming back - what’s the truth then? Not telling my wife at that point is certainly less ‘living a lie’ than it was at the time I was actually being unfaithful.
In fact, at that point, in the scenario we’re discussing in this thread, that’s more the truth than it was during the period before my hypothetical infidelity - a period when I would likely have been open to the possibility of an affair, but just hadn’t had the opportunity yet.
I wasn’t ‘all in’ then, but I am now. But if I don’t tell now, I’m living a lie now, when I wasn’t then? I don’t buy that. If the truth is that I’m more committed to the marriage and staying faithful now than I was before I cheated to begin with, then that’s the truth. There’s no lie being lived.
And what good purpose is accomplished by telling her? All it’s going to do is create a mismatch between the time when she should have mistrusted me - before and during the affair - and the time she will have to deal with not being able to trust me - for many years of my being totally committed to our marriage. Yeah, that’s a worthy goal.
No, taking the the ‘living a lie’ business seriously would imply that the time a spouse ought to share about cheating is while the desire to do so is growing in the first place, before there’s actually any physical infidelity. Because that’s when you’re really lying, when you’re looking around for some action on the side, or being tempted by the possibility of a fling with a particular person, and your spouse doesn’t know about it. And that’s when talking about it might actually keep it from, you know, happening.
But that’s not going to happen, is it? And certainly if that ‘looking around’ stage is as far as it ever gets, and I repent of that, I’m damned sure not going to tell my spouse about that afterwards.
The good that it does is that she gets to decide whether the relationship continues or not, something people in the “don’t tell” camp think should be entirely their decision. It is such a basic right you are denying your partner for purely self serving reasons.