Cheating in relationships

[Trunkage]

Huh. I guess, an alternative perspective. Something I've done. Something that's been done to me.

Eight years. Not a lot, when you look at the course of a lifetime, but still a good chunk of time.

I have a very high libido. Awhile back, so did my boyfriend. Everything was great. . .until he stopped wanting anything. I thought, I should be patient. I was accepting. I told him you know, stereotypes aside, it's okay for a guy to not want sex all the time. He started going downhill, emotionally. I listened to him, I tried to help, I tried to get him to talk to friends -- anything. The mere mention of counseling sent him into a breakdown; he couldn't accept the idea of needing counseling, even when he admitted that he felt something was wrong with him.

When I told him that sex is part of how I showed my love for him, he said he didn't want the relationship to just be about sex. He all but told me that me wanting sex was selfish.

So I tried to cut back on it. I tried to hold myself down. I would hide my needs from him, take care of it privately, try not to touch him when we laid in bed; I used to be proactive. I used to try to start stuff. The look in his eyes . . . I stopped. I stopped mentioning it, I started to pretend that I didn't want it from him, that everything was okay. Every time I tried to talk about it, he looked like I was killing him. So I stopped.

I told myself I was being selfish to want more. He's a good guy. But when your partner loses that look when he looks at you, when he has no response to you when you buy sexy anything, when his compliments sound platonic and slightly bored. . .when you lie next to him naked and nothing is there -- it hurts. Slowly but surely, it worms its way into you and you start feeling like you're nothing. Because then you start wondering -- what is romance? What makes this any different from a platonic friendship where you're sharing financial responsibilities? It got to the point where I started asking friends (the kind who are honest, and blunt) if I was desirable. If it was me. If there was something wrong with me. And even when they told me no it's not you and yes you're desirable, deep down I couldn't believe it, because the person who I wanted that from was showing just the opposite.

And it wasn't just that. He's depressed. He doesn't want counseling. He tells me he would be nothing without me. I feel suffocated. I can't share my problems -- he can't take them. And I have always tried to be good with communicating, with talking things through. When your partner can't handle that and won't get counseling. . .when he says that he wouldn't make it without you, that you're the only thing keeping him going, when you're afraid to share your stress with him because you question whether or not he'll be able to handle it --

I didn't physically cheat, no. I emotionally cheated. I opened myself up to another man. For the first time in those eight years, I cried about that relationship with someone else. I let him tell me things that, to me, would constitute cheating. I told him things that, were the shoe on the other foot, I would consider cheating.

Is it okay? No, of course not.

Did it show me that unless something drastic changes, this relationship is unhealthy for me? Yes. I feel smothered, suffocated, unable to move forward. He tells me I'm the only one in the world who keeps him going. I am working full time and schooling full time. I have my own stresses that put me on the edge, and when I am out of my mind, he jokingly complains to others about how awful I'm being, in front of me. Rather than tell me how he feels when it's just us, he airs it in public, when we're in front of other people. It just. . .it hurts.

It isn't always so simple a thing as not being able to keep it in your pants. It is still awful, I am not denying that, but sometimes it's a little more complicated.

And yes, I am working up the courage to tell him. I am afraid he will hurt himself. I love him, but I just can't do this any more.

So yeah, to me, any sort of cheating signifies an end. Even for me, being the bad person. I can't trust him any more. I can't talk to him. I can't touch him. I can't get help for him.

Just a little something from the other side.

I see this happen so often its ridiculous. One person tries to dictate the others sexuality though forced abstinence. Then the other person wonders why the affected person has cheated. The relationship actually end long before the cheating happened. The other person disengaged emotionally and sexually.

This is coming from a person who has been cheated on four times by four different women and never cheated. If you get cheated on, its so easy playing the victim and not taking responsibility for your own actions.

The first girl who did this I feeling like I wasn't being really 'forceful' with having sex. We'd been going out for months and no action. I didn't want to be that 'forceful' or 'pressuring' guy. I didn't work out because she wanted a bit of that to help the sex side of things start.

Which leads directly to my second mistake. Trying to be more 'forceful' trying to get sex. She found it a too high of a pressure situation. She still wanted sex but I had freaked her out about it. Funnily enough, that's the one where we tried to make it work. We tried sex and it was terrible. I think there was too much history before that.

The third one just stopped contacting me, and I found out almost a week later that she cheated on me. Everyone ostracised her, even her friends. I never found out what happened.

The last I could tell something was wrong for a couple of weeks. We agreed to talk about it. She told me that she had cheated, but why she was feeling weird was that she felt like she was more interested in women. She only cheated on me the day before. We had agreed to be monogamous previously and she didn't know how to discuss these feeling with me.

I do understand this last one, as all this happen by the time I was 20, and I met the person I was to marry that year. I didn't have much experience with having sex with men. It was very traumatising when a couple of years into the relationship that I had to discuss with her that she couldn't fulfil all my sexual needs as she wasn't a man. I've never been so scared of a conversation in my whole life.

With my marriage, we talked about how if we are interested in sex with any other person, the partner needs to be told first. Nothing come up in 11 years, so it seems to be working.

As to delusion for keeping the relationship going, My first point about how the relationship has ended well before any cheating goes on leads me to asked the cheaters (who actually still loved the original partner), why didn't you break up if you knew the relationship wasn't working.

 

[Trunkage]

Snip

You are pretty emotionally weak if you are trying to make excuses for your actions. You should take responsibility for them.

 

[Trunkage]

Double Post

 

[Halla Burrica]

I am not experienced when it comes to romantic relationships, but just from my perspective, in most situations I doubt I would be able to forgive them and want to move on, though there are always those morally grey areas in our terribly complex world that would require more thought and there wouldn't be a simple answer to.

 

[Velventian]

I take it with cheating you mean your partner having a relationship with someone else and hiding that from you.
Everyone makes mistakes, so yeah it can happen that 2 people get together as friends maybe drink a little bit too much and then do something they shouldn`t because one or both have relationships. Never happened to me before but i would be lying to say i would be strong enough not to, everyone makes mistakes.

That only counts once, its a one time "Not get your ass kicked to the kerb" card. Even then the trust will be severely broken, maybe beyond repair but from where i stand there`s at least hope left.

But having an affair, a romantic relationship with someone else then your partner. Personally i see no excuse for that, because its not accident, its something that need premeditation, planing, hiding the evidence, its not only breaking the persons trust its actively abusing said trust to cover the affair.
And that's a game over.
Because that just breaks something inside of you. There are stories out there of couples getting back together after one partner cheated but i never saw it happen.
Quite a number of people i know have cheated or have been cheated on, a lot of them tried working it out, getting back together. But i never saw it actually work out.
Sure some try it for a couple of weeks but the broken trust is like glass shards in a wound, you try to ignore them but they keep grinding away inside of you.

Fuck up one time and maybe it can be fixed, but if you have to sleep with someone so badly at least have the guts to end the relationship.

A child tries to steal cookies from a char and hopes it can get away with it.
An adult should close one door before he/she opens another.

 

[littlewisp]

As to delusion for keeping the relationship going, My first point about how the relationship has ended well before any cheating goes on leads me to asked the cheaters (who actually still loved the original partner), why didn't you break up if you knew the relationship wasn't working.

For me, I was in denial. It wasn't until that happened that I realized that I was lying to myself. It was stupid of me. It was me letting my half of the relationship down. It was telling myself that I could handle everything by myself, and not talking about it with anyone, pretending everything was fine and I was happy. But I wasn't.

I did wind up telling him. Hardest conversation of my life.

I guess if anyone reads this, don't let what happened to me happen to you. Even if you're trying to be selfless and sacrifice yourself for the relationship by telling yourself that you can handle it, don't. If the other person can't handle life or you and isn't willing to go to counseling or even talk to a friend about it, it's time to have a serious talk. Don't pretend it's okay like I did.

 

[JarinArenos]

Cheating is one negative data-point on a chart indicating the health of a relationship. If you have someone regularly lying, using obvious manipulative tactics, or... other issues. Honestly, my experience with toxic relationships is limited, so I don't know most of what can go wrong.

Saying "people make mistakes" is a two-edged sword. Don't get me wrong, forgiveness is absolutely critical to a healthy relationship; nobody is perfect. However, it's easy to get blinded by your own attachment and just keep excusing more and more bad behavior. The key is honesty. Both to your partner, and - more importantly - to yourself. Convincing yourself that a relationship is fine when there's obvious problems is possibly the quickest way to torpedo that relationship.

Breaking up sucks. Letting it linger until it implodes is far worse. Either make an actual effort (BOTH of you) to fix the issues, or rip that band-aid off, deal with the pain, and move on.

 

[Trunkage]

As to delusion for keeping the relationship going, My first point about how the relationship has ended well before any cheating goes on leads me to asked the cheaters (who actually still loved the original partner), why didn't you break up if you knew the relationship wasn't working.

For me, I was in denial. It wasn't until that happened that I realized that I was lying to myself. It was stupid of me. It was me letting my half of the relationship down. It was telling myself that I could handle everything by myself, and not talking about it with anyone, pretending everything was fine and I was happy. But I wasn't.

I did wind up telling him. Hardest conversation of my life.

I guess if anyone reads this, don't let what happened to me happen to you. Even if you're trying to be selfless and sacrifice yourself for the relationship by telling yourself that you can handle it, don't. If the other person can't handle life or you and isn't willing to go to counseling or even talk to a friend about it, it's time to have a serious talk. Don't pretend it's okay like I did.

The bigger problem is that everyone perception is not based in reality. Its like everyone has this augmented reality plug into the sense we have to warp how we think about the world. The cheater who though it was best to try and make the broken relationship work until breaking point, the investment bankers who could gauge risk, the politician who thinks that what they say hasn't been recorded and used to discredit them down the track, the worker (or boss) you thinks the boss is useless. There might be some truth to what you see, but what you experience (through seeing) and what your eyes view is warped by your experience up to that point.

You can see this with some people who seem to chose the exact same negative relationship. That's the only relationship they know and understand. Why would they choose different?