DP cheated four years ago, just found out

[YorkshirePudPud]

Can you help me please, I feel utterly bewildered and broken. I found out last night that my DP cheated on me nearly four years ago. Apparently a drunken kiss on a lads holiday. I had suspected something at the time- he became Facebook friends with a girl after he returned from the trip. He denied it at the time, said that she was part of a group of girls that he and his friends had hung out with on the holiday, no more.

I brought it up randomly last night, I don't know why. Just an uneasiness that had crept up on me every so often that he'd not told me the truth. After being asked several times he finally admitted it, said it was a one off drunken mistake that he'd never told me about because it meant nothing to him and he didn't want to risk losing me over it.

I'm feeling...so hurt that he could cheat on me. It happened about nine months into our relationship, we'd just moved in together, extremely happy I thought. If he could cheat on me in such a lovely honeymoon phase of our relationship, what hope do I have during the really hard years of marriage when it's not all hearts and roses.

Also can't get over the fact that he kept in touch with her afterwards (via Facebook). I could almost get my head round a stupid drunken kiss that he felt hugely remorseful over afterwards and wanted to just forget about, but they were in contact afterwards by becoming Facebook friends and no doubt messaging each other. To me that shows no remorse for what he's done. I don't think anything physically happened when they got back (I remember from her Facebook profile at the time when I found out he was friends with her that she didn't live anywhere near us) but if anything that makes it more confusing that he kept in touch with her.

The lying. We are engaged, due to get married in six months (how sick it makes me feel to write that). Several times since we got engaged I've said that I want to go into married life with no secrets and that if there was anything he wanted to tell me, to tell me now. He's always looked me in the eye and sworn there was nothing to tell me. Who knows why he finally admitted it last night.

The trust. It is killing me that I have no way of knowing whether he slept with her, whether he's cheated on me other times. Is he someone that just casually cheats because he can? I don't know, of course I want to believe it was a stupid one off mistake years ago but it's tearing me up that I can't know that, and I've already naively believed for five years that he's always been faithful to me so how w

Frank are you a ciunsellor then?
And where is the question in " Perhaps it's my aged years but you aren't fighting for this relationship at all. You seem resigned to consigning it to the bin rather than working at it. All relationships have their ups and downs. If a drunken snog is the worst of your problems, you will have a charmed marriage. "

I don't get the impression that the OP is ending the relationship. I get the impression that she's coming to terms with some shocking and distressing news.

Oh, but please save us from the old chestnut that the woman should fight to save her relationship and not throw it all away so easily.

How long have you been together?

How has he behaved in the last four years?

I don't think accepting her friend request was his brightest moment but he may not have given it too much thought.

Do you normally row much? How often have you mention that you are suspicious of him?

(Lots of questions )
Sorry if you have already answered these but I couldn't see.

Yes I don't think the OP is throwing the relationship away, she is saying that she has asked for some space as she is feeling very hurt

This is so hard because if I am honest I wouldn't have told you either. I wouldn't want to risk what was obviously turning into a lifetime commitment to each other on a drunken kiss. The fact he became friends with her on facebook may just have been him showing himself and her that it meant nothing and he was happy with you.

I hope you don't take this as me minimising your current heartbreak, I can't imagine how you must be feeling at the moment.

Hello op. I'm sorry you are feeling so terrible.

But I can't help but think you are reacting really REALLY strongly to this. And to have had niggling doubts for 4 years about a holiday / FB request and bring it up 4 years later. What's going on there? That also seems a bit extreme to me.

It seems your bf was right when he said that he didn't tell you because he knew you would react like this. Doesn't make the lying right of course. But it does perhaps explain it. And as one person said, once he'd lied, when put on the spot once, he had painted himself into a corner.

Anyway, not minimising how hurt you feel but I do think you need to calm right down. Wash your face in cold water. Have a large coffee. And start thinking logically about where to go.

Fwiw I would be pretty unhappy if I found out that my bf had snogged someone on holiday. But my reaction would not be so extreme as yours and I would not be ending a relationship over it.

Ok, seriously, which group of drunken bankers on a lads' holiday lets something like this stop at a 'drunken kiss'. In this day and age? I would be assuming that they shagged tbh.

I know I'm speculating, but the Facebook thing and the fact they hung out with them all holiday suggests to me that they were 'together' for the holiday.

Sorry, not helping here I know.

In all honesty, OP, my first instinct would be to ascertain whether it really was just a drunken snog. But then I've been stung by that line before.
Then you have to be really honest with yourself - if he insists it was just a snog, are you able to banish the event away 100%? If it was more, could you forgive him?

Essentially, you're the one who's got to live with the man - and living with a constant niggle in your mind is like a form of Water Torture. It's no way to live.

I believe you can learn to trust again. my dh had a "virtual" relationship with someone else that went on for 4yrs. I never had any proof that it went beyond that. I was broken and devastated and immediately could see no future for us, but time did make me see things differently.

5 yrs later
do I 100% believe he wasn't unfaithful? no, but I dont allow this to eat away at me
do I worry about him going out and question him? no because if I don't trust him what's the point
do I bring it up in arguments? yes, but only sometimes cos it's not something that is constantly in my head

my situation was different, married with 2 kids, but when I said you can choose to believe him, I meant that if you stay together you have to our the relationship is ultimately doomed for lack of trust.

give yourself time

Brucie - disagree - surely becoming fb friends would be incredibly risky if that was the case?

NOYB I'm afraid stealth

I'm not of the opinion that filling the OPs head with ideas such as I doubt very much he just kissed her. and I wouldn't believe it was just a kiss either. He had opportunity. They could have spent the while holiday together for all you know. is as abusive, IMHO as much as gas lighting. It is implanting ideas with the very deliberate attempt to destabilise and undermine the OPs confidence in herself. It is feeding her fears, for what gain I don't know. Its a strange collective, that's for sure. Why you would do that to someone I cannot fathom.

Oh, but please save us from the old chestnut that the woman should fight to save her relationship and not throw it all away so easily.

Vivacia Nobody is saying she should fight to save her relationship, that is for her DP to do, some people are merely advising caution to ending her relationship and are offering a different opinion, yes, shocking but people can have different opinions to what you think so save us from the old chestnut that we all have to have the same opinion

But Frank, many of us on here have first hand experience of partners using the "it was just a kiss" line... Why isn't it ok to advise her that's a pretty standard tactic for cheats?
If she's not 100% sure she's been told the entire truth! how can she begin to forgive?

Ignore the rouge ! In there

I think you've done the right thing in getting some space.
Do you have a close friend you could confide in?
Get that friend round tonight and talk it through.
It is nearly always recommended on here that head space is required when you find out something like this.
Let him go away and you can have a good think about things.

many of us on here have first hand experience of partners using the "it was just a kiss"
Absolutely - been there got the t-shirt!

I hope you get the outcome you want.

Ok it's just your comment about questioning doesn't marry up with your actions

" ThePinkOcelot I am broken and I really don't know whether it was just a kiss. I just don't know and it is killing me wondering and knowing that I will never know for sure."

Op I suspect if you go through with the wedding it will be with this issue unresolved

but if you never believed him, never trusted him, why did you agree to marry him and buy a house with him?

I understand that it could have been a deal-breaker for you at the time, but instead of exploring it at the time you allowed the relationship to flurrish, have presumably been happy enough to accept a proposal and commit to buying a house together, and yet you have had all these mistrust issues all this time?

Sometimes things happen. but ultimately you made the choice at the time to stay with him, you chose to marry him and to buy a house with him even though you didn't believe him. IMO if you hadn't believed him at the time you should have ended the relationship there and then. If the trust was already gone the relationship was already over. Since then the relationship has deepend and presumably moved on from lads holidays and drunken snogs.

He hasn't lied to you for four years he omitted the truth because he knew what the reaction would be. and the longer the relationship developed the less there was to be achieved by admitting to a kiss.

Facebook is a red herring IMO. it was a lads holiday, he probably had a request and accepted it, but he deleted her when you asked him to so I don't see the issue there tbh.

I think that your choice to carry on with a relationship despite your mistrust is as much part of the issue here. He presumably will have wanted to get past this and you are going to end a four year relationship over something which happened before you were even that established?

Sorry but I think you bear some responsibility here as well. If he cheated then he was responsible for tha- of course he was. But you are the one responsible for allowing a relationship to move on in spite of your doubts and trust issues. You had the choice to walk away in the beginning and you didn't. There comes a point where you have to choose to either move on with a relationship or let it go based on your doubts. You chose to carry on with the relationship anyway...

Personally, I don't think she should marry him because she doesn't trust him. The day you go snooping in emails, pockets and phones is the day your relationship is dead in the water. Whether there was anything to snoop for is irrelevant. Trust is the issue.

IF the OP trusted her partner she would have put this entire issue to bed 4 years ago. But it has niggled the OP. Rightly or wrongly, only the Partner knows if he is being mis-accused. Frankly, nothing he can do or say would prove otherwise.

All people are different. Some will re-evaluate and salvage the relationship. Others will walk away. My opinion only, a fundamentally sound relationship would not collapse over a drunken snog. There would be other issues.

You certainly won't like this either - I think the partner was a bit dim admitting to it. But reading between the lines, there has been 4 years of on-off questioning, i suppose he thought if he got it out in the open , it would be a matter for discussion and moving forward with a clean sheet.

I can't gauge what the OP wants to hear. Because we do only ever ask questions that we want the right answer to. So OP, is this a LTB sort of thread or a work-it-through advice you are looking for.

Never listen to other people - they don't have your best interests at heart. They will tell you their experiences and project those on to you because they want you to feel their pain. Just because your mates boyfriend was bonking the au pair, it doesnt mean yours is.

I've seen threads on these boards with a baying pack of LTBs based purely on a man being highly secretive. Marriages have almost split up by the level of what-if scenarios fed to posters, only for the poster to sheepishly come back and tell us that a surprise party for a significant birthday/anniversary was being arranged.

You do really seem to care about this 'kiss', and about the years of lying.
Unless he admits to a whole holiday sleeping with this woman, messages to her on fb afterwards, and subsequent affairs (i.e. worst possible scenario), you are always going to be wondering 'what if more happened', I suspect. For the rest of your life.

If you can live like that, marry him. If not, don't.

Frank this situation isn't about life experience or wisdom with age. It's about the OP's beliefs and the boundaries of their relationship. So the fact you are assuming you are older than the OP doesn't mean your opinion on the matter is more valid. You've made your "none sheep" point now, enjoy the limelight of thinking so independently

OP I completely get where you are with this. The time that's passed would almost make it worse for me as I'd feel like my decision on what to so about the kiss had been manipulated by the idea that time passing has faded the lies.

I'm with you that a kiss is cheating but my opinion on that is irrelevant anyway. Those were the boundaries of your relationship and he broke them. If the breaking of any boundaries are a deal breaker than so be it. Good on you for not sitting back and letting life happen around you.
I would find it difficult to get over the Facebook add-that's a game changer for me. If it was a terrible one kids mistake then I can't see why he'd want to stay connected in anyway when he returned home.

You have absolutely zero obligation to try and resolve this and I really despise that attitude. You see so many people on MN stuck in horrid relationships because of this pressure. Walking away wouldn't be throwing the relationship away, it would be leaving a dishonest person behind. 4 years of looking into your eyes and lying suggests that he isn't the person you hoped he was.

I'm not suggesting you do leave as it's not my decision, but if you did them I would completely understand why!

I'm sorry you are going through this!

In the first year I was with DH, I had a drunken kiss with another man. It was meaningless. A ridiculous mistake.

10 years later and with a DD, I would never tell him. I know it meant nothing, but I wouldn't expect him to understand that and I know it would sour our relationship forever. It is also not something I would ever do now. Yes, the honeymoon period is lovely but it's not necessarily as solid as what comes afterwards.

Look very hard at the rest of your relationship before you decide anything. If I told my DH about my awful mistake, he'd feel just how you do. I hope we have a good enough marriage to survive it. Only you know if you want to try to get past this.

Here's a trick on face book, if the messages have been deleted from the message folder, the messages aren't actually deleted just the thread. If you and message the message deleted person the old messages reappear. That's because you have deleted the folder not the messages. You can reread them without them going back into the folder. If however the actual messages have been deleted then it doesn't work, but most people think deleting the folder deletes the messages it doesn't.

It wasn't a lie by omissi

Agree with WannaBe and Fish. Nine months in is pretty quick to be moving in with someone. He wouldn’t be the first person to get a bit freaked out and see this trip as his last hurrah before settling down with his girlfriend, letting a few (normally closely held) inhibitions fly out the window. If it were me, I don’t think it would bother me so long as he’s been a good partner in the interim. Has he ever given you any cause to doubt him other than this? You sound quite young, throwing your engagement ring at him because of a drunken snog four years ago.

It’s easy to see why he didn’t tell you initially, and why he thought that four years after the holiday your reaction may have been more reserved. I personally don’t think that it went further. If he shagged her it would make more sense to maintain the status quo and say nothing rather than risk you digging around with his mates and finding out more info.

I’ve got off with people in a club and we’ve become Facebook friends. It doesn’t mean anything, most of the time. Has he actually been corresponding with her? The fact that you brought it up four years later out of the blue would suggest to me that there are underlying issues here. Either he’s not as good a partner as you’ve portrayed or you have issues letting stuff go and/or trusting him. Neither creates an environment that promotes honesty.

If I were you, this weekend I would take a long hard look at your relationship in the intervening years. He’s committed to you, both financially and emotionally. You say he’s great in every other way, you’ve never had cause to doubt him. He actually just sounds like an alright bloke who made a silly mistake. I’d make it clear that this isn’t the behaviour I expect from him, and try my best to get past it on the understanding that if it ever happened again I’d be away. Good luck.