This is unforgivable, right?

[HeidiSchmeidi]

I think this is probably unforgivable but just want to run it by an objective audience. This happened a year ago and my ex is trying to get me to take him back (he has been trying for a year) and I wanted to see if I am crazy for even considering it.

My boyfriend and I were long distance at the time, and I hadn't seen him in three months. His ex started working with him. She is a woman (colleague from another office) who he had a brief relationship with (a few months) and he ended it because she was in love with him and wanted more and he didn't return her feelings.

When she arrived though, she relentlessly chased after him. To the point of propositioning him for sex and telling him if he did it she would never tell me and so on. She started sending him messages and so on about how she still loved him and didn't he miss her (he did tell her to stop and eventually blocked her) but it was quite blatant she was trying to steal my man.

In his defense he did tell her to please leave him alone because he was in a relationship (she didn't respect this request) and he was also completely honest and told me everything at the time and shared any texts with me so I was in the loop.

At the time, pre-pandemic, there were a lot of boozy work nights out almost every weekend, and I know my boyfriend very well and he is one of those people who gets absolutely blotto and does and says crazy things (loves everyone), so I was very uncomfortable with him getting wasted drunk if she was around. Not so much because I thought he would sleep with her, but just because I thought a conversation would start that he would not be in control of and so on.

So we agreed he wouldn't go to events which she was at, or if he did that he'd stay sober. Which he did for three months. Then one day there was an event she wasn't meant to be at, but she showed up to and he was already completely wasted when she got there. He was drunk at this point with no boundaries so he didn't think to leave.

She started hitting on him quite blatantly, and he ended up talking to her for a while. I happened to call him, and he told me where he was and that he'd chatted to her and in his drunk state he didn't see a problem at all with it. He actually got quite belligerent with me "I am an adult I think I can make a judgement".

I was home alone, I'd had a really stressful day and I felt very threatened by how persistently this woman was trying to steal my man and so I asked him to come home and call me. So he did and left five minutes later (it was about 9.30pm). He had been drinking all day on some corporate boat trip and he was absolutely wasted.

We never argued much, but I ended up absolutely raging at him, shouting, and told him I wanted to break up with him. I then blocked him on everything. This might seem an over-reaction, but at the time we were under a lot of strain being separated, and I felt he wasn't doing enough to get this woman to stop chasing after him (maybe his ego enjoyed it a bit) and it was making me feel really uncomfortable.

I'd stress we never had ANY problems with trust before (together two years) but this woman was blatantly gunning for him in the most obvious way and I was worried after so many months apart and her constantly trying to get him alone that something might happen everyone would regret.

Anyway, I did my dumping tantrum, and he (already wasted) decided to go back to the party and carry on drinking because he was upset and said he was on a self-destruct mission. She got him talking, he told her we had split up and cut a long story short he went back to her place and slept with her.

The next day he woke up really horrified but he believed we were genuinely split up so he went home. Later that day I called him to try and patch up our fight and sort things out and he confessed what had happened.

I was absolutely devastated, and told him I could never forgive him. He cried for weeks, tried everything he could to win me back but I just could not get past it.

Here we are over a year later and he is still trying to win me back, I am the love of his life and so on, it was a drunken mistake he made when he felt I'd dumped him.

Any thoughts on this? We do still love each other, but although my behavior was bad on that night I couldn't figure out why a few hours after our breakup he went and had sex with the one woman who had been making me feel unsafe for so long.

Obviously I;ve been very uncomfortable

@occa

Would you be ok if your partner did this?

But the whole thing is, he wasn't her partner, he was her ex-partner. At which point he's free to do whatever he likes whenever he likes, with whomever he likes, of course. That's sort of the point of breaking up with someone!

She unilaterally decided to dump him, then blocked him, and there's absolutely no reason he should have then hung about knitting a hair shirt on the off-chance she'd change her mind!

A very wise relationship counsellor I know once told me that her number one piece of advice in all relationships is 'Never say it if you don't really mean it.' Don't say you love/don't love/ hate someone, don't say you want a divorce/ to break up/ to get married/ to move out or whatever unless you are sure you really really mean it. Saying such things in the heat of the moment never ends well, and OP found that out for herself.

Agree wholeheartedly. To be fair, I didn’t absolutely love it when my most recent ex told me he was sleeping with not one but TWO of the women I had felt insecure about during our relationship. But there was a bigger part of me that thought, well then, I was right not to go back to him when he begged me to (after brutally chucking me). My instincts had in fact been right all along.....

Nor did I love it when I found out exH was (and is) now in a full blown relationship with the OW, his affair with whom was one of the reasons I left. But I also thought, well, fucking glad I left, then.....

I was choosing not to be with either of these men. So no longer had any say over what they did. So they weren’t doing anything wrong by me, as such.

You can have any feelings you like about what someone does. But when you have chosen not to be with them any more, you have rendered them a free agent.

Did my ex who chucked me have the right to slut-shame me for getting with a bloke within a week of him chucking me? No. No he did not......

I don’t think OP should get back with this man, as I have said. But I also don’t think he betrayed her by sleeping with someone when he was no longer with her.

I think what you need to admit to yourself, is that you were right. No matter how much he claimed to you, "there's nothing going on, I block every advance of hers", the reality is, within 5 minutes of you dumping him, he rushed back to where she was and slept with her. Specifically her.

Not went out and had a stupid one night stand (not that I'd forgive that either, but you see where my point is going) he went immediately from your house and slept with specifically her.

All your Spidey senses were right, there would have been a lot more to this "thing with her" the whole time you were in your relationship than he ever let on.

Of course he didn’t betray her... you don’t get to dump someone then complain when they go and shag someone else. I appreciate you wanted him to go and cry into his pillow all night but they do say the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. Whether you want someone who gets wasted at work events is another matter... that sounds completely gross.

@AfterEightsBeforeEight

I think what you need to admit to yourself, is that you were right. No matter how much he claimed to you, "there's nothing going on, I block every advance of hers", the reality is, within 5 minutes of you dumping him, he rushed back to where she was and slept with her. Specifically her.

Not went out and had a stupid one night stand (not that I'd forgive that either, but you see where my point is going) he went immediately from your house and slept with specifically her.

All your Spidey senses were right, there would have been a lot more to this "thing with her" the whole time you were in your relationship than he ever let on.

This is such bullshit. If a partner is controlling and overreacts about something which then escalates into the thing their spidey paranoia was tingling about, that absolutely doesn't prove anything except that people do stupid stuff when they're upset.

If a partner is controlling and overreacts about something which then escalates into the thing their spidey paranoia was tingling about, that absolutely doesn't prove anything except that people do stupid stuff when they're upset.

It was exactly the thing the OP was worried about though. So assuming she's not the type to be like it about everyone, that does imply that she was right to be worried.

@AfterEightsBeforeEight

I think what you need to admit to yourself, is that you were right. No matter how much he claimed to you, "there's nothing going on, I block every advance of hers", the reality is, within 5 minutes of you dumping him, he rushed back to where she was and slept with her. Specifically her.

Not went out and had a stupid one night stand (not that I'd forgive that either, but you see where my point is going) he went immediately from your house and slept with specifically her.

All your Spidey senses were right, there would have been a lot more to this "thing with her" the whole time you were in your relationship than he ever let on.

Absolutely 👏