@AmusedAzureShaker I’m not entirely sure why he swapped social media contacts with her, that wouldn’t go down well with me at all. Also why on earth would she contact him? She did pretty well with all the details if there’s a language barrier? Extraordinary that she can’t remember either. “Hi, remember me?” Not going to be much of a conversation with a language barrier really one would have thought.
When cheats get caught, they cry, lie and deny. Whether he cries because he feels sorry for hurting you, or sorry for himself because his little holiday party got rumbled and he knows what he could lose, is debatable. He’s lying about not remembering all of it, about her not remembering what happened, he’s lied by omission ever since it happened by keeping it secret.
Who knows whether his friend left him with her, or whether he was there and saw the whole thing up to the hotel room part and could tell you exactly what happened and what it was like?
He’s minimising the whole thing, abdicating his responsibility for what he did to weed and drink, removing witnesses and making other witnesses difficult to question because if language barriers and more booze. He’s denying that he knows a darn thing about it really.
As for being relied on to tell the truth and being remorseful, he didn’t feel so awful about doing this to you that he remembered to tell you what happened as soon as it did, and he left it to you to find out.
Having access to his phone is pretty useless these days, I wouldn’t put faith in it. It’s absolutely incredible how many messaging apps there are and ways to completely hide them and their use on your phone. WhatsApp hidden chats, for example, now has a hide the hidden chats folder option, you type in a passcode to access it, nobody would ever find it and you can hide the notifications too. Secret vault apps that look like calculators, options to invent your own app logo to hide a shortcut to another app, you’d think the manufacturers presumed we all worked for the FBI, the level of secrecy you can put on a phone now. Somebody on Mumsnet finds a new one almost every day, sadly.
What I’m saying is cheats go into damage limitation mode when they are caught by surprise. You very, very rarely get the truth at first telling (most only ever admit to what they think you know or can prove, anyway), they try to come up with a version they think you’ll believe, which deflects accountability as much as possible onto other things or other people.
I’m being hard on him because you need to protect yourself. Very few caught out cheats are of the ‘the game’s up so I might as well tell all.’ variety.
I know this both through personal experience and the experiences of many others. You’re not getting the full truth about what happened.
You deserve better. Threaten to ask his friend about this group of people and this woman. How much did he see?
If he was that tanked on weed and booze and she didn’t know him, l have trouble believing a woman would take the not inconsiderable risk of going to a hotel room with a random drunk stranger she’s just met. Also why on earth get in touch with him if she wasn’t hoping to see him again? He clearly gave the impression that he fancied her at the very least and that she could.
He’s got a lot of work to do and the truth would be my only starting point. I’d tell him if he doesn’t want to lose you he’d better start telling you the real version of what happened, because what he did is bad enough, but continuing to lie about it is what will end his future with you.
I hope he realises this and comes clean, too many convenient coincidences for me and too many people with amnesia. If you allow him to rugsweep it you’ll sentence yourself to an anxious future with a man you can’t trust.
Please don’t accept this, when it happened to me the lying completely blindsided me, I believed version one because I was in total shock, massively out of character, never saw it coming, I still hadn’t wrapped my head around the fact that he’d been lying to me about what he’d been up to for quite a while by dint of the fact I’d just caught him cheating. When I found out, it didn’t dawn on me that I wasn’t talking to the man I knew (who obviously would tell me what happened now I’d found out, he wouldn’t do that to me, would he?) I was talking to a cheat who never thought he’d get caught, desperate in the blind panic of trying to close down the situation and think on the spot. Unbelievable how they so rarely have a plausible story, totally in denial about anybody ever finding out, they don’t even think about what they’d say if they got caught, too terrifying to contemplate probably, or they think they’re such a clever Billy Big Bollocks that they can keep it secret.
Cheats lie when caught to keep control of the situation. More lying is easy when you’ve been keeping a secret. I bet another thing he forgot to do was tell that woman about you.
I wouldn’t agree to reconcile until he starts telling the full truth, sorry.