Did you have an affair and rewrite history?

[Mumof3confused]

I see this a lot. He/she has an affair and rewrites history. I’d love to hear from those who have been there, ie they were the one that had the affair. Did you rewrite history? If so, was this some sort of story that you made up in your own head and did you eventually come to your senses? Or was it a case of falling in love and having your eyes opened to cracks that already existed in your marriage?

I’m genuinely interested in this phenomenon, not here to judge.

@user43786 I also disagree with you on the point about happily married people not having affairs. I did because I fell in total lust with someone and it threw my stable, loving, lovely, sadly ex DH into deep shade. I didn't rewrite history, totally owned that this was all on me and he had done nothing wrong. Unlike my second husband (lust guy) who, after two kids and really not long at all after we were married found his "soulmate" (ffs!!) and spun the usual, not been happy for ages (doesn't quite tally with his proposal and pushing for the wedding) me being controlling, treating him like a child etc. I pointed out to him that we had fewer children than I wanted and were living in a totally different part of the country than I wanted, so not sure how I was controlling and that if "treating him like a child" meant getting pissed off with him every time he fucked up simple tasks that a 10 year old could do, then yes fine, I'll own that one. Thing is, the alternative is holding up your hands and saying "I'm a selfish shit who is bored with the daily grind and this person is hero-worshiping me and my dick and telling me how amazing I am". Doesn't sound quite so sympathetic does it?

Echoing everything said by Wookie.

The affairs being discussed here on MN are often exit affairs, often women who build up resentment and meet someone who makes them realise they don’t have to settle.

There are other types though; the serial cheat who happily married just enjoys the fun and the thrills, one night stand etc etc

And the limerant affair. Often a sign of a deeply unhappy person not necessarily a deeply unhappy marriage. In these cases affairs are pretty much a serious act of self destruction, highly intoxicating, the ones where the cheat convinces themselves of all sorts because true love is good and they need to hold onto their sense of self. No one wants to think they’re selfish and entitled.

The fall out is absolutely catastrophic. Especially when the cheat wakes up from the dopamine hit they’ve been addicted to. With an affair partner who is often highly incompatible with them.

There’s a huge amount of work out there about the different types of affairs and a huge amount of research contradicting the idea of the marriage being the reason for some cases of cheating.

@ChiselandBits your comment illustrates my point about the person being cheated on perfectly. In your mind everything was okay but that doesn't necessarily make it true, pretending the marriage was perfect is exactly the same as rewriting history and painting out your other half to be the bad guy. I'll admit I find the psychology behind affairs extremely interesting due to my work background and from speaking to colleagues in the marriage counselling field there's always denial on both sides about the actual state of the marriage and it's usually somewhere in the middle of both parties accounts.

@user43786 I find this so interesting. Both sides potentially rewriting history.

@Ladybugzrock how would one know if they are having a true exit affair or a limerant affair? Once it comes crashing down?

your comment illustrates my point about the person being cheated on perfectly. In your mind everything was okay
Not sure how Chisel's post illustrates that as s/he was the cheater saying the marriage was good, not the cheatee?

As the cheatee, I never believed that my marriage was perfect. I thought it was OK - we had very few rows, no nastiness, had the same kind of values and things ran smoothly. With flaws, as my exh was a workaholic and thus away from home a lot. But pretty good compared with either of my parents' marriages, and they had both been together for decades. Just a normal marriage as far as I knew.

Since we broke up, if anything I've seen it in a worse light. I've noticed that some of the things my ex did were not very nice. This is probably partly also some kind of "rewriting history" defence mechanism, rewriting the story so that I am better off without him. The idea that all cheaters do X and all cheatees do Y is a bit too simplistic.

I definitely think that one persons version of happy is another persons version of dull. I was in my mind happy, but looking back, I can see that we had got into a boring routine of running around after the kids and not taking much interest in one another. I put that to the back of my mind as the kids became more of my life than him. I just assumed he was happy too as he never said otherwise but we had drifted and sex was infrequent. We rarely went out together and our nights out become very much he goes out with friends and then I go out with friends. We trundled on like this for years and with hindsight it was a big mistake. I thought loving someone was enough.

In the end he had an affair with our cleaner of all people!! He was working from home whilst she would come to clean and over time they would have a coffee together and have a chat. He told her about a band he was going to see in a pub that she went in and lo and behold she was there. That was the night they first kissed and they then had a four month affair including sleeping together in my house ! Her husband found out and went nuts and I found out from him. We separated soon after but she stayed with her husband. I was devastated at the time and the kids were too. Affairs are so destructive if you get caught.

My ex explained that he felt pushed out and neglected which was probably true. I was too though and I didn’t have an affair.

He now lives with someone else but does have the kids a lot and is a good dad. He has been very accommodating financially and we are now back in the friends zone after a few difficult years.

As for me, I have found it very hard to trust again and have ended up having a lot of meaningless flings with men who don’t want commitment. I’m not sure if I will ever take the plunge again.

I do sometimes wonder how affairs can go undetected for so long in a happy relationship. To be clear I am not in anyway blaming the victim here and I think the full responsibility rests with the person who is cheating rather than confronting their relationship issues. But if I was regularly sneaking off for dates and sex with someone else DP would notice because our lives are enmeshed. I wonder if there needs to be some distance between the couple for an on-going affair to not be discovered in a few weeks.

The idea that all cheaters do X and all cheatees do Y is a bit too simplistic.

I 100% agree with this.

I've always known that I could write posts on MN about my relationships and have threads saying 'LTB' and threads saying 'sounds like you can work it out' depending on how you phrase it and what you include, without ever actually lying.

There are cheaters who are absolutely determined not to be found out and they aren't. Yes it takes a bit of privacy to achieve that but if there are zero private spaces in your relationship thats a price im not willing to pay.

I agree that both people rewrite history. If you read /r/deadbedrooms or even some mumsnet threads, the partners in those relationships are always "blindsided" and "stunned" by the relationship ending.

Mumsnet posters are always blindsided even they had multiple prior separations. I remember a post here where a woman said her partner was left "out of the blue" but then revealed that her partner had not been speaking to her daughter for a week and they had huge weekly fights. Some people just have very low standards for relationships and think misery is an acceptable marital state. They decide they are going to sacrifice themselves for their children and then are shocked that their partner won't.

@KylieKoKo

I do sometimes wonder how affairs can go undetected for so long in a happy relationship. To be clear I am not in anyway blaming the victim here and I think the full responsibility rests with the person who is cheating rather than confronting their relationship issues. But if I was regularly sneaking off for dates and sex with someone else DP would notice because our lives are enmeshed. I wonder if there needs to be some distance between the couple for an on-going affair to not be discovered in a few weeks.

My exh was a workaholic who had always come come late at night and worked some weekends. When he had his full affair, he had taken on a job that meant he worked in another town in the week and came home on a Friday night.

Even so, I effectively "detected" the final affair after about 2 months. I just didn't know what I was seeing. He had suffered a bereavement and used it as cover - all the texts he was receiving were supposedly him talking to a workmate who had also been bereaved, about cancer. His weird behaviour was because he was sad. If I doubted any of it, I was being nasty to a grieving man. (I eventually read the texts and they were about sex. Cancer did not come up once.)

Even when you're pretty sure it's an affair, it isn't like they just fess up when you point it out. Without any proof, and with various just-about-plausible explanations, and plenty of gaslighting to keep you really confused, it's hard to make the choice to end a decades-long relationship.

@KylieKoKo if your working lives are not ‘enmeshed’ it’s a piece of bloody cake.
My husband and I had very enmeshed lives as far as home, local friends and kids were concerned, but his working life changed when he got a new job a long commute away. He left the house early for the train, disappeared until the evening, and I couldn’t possibly now what his days were like. He talked about his new colleagues normally and would text that they ‘were going for a beer’ or ‘going to the pub’ every so often so he’d be in a slightly later train. Or there’d be ‘a meeting’. All perfectly normal stuff. Totally plausible from a man I’d been with for 34 years at that point. It would always be only about an hour later, very, very rarely much later than that, so it looked like a quick drink after work with colleagues or a meeting, never a big evening out that if it happened often would look weird. He could work his own hours so I had no idea that what he actually did was take a very long ‘lunch’ once a week or leave work early then add on the ‘extra hour’ so he’d left work three hours earlier, not one. I had no idea. He did his own invoices, I never snooped (never had reason to) on his phone or laptop or iPad, I knew the passwords anyway. It wasn’t until I got suspicious because he said he was going for a pub crawl type night away with male colleagues at the weekend (I.e it encroached for the first time on the enmeshed part of our lives) and had a weird attitude when I questioned him about it, that I tried to look on his laptop and iPad and couldn’t because unknown to me he’d changed the passwords.
We were happy at home, he was totally normal, we went on our usual date nights, slept together every night, were still having sex, he was booking holidays and days out for us etc as normal. Laughing, hugging, joking, telling me he loved me as usual. Cuddling up in the sofa watching movies with a bottle of wine, I wasn’t ignored or neglected, nothing seemed off until one weekend. Believe me, absolutely nothing had changed.
He got snappy and a bit distant one weekend once the night away was booked and to put it bluntly he hadn’t liked me asking for details, and had quite rightly decided the night away was madness and was shitting himself. His odd caginess and snappy attitude made me ask if something was wrong and his defensive reply made me realise there was but he wouldn’t tell me what. Suddenly the after work beers seemed suss and I dug deeper. Still couldn’t believe it of him and felt guilty for even thinking it and looking!
It is absolutely possible to keep an affair quiet as long as the mistress colludes in it if you work far from home and get your timings right and behave normally. And you have a trusting wife who thinks you totally incapable of such a betrayal.
Quite honestly the shock in those circumstances is horrendous. You feel like an absolute fool but if you analyse it all and check for evidence based facts , you can see that if they’re clever enough it could happen to anyone.

@ravenmum and @Thewookiemustgo I just want to make it clear that I am not in any way apportioning blame or shaming anyone for not realising. Just musing on the topic of rewriting history.

Hopefully you are both in a much better situation now you are rid of your cheating partners.

Just answering the question :)
I'm in a different situation now. Not going to write off the entire 20 years with my ex, despite the various psychological forces encouraging me to, as described here :)

I've had an affair during a previous relationship and don't really ever discuss it with someone so can't say I rewrote history. More than a decade later I do view both that relationship and the affair different than at first. Is that unconscious rewriting? Or could it be viewed as rewriting history? I think both men used me in their own way really. In hindsight I also feel that neither saw me as an equal, which was very problematic in the relationships. In the end I'm glad that I moved on from both of them.

Crikey no, didn’t think you were at all and I’m ashamed of none of it, it most certainly wasn’t my fault and the shame was his to carry, not mine!
I was replying to your comment wondering how if you’re happy and close you don’t notice an affair. I was just pointing out that it is actually entirely possible, didn’t think at all that you were insinuating anything about blame or shame. It never occurs to me to be honest because he was to blame for his affair and the shame was all his.

@Thewookiemustgo - totally agree with what you said. I’m not sure my dh was even ever late home - affairs don’t have to be lots of romantic dates out - as far as I’m aware his was sneaked sex in the office when others stepped out for a bit / snatched sex at lunch time etc - I guess they might have had a day off together and I wouldn’t know but can’t have been more than that.

My dh also acted normally at home (well as normal as things are when you’re heavily pregnant / new baby). Still loving, still having sex, still not wanting to go up to bed separately in the evening.

To be fair to him he didn’t rewrite history either - just said when it all came out that it had been stressful having a baby and she’d basically been stress relief. Nothing to do with us.

I do think sometimes women like to think there must have been something wrong etc so they feel it couldn’t possibly happen to them as long as they’re careful

Interestingly I think what can also happen is that a happy relationship can become unhappy during and because of the affair, when the spouse having the affair starts directing attention/ energy towards the affair partner and relationship and not to their spouse or marriage. The spouse who knows something is up but can’t put their finger on it understandably starts questioning, the guilty spouse gets tetchy and defensive in response, arguments become more frequent and now the spouse having the affair thinks that their questioning/ feeling neglected/ unhappy spouse has in fact always been like that and hey presto they have created their justification. Their attitude during the affair changed their spouse’s attitude to them, they were fine before.
It’s like being described as crazy or controlling or paranoid after discovery of the affair, when the guilty spouse’s behaviour was what made you act that way, not the other way round. Affairs can turn perfectly normal people into fools, liars and manipulators and betrayal can turn your mental health upside down and make you do and say stuff you had no idea you were capable of. The history rewrites are usually artificial defence mechanisms created to avoid facing all or any of the above and shift blame like sand in the wind.

Definitely @Thewookiemustgo

@Thewookiemustgo my ex's affair started exactly the same. We were happy, planning for the future, still having great sex etc. I still believe ex had a limerance affair caused by his low self esteem as a result of a serious warning at work.

@DisneyMillie so sorry it happened to you, and at such a vulnerable time for you.
My husband didn’t rewrite history either, not to me anyway, he did say he was unhappy however, not with me or the marriage but with stuff which led to a self esteem issue. None of this excuses him one bit, however, he could have talked to me or got help with it. He never tried to justify his affair or excuse it.
He did, however, do a full history rewrite and present day rewrite/ future fake to the affair partner. He was in an unhappy marriage, apparently, wife didn’t give a shit about him, neglected him etc etc. His ageing flagging ego got stroked by a younger woman who wanted my life, basically. She took him at his word, despite knowing she was screwing a proven liar, and did everything she could to replace me and try to take it. No, she didn’t seduce him and he’s the last man you’d call helpless, he did it, accepted full blame and fed both of us a crock of shit. But I also blame her for helping him keep his secrets and considering herself quite entitled to another woman’s husband, money and property. Once an OW knows the OM is married, or in a committed relationship, the blame is equal as far as I’m concerned. She did everything in her power to help him betray me and didn’t flinch at betraying her own partner either. Poor sod got dumped for the married guy with more money. That’s why I find it hard to feel sorry for her, even though she was on the receiving end of the history rewrite and allowed herself to swallow a huge amount of his bullshit. She knew what she was doing and so did he.

@Thewookiemustgo

How long was he deceiving you for ?

A very good friend of mine had an emotional affair with a work colleague while he had a live in a girlfriend. He is not proud of what he did but he does not rewrite history, he knows what he did was wrong and has admitted as much when asked. He ended things with his girlfriend, switched jobs and had several months of being single before he and the emotional affair partner reconnected. 15 years later they are married with three children. While I don't condone the manner in which they met I can't fault the fact they are clearly a very good match in a very strong relationship.

I think that looking back on past relationships we all tend to rewrite history a bit. Or maybe we are wiser to things that went on and realise we wouldn’t put up with certain things now.

FWIW I had an affair. I was only 20. I didn’t rewrite history but it opened my eyes up to the fact I was in an abusive relationship and it showed me that what my ex was doing to me wasn’t normal. It gave me the courage to leave so I don’t regret it one bit.

@Keystone76 a year to the day. They had never spent the night together or has late evenings together, and the night away was the first one. When he came home the following day I looked in his coat pocket when he fell asleep on the sofa that afternoon and there was a receipt in there, lunch for two with two large glasses of wine. Hardly a lad’s pub crawl! I said nothing, let him go to work the next day and used my day alone to turn the house over whilst he didn’t know I knew. I guessed the iPad password and the search history hadn’t been deleted. Plenty to go on including a name. I looked at our photo stream on the pc which was linked to our phones. He’d obviously been very careful to move incriminating photos to some online email account but had missed one.
I confronted him in bed that night as I didn’t want the kids to know anything was wrong. I told him I wanted to talk and he full-on love bombed with “I’m sorry if I’ve been distant lately but work has been soooo stressful...I’ll make it up to you.” I said no, actually, I wanted him to tell me all about his day/ night away. I let him describe his day/ night away ‘with his mates’ and asked him where they had lunch. He made up a story about lunch at a burger joint (surreal to hear him lying so well. He had no idea I knew it was all bullshit) and I said, “Oh. That’s odd. Are you sure it was a burger place? So you didn’t go to X restaurant and order Y and two glasses of wine?”
Stunned silence.
I said “You took a woman to that hotel, didn’t you?”
Pause. Then he just said “Yes.”
And my world fell apart. I had had no bloody idea whatsoever, he never gave me one tiny cause for concern until the weird reaction to my asking about the booking of the night away. I could have explained the event itself away to myself easily, but his attitude was way off. Spidey senses are well worth listening to.