Cheaters never win. Or do they? For these people, it was hard to stay faithful to their original significant others. While some of them actually got happy endings, they also say what goes around comes around.
She Needed Comfort For This Bad Relationship, But Maybe He Wasn’t The Right Person To Turn To
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“Welp, I was young and stupid. I was in a relationship where neither of us was happy but we were too attached or afraid to end it. He was working insane hours so we never saw each other and I just didn’t care for him anymore but I didn’t realize it until I met a friend of my roommates, we’ll call him Jim.
He swept me off my feet. Jim Made me feel special in a way that I hadn’t felt in years. He put it in my head that my (ex)significant other didn’t love me or care about me and that I deserve better. Eventually, this all leads to this weird pseudo-relationship. We talked constantly but never hooked up. Until one night after a bad fight with my boyfriend, I fled to Jim’s house for comfort. That night our physical relationship began.
Jim made me feel wanted and he made me smile and laugh and I enjoyed spending time with him. It was a fun little secret at first but I knew what I was doing was wrong and I couldn’t handle the guilt anymore. I finally ended things with my boyfriend and that is when Jim completely ghosted me. It hurt worse than the breakup, my support system and motivation to leave my boyfriend of three years was gone because apparently ‘it got too real.’
I was naive and young and vulnerable, Jim came into my life when I was heading towards the end of my first serious relationship and I was very lonely. I hate myself for what I did until I learned that my significant other had been cheating on me for the entirety of our relationship and was waiting for me to leave so he could be with her. So I guess it all worked out?”
There Was “No Happy Ending” For This Affairee
“I was the other guy in a two-year-long affair. She was married and still is. No happy ending for me at least.
We were former work associates and hung out a few times and just watched TV/movies, smoked and drank, but nothing happened for a long time. I had an emotional and physical attraction to her, and the feeling was mutual. But we never crossed a line.
One time at a party she got too wasted and since I was her ride, we both stayed there, in a spare bed together. Honestly, I wanted the intimacy of being close to somebody, and I wanted to make sure she didn’t get sick in her sleep. I didn’t do anything, and neither did she. Nothing happened that night. We hung out a week or so later, and she said she had liked my beard rubbing against her, and then asked me to do it again. This progressed over days to more intimately cuddling, getting more intimate, and finally, I kissed her. It was awesome.
Making out progressed to more. Then she really wanted to fool around one night. I declined at first but we ended up doing it. Then again, and again. She explained sometime after this that at the beginning she was feeling distant from her husband, he was pushing her to have kids and, according to her, being a jerk. I wasn’t that guy.
It ended fairly recently because she was ‘trying to distance herself from me,’ and kept saying that, to the point, I just said screw it and gave up. It ended up in a minor argument and she asked if I wanted to break up, I said I wasn’t certain, so she dumped me instead.”
When This Mistress Thinks About This Affair She “Has To Shower At Least Twice”
“I was the mistress in a marriage. The guy was an old boyfriend from high school, and we dated off and on. When we were off, he would date this girl Kelly, and when we broke up for the final time he went and married her. Almost a year after we broke up, I was back in town on summer break from college and ran into him at my summer job.
He gave me this sob story about how Kelly wanted a divorce and was taking his kid from him. I (stupidly) believed him, we exchanged numbers and started talking daily. He invited me over to ‘his’ apartment, showed me his divorce paperwork, and ultimately things got freaky for a couple weeks.
One day, I swung by to pick up a pair of earrings I’d forgotten the day before. His best friend from high school answered the door. I asked if the guy was around and his best friend said no, why would he? Turned out, the guy was actually house sitting for his best friend, it wasn’t his apartment. Best friend also informed me that Guy and Kelly were in the process of buying a house, their marriage was fine.
I was livid and disgusted. I went to work the following day and in walks Kelly. I ask her what she’s doing later that night and if she’s available to talk. We meet up after I get off and I lay it all out for her. She teared up a bit, but ultimately she was pissed. She gives me their address and tells me to show up there unannounced the next day.
I do and Guy is white as a sheet trying to get me to leave. Kelly shows up and they end up in a screaming match. So Guy ended up getting divorced and settled with a chunk of child support because Kelly informed the right people about Guy’s less than legal plants. None of us talk anymore. When I think about it, I have to shower at least twice.”
She Was There For Him When His Girlfriend Wasn’t
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“I had just moved back to Florida from Boston. I was hanging out with some friends at a bar they were regulars at. I met the bartender and ended up going to a party at his house after the bar closed with some friends. It was a usual weekend thing apparently. I thought the bartender was so cute but he had a girlfriend. We got to know each other and the chemistry was just so dang strong.
On the 4th of July, he and I were texting and he was stressing out about the fireworks as he is an Army veteran and they gave him Iraq/Afghanistan flashbacks. His girlfriend was busy with her son doing normal celebrations and wasn’t interested in his feelings at the time. We met up and went out drinking all night.
That’s when it started. We started messing around and I’d stay over, we’d send each other dirty texts. She found out and hated me, obviously. He broke up with her and we started talking more seriously. After a month I told him we were going to be exclusive or I was done.
Four years later, we’re married and he’s at the park right now with our daughter having fun on Father’s Day. It may have started off wrong but I’ve never met someone so perfect for me. He said as soon as he met me he knew he was in trouble and that I was his future. Turns out he was right.”
Everything Changed Once She Sent Him This Photo
“I was in a five-year relationship with my girlfriend at the time. I started to talk to an old coworker from my teens that I always had a thing for, but she lived a couple states away so I knew nothing would come of it. Well, it turns out that she still had family in my area and regularly visited.
We made plans to get some dinner and catch up, for old times sake. It ended in both of us getting wasted, renting a hotel room, and having some fun. This happened a few times over the next several months until I get a text from her. It’s a picture of a sonogram of our child.
I was going to come clean to my girlfriend because I never had a father growing up and I didn’t want to put my child through that. However, she ended up losing it a month or so into the pregnancy and we stopped talking.
It left me feeling very guilty and anxiety stricken.”
They Went Past The Point Of No Return
“My significant other and I were both 23 years old. We were in a long-distance relationship while I attended graduate school. We attended undergrad together on the East Coast, and he had moved back to the West Coast – I went to school in the Midwest to be closer to him, but I couldn’t afford the schools I got into on the west coast. We were going on five years together.
I was trying hard to make friends, so I joined a meetup group for a sport I play. I wasn’t looking for a relationship – I loved my significant other. The affairee asked me if I wanted to be partners in a more competitive league, and I was excited to be making friends in this new place and for the opportunity to have a fun extracurricular activity while in school. So I accepted.
The affairee was pretty open about having a crush on me within a couple weeks of our meeting, despite knowing about my relationship. I would explain that I was taken, that I loved my significant other, that my significant other was looking for a job in the Midwest to move close to me, and that I wanted us to grow old together. But things quickly took a nose dive. When I asked my significant other how the job search was going, I was informed that there was no job search. I asked him if things were okay and if we were going to get married one day. He told me that it was too uncertain to answer – anything could happen while I was in graduate school. These were not the answers I expected, and I was getting frustrated.
There was this person who liked me, who was attractive, who liked a lot of the same things I liked, and who was present. I was so lonely. I missed my significant other. But this was hurting…it felt like it was ending. I told the affairee that things were getting hard, that I might need to end it. I shouldn’t have revealed that, but at this time, the affairee was still the only person I really talked to in my new home. One night, after playing some pickup games, the affairee and I are watching a movie at his place. I fall asleep. I wake up to the affairee making a move on me, and I don’t stop it. I go with it. Then we’re past the point of no return. I felt terrible. I broke it off with my significant other the next day without explaining why.
I dated the affairee for over two years. It was a terrible relationship. The affairee turned out to be borderline emotionally abusive, and I often wanted to get out, but I think I was so desperate for my heinous act to have been ‘worth it.’ There wasn’t a day that didn’t go by where I wouldn’t think about what I did. And about once a month, I would just break down and call one of two close confidants about it, telling them how I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to get past what I did. When the relationship with the affairee finally ended, I was able to make peace with what happened. I think I put so much pressure on myself to make things with the affairee work because of how the new relationship started, and I think until that point, I maybe felt like I deserved to be in a bad relationship for what I did.
My significant other and I were in contact again for a brief time a few months after the affair, and I confessed about what happened. I regretted coming clean about it almost as much as the act itself – I should have just kept it to myself and swallowed the guilt. There was no reason for me to confess except that I needed forgiveness. I got my forgiveness (he was a better person than me), but I stabbed someone in the heart to get it, and that was selfish and unfair.
The cheating happened four years ago. There is not a day that I don’t think about my ex-significant other. If I’m being honest, I think it probably would not have worked out anyway, but I still regret how it ended and hurting someone I loved. I’m single and a little lonely sometimes, but after my relationship with the affairee, I just want to make friends (I am somewhat reclusive, but working on branching out…being in a borderline abusive relationship makes it harder to make friends) and focus on work. I think I’ve forgiven myself for what I did. Sometimes I still get this feeling of self-loathing and guilt in the pit of my stomach. But I just try to do my best to be a good person going forward, and hopefully one day I will be.”
Once A Cheater, Always A Cheater
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“I was the person the girl cheated on her boyfriend of four years with. We met in college and we became friends immediately due to our common interests. We hung out pretty much every weekend and any day we had off. I fell for this girl almost as soon as I met her. We’d watch movies and just chill all night long, then I’d walk her back to her dorm. She eventually started telling me about how she had cheated on her boyfriend and was trying to make things right, I thought that was fine, we can just be friends. Eventually, we just became super close friends and hung out and talked every day.
One night we were hanging out in her dorm and I was too tired to walk home. In my tired daze, I reached up from the floor and grabbed her hand and we just held hands. From then on there was a lot of tension between us. Eventually, after slowly building up to acts and finally getting freaky, we began to do it pretty much every night. We both felt bad but she never really told me to stop, so I just kept going. Her boyfriend eventually found texts between us and ended it since he had already given her a second chance. The next week or so she wouldn’t talk to me. When she was done getting over her ex, she started texting me again. When I finally got to see her again after summer break, I asked her to be my girlfriend. We will be celebrating our three-year anniversary in August. I have loved her every single day.
I know people will say I am awful and that I shouldn’t have started anything with her, but we’ve both never been happier.”
He Never Could Forget Summer
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“I had a crush on a perfect girl when we were 15 years old, let’s call her ‘Summer.’ She hated most boys because she was constantly being hit on, but she’s drawn to me. Thought it’s too good to be true, despite her hitting on me for months. She finally dated someone. It broke my heart and we cut ties. Had not spoken to her for years. Several years and girlfriends later, she texted me out of the blue. At the time we were in relationships with our own partners.
One year later, she moved to my college. ‘Hi, would you give me a tour?’ I fell in love again at the first meet, and fell in love more and more with every other denial ‘we’re just friends’ dates. I couldn’t lie to myself, I was in love with two women. I confessed to her and she confessed that she already had feelings since we were 15 years old. She broke up with her boyfriend so she could be with me. She knew I was in a relationship. My girlfriend knew that Summer and I had a ‘connection’ since the first time I gave her the freshman tour.
I had an open relationship with the two of them for some time until my girlfriend couldn’t take it and called for us three to meet together. My girlfriend wanted to end the relationship. Summer wanted to stay with me, and she did. Until the day after that.
That night my girlfriend called Summer and said things about me, things that prompted Summer into saying ‘Sorry I couldn’t be with you. Have a good life, I know you will.’ I have had 12 committed relationships, with that being the last one. I have never, ever, in my life had the feeling that I had for Summer. I love her truly.
Nowadays, even though I date or have one night stands, I keep thinking about Summer. I couldn’t fall for another woman ever since then.
My girlfriend was popular so she gathered all her friends to hate me. Had tons of talk, hate, and insults. Gave me depression for a year.”
This Cheater Got Caught Red-Handed And Had To Live With His Lies
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“I was a sophomore in high school and I was dating the valedictorian. She had a star GPA, was in choir and theatre, cute, and I could talk with her for hours. Being in the band program, a lot of the people I dated also happened to be in the band program one way or another, so when I started dating, we’ll call her B, I got mixed responses. A couple kids said I was only dating her to get out of the band program and I was using her and blah whatever high school bull you can think. The others were really supportive as previous girlfriends were a bit nutty.
There was an individual who I thought was a female best friend, someone I could come to with all my problems and just talk to when it gets heavy. She was two years older than me (a senior in the beginning) and she was also cute. She and I were teachers assistants together where we basically sat in a back office and made copies every once in a blue moon. We were jokingly flirty, and I was trying to hook her up with an acquaintance so I figured nothing dumb would happen. She kind of started making moves toward me, super subtle stuff. Talking more than usual, sitting near me more often, just being around a lot. B wasn’t suspicious, in fact, she was really supportive and happy that I had other friends and such, and in the end, that’s what ended up breaking my heart the most.
It was about September, and other kids that have gone through band know that’s the beginning of contest season, and we sat next to each other on every ride. In the back. Where you know darn well what happens back there. That’s the beginning of it, and this continued for a few months. We took a trip to New York together, and that’s where we did it for the first time, and it just got more and more. After a while, I was living two lives: one with B, and one with the affair.
B ended up finding out. Because the affair sent her screenshots of the conversations we had. It didn’t occur to me until recently that there’s only one way that could have happened, but needless to say, B left in a hurry. I continued to ‘date’ the affair girl for a while though because I thought I was happy.
Complications happened, and I ended up not being able to talk to her for a month, which wasn’t as bad as I thought it was at the time. During that month, I didn’t see anyone else. I cheated to get here, but cheating to get out feels low (like cheating wasn’t low enough??). Once I could talk again, it felt different, but I ignored it as I assume it was just nerves that it would happen again.
I suspected something was happening around December of last year. She was over at a ‘friend’s’ house a lot, and around January, she left. She swore up and down it wasn’t for him, but lo and behold, they were dating less than 48 hours later. I found out later she had been with him behind my back for about three months before she left.”
Even To This Day She Questions, “Was I A Cheater?”
“I was with this guy, we’ll call him Bob. We met through mutual friends in college. He was kind, funny, quirky, and when I came on to him he reciprocated, which I hadn’t experienced before. We started a relationship and I quickly realized he was also flakey and had very little ambition.
It was a tough point in my life. I was struggling with depression, doing poorly in school, and due to my depression, I often felt a sense of alienation from my friends. I needed someone to be there for me, and he wasn’t. Not in a cruel way, just in the sense that we were both young and not on the same page. He had no intention of going to school, having moved to town B mostly to get away from his parents after high school. When it became apparent that college wasn’t for him, he moved back home (town A), while I stayed (town B) trying to get back on track academically. He took a job (town C), but every weekend he’d get off and go visit his friends in town A, before (and sometimes at the expense of) visiting me in town B. I felt like an afterthought. I started drinking more and pressured him to move in with me. It was a bad idea.
We dated for about two years. Went through two apartments and multiple roommates before moving in by ourselves. His job situation never changed, I was still out of school, and I became incredibly lonely.
Enter, Josh.
Josh was in the military. We dated in high school but it ended due to some stuff he was going through. It was a very anticlimactic breakup. I never felt there was any closure. We kept in touch over the years and hooked up a couple of times when he was on leave, prior to my dating Bob. Nothing inappropriate when I was in a relationship. Can’t confidently say the same for him.
I was invited to the wedding of a high school friend (in town A) whom Josh was very close to. I’ll be honest and say that visiting him (platonically) was one of the factors in my decision to go. I thought that we were very good friends. I was wrong.
Bob and I went together, and he acted like a petulant child the entire evening. He said he would be the designated driver, but he immediately started partying. He socialized for like 20 minutes before he started disappearing for long stretches of time. I finally found him out in the car. We fought. He said he felt like I wasn’t doing enough to be a social buffer for him. I told him I barely knew many of these people and we were supposed to be there as a couple. More fighting. I told him this wasn’t working anymore and we needed to break up. He left.
I had no ride home but connected with an acquaintance who was throwing an ‘afterparty’ mere blocks from my parents’ house, where Bob and I had intended to stay that night. I tried calling him to ask if he still wanted to stay there despite the breakup. He was passed out at a friend’s house and said some awful stuff to me. I figured I’d just catch a ride to the party and walk home.
Josh was wasted, I was weak and we ended up fooling around (not even going all the way) at the party. In the morning, Bob showed up at my parents’ house as if nothing had happened. I reminded him of the previous night’s events and said I was perfectly willing to take the bus or find a ride back to our apartment, where we could figure out how to proceed.
He claimed to not remember any of it. Said he was sober when he left the wedding and thought we’d just had a fight. So he got blackout wasted at his friend’s house. I started to question myself. Was I clear in what I had said? I thought so… I barely had anything at the wedding because they only had drinks I didn’t like. I didn’t do anything until the afterparty. I told him I’d messed around with someone and apologized.
He said ‘let’s go home and work it out there.’
We got back to our apartment in town B. He was cruel. Said he wouldn’t leave despite having another place to live, and working in town C. I was actively trying to reapply to university in town B after an academic suspension, and couldn’t afford the fees associated with moving. He agreed to move out and was incredibly petty about everything. Made me move into the guest bedroom, where I had a sleeping bag on top of two ottomans pushed together, and not much else. I’d gotten rid of lots of my belongings when his sister got married and gave us a bunch of her old stuff. He started tallying up all I owed him for groceries and nights out over the course of our relationship.
I tried to make the best of it. Looked for a roommate, hung out with good friends, and except for a couple of lapses in judgment, we generally avoided one another. Bob put a lock on his bedroom door and made threats to keep me from going in there.
One night, he was supposedly out of town and I was desperate for some extra padding to sleep on. I jimmied the lock on his door, took a blanket, had too much, and passed out. Sometime in the night, he returned, noticed a blanket missing, came into my room (which had no lock), saw me asleep, and proceeded to look through my phone. This was before passcodes. I’d been texting with Josh.
Bob found him on Facebook, messaged his version of events (that I’d cheated), and got Josh on his side. Josh replied with details of our night together. Nothing I hadn’t already admitted to Bob, but I think the nitty-gritty justified his sense that he’d been wronged. He started telling all our friends and family that I cheated. They stopped talking to me. He again refused to move out, despite my having found someone to take over his portion of the lease. I started drinking less as he began drinking more, often showing up at the restaurant where I worked and causing a scene. I finally contacted his sister. Apologized and explained the situation. Begged for help. She admitted he was drinking too much, thanked me, and he was soon completely moved out.
I went on to have a friends-with-benefits situation with Josh, who had since moved to town B. He half-heartedly apologized for telling Bob ‘everything,’ and I foolishly believed him. He would never publicly admit that we were together, and I found out that he had gotten himself a ‘legitimate’ girlfriend that he hid from me, when they both showed up to the party of a friend that she (new girlfriend) and I both happened to know.
When I look back on that time in my life, I often wonder… Was I a cheater? Did I imagine the events surrounding the breakup just to make myself feel better? To justify my actions?
Many years of unhealthy relationships later, I found my now fiance. When preparing to move in together, I was going through some old computer crap, found the hard drive from my first computer, fired it up, and found a file marked ‘Bob’s.’ I attached the contents to an email without reading them. Apologized again for everything that happened, and told him (roughly): ‘I know we both said and did some things that we’re not proud of. We were young. I hope you’re living a happy life.’
I never heard back.”
Sometimes True Love Really Does Conquer All
“I was in a dud of a marriage. I married too young and against my better judgment. My husband was a controlling and repressed man who did not respect me. I did not respect him.
I found out that my husband was on dating sites and talking to women online attempting to solicit dates. He was actively seeking to cheat and the only thing stopping him from taking it to a physical realm was the fact that none of the women were interested in him. We worked on our marriage over the years to try to resolve his online cheating, but he’d always start up again. Eventually, I got so emotionally worn out by it that I just didn’t have it in me to care much anymore.
I met a man at work who I was instantly attracted to on a mental and a physical level — something I’d never had with my husband. We started out with harmless conversations and became work friends. We then found excuses to text each other when not at work. We’d grab lunch together here and there. At first, it was with groups but then with just the two of us. I couldn’t wait to go to work every day and see him. I thought about him all the time. I knew I was heading toward dangerous ground but I didn’t want to stop.
We started flirting and I began to sneak away from home to meet up with him for hikes, dinner, you name it. I met up with him for hours at a time on evenings and weekends, and my husband never really noticed because his attention was always occupied with his friends or his online chats with women.
My friend from work and I were always careful not to make physical contact, until one day in his car when he leaned over to help me with my jammed seat belt and he kissed me. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever felt in my life. Over the next few weeks meeting up to have dinner turned into meeting up to find a secluded spot and make out in his car. Then that eventually turned into constantly fooling around. I could not get enough of this guy.
I felt tremendously guilty the entire time because I never thought of myself as the type who would cheat. I came clean with my husband before my affair progressed any deeper. I broke off the affair and agreed to try marriage counseling. I quickly changed my mind when during the course of an argument (I didn’t want to go to his church and he wanted me to) my husband slapped me and told me I wasn’t allowed to have any unsupervised visits with my family or friends anymore.
After I told my husband I wanted a divorce, he attempted to destroy my life. He tried to get me fired, told all the neighbors and everyone at his church what happened, posted our business on Facebook tagging my friends and family, you name it. He also threatened to ‘beat up’ the guy I had been cheating with which, honestly, would have only ended up in severe embarrassment and injury for himself.
It didn’t take long after filing divorce papers for me to hook back up with my friend and officially start dating him. My husband harassed and threatened us both until my boyfriend called his bluff and then he just sort of faded out. My boyfriend is now my husband and we have been together for 10 years and going strong. I love him more than anything and I respect him more than anyone I’ve ever met. I would never dream of cheating on him and I feel confident that he’d never cheat on me.”