One way or another, everything eventually comes to an end. Friendships disintegrate, families break apart, and sometimes a once happily married couple fall ruin to cheating. It's almost like you could add infidelity to that other list with death and taxes. The bottom line is, finding out that you are being cheated on is one of the worst feelings imaginable. It sucks and there's no way around.
The people in the following stories recently dished their dirt on Reddit where they were asked to reveal how they found out their significant other was cheating on them. Some people learned something from the experience while others just wanted to watch their former soulmate pay for what they did. Either way, these responses were something else. All posts have been edited for clarity.
And She Thought The Tarot Cards Were Just For Fun
“I have tarot cards, just for a fun party trick. One day, I decided to do one for myself about my relationship. A card came up saying my boyfriend was being unfaithful or lying about something big. I laughed it off and did it again. The same card came up. I think I did this two more times, every time no matter how much I shuffled again, the same (moon) card came up. I got paranoid and asked him if he had ever done something. He laughed at me for being silly and said no. I laughed as well because he would ‘never cheat on me.’ I felt a bit uneasy, but I don’t believe in tarot cards, so I told myself I was being crazy. This dude was one of the nicest ‘teddy bear, puppy dog’ guys I ever dated.
About a week later, I borrowed his computer (as mine was broken). I asked if I could look through his pictures, as I was looking for a picture of us that had been saved on my computer, to post for our one-year anniversary. I guess he forgot about all those nudes he received and sent in our first few months of dating.
He was at work, so I saved the evidence. When he came back, I pretended I had a surprise for him on his computer. I have never seen such an ‘OH NO’ face in my life. The color drained from his face and the waterworks began.
The tarot card thing was weird, and I’m not saying it’s real, but apparently, life wanted me to know as my computer broke in a freak accident as well. Now enjoying very much being single.”
And He Though Her Dating Other People So Soon Was The Big Issue
“I dated for a girl for two years until one day, out of the blue, she said she was not happy anymore and broke up with me. It sucked, but I figured it was for the best if she wasn’t happy.
About a week after we had broken up, I saw her at the bar with some guy who she sheepishly admitted she was on a date with. Later that night, I ended up standing next to him ordering drinks. He apologized to me for the awkwardness.
‘Yeah, it’s just weird since we’ve only been broken up for a few days and she’s already dating.’
He paused, ‘A few days? She and I have been seeing each other for like three months now.’
We stared at each other for a second. And then my ex came running up to pull him away from me. He shrugged her off and told her to get lost and then left the bar.
That’s how I found out my ex had been cheating on me for three months before apparently guilt took hold and she broke up with me.
I bumped into the other guy a few months later at a bar and we actually talked about it. It was weird hearing about it from his perspective. In his mind, he had thought she was just really flaky but after speaking to me it just all clicked for him. And we went through some of the times when he couldn’t reach her because she was with me and vice versa. I’m not sure how I didn’t pick up on it. Either way, I’m happily married now and I think she had to move home and live with her mom.”
I Guess The Third Time Really Is The Charm
“I came home one day and my husband’s work phone was going crazy. He had taken our son snowboarding, and they weren’t going to be home for a while.
I picked it up trying to see who was trying to get a hold of him. Since he was on call pretty much 24/7 I wanted to call him on his other phone if he needed to call into his work. My surprise to find him kissing a Chinese woman as his background. Then there was a picture of him and her at the Great Wall, where he said he went alone. Then I found dozens of messages between him and another woman he had met while he was working in China. He’d even offered to move her to the US and have her take my place!
When he came home, I confronted him and he swore he’d end it. Well, he ended it with her and moved on with a lady in Israel where he was working. I discovered that one when I found photos of them on a trip to Egypt that he said he took alone.
I found out about the third girlfriend when I found intimate pictures of her on his tablet and phone. I finally left after that. I knew he’d never change, and I don’t think he ever truly loved me.
I left him in 2013. He passed away in December 2015. He probably would have caught the cancer sooner if I had been there.
Since we were still technically married at the time, I had to go through his stuff with his brother. We found more secrets he was carrying, like the fact that when he wasn’t dating some girl on his business trips, he was just paying for their company. His brother was shocked and saddened obviously but it helped me start to bring closure.”
Not The Military Homecoming They Were Expecting
“In the early 2000s, my friend’s husband was deployed to Iraq. Together, they had a 10-year-old son and a happy marriage. One day, while he was deployed, I was at home when another one of our friends called and screamed, ‘Dude, turn on the news right now!’
I turned it on to watch a human interest story about a fundraiser at a high school 30 miles away. They were doing Relay for Life or something, and as a ‘surprise’ to one of the participants, they had her ‘husband’ and father of her two grade school children do a video call from Iraq and displayed it on the football jumbotron.
There on our local news was my friend’s husband, telling another woman and two kids how he loved them and couldn’t wait to get back home to them. The news ate it up. That night, our group of friends convened and decided how we would tell her. I was nominated, so the next day, I had to sit her down and tell her what we saw. She called the news station, and they were happy to let her come in and watch the story. They were also incredibly apologetic.
She called him out on his lies, they started divorce proceedings, and he went on to legally marry the mother of his other kids, and mostly ignored his son from the first marriage. Prick.”
A Devastating Truth Led To A Beautiful Ending
“My ex-wife’s guitar teacher (that I got her for Christmas) was acting cagey around me when I went to get bass string for myself. He talked to me and said he wasn’t sure if I was there to beat him up and since I was friendly to him, he assumed the note was true.
What note, you ask?
The note my ex-wife had given him saying I was ok with an open marriage and that she really wanted to go get drinks with him. Her exact words were, ‘I really want to get a drink with you and a bit more. It’s ok, my husband knows and is cool with it. We have an open marriage.’
I wasn’t mad at him. I wasn’t even mad at her. Had she said something, I probably would have been down for an open thing, but she lied to me and him. I kept the note, showed it to her, and said that we were finished.
Ended up meeting my current wife that very night. Since I was so upset, I drove to Kutztown PA, as a friend I had briefly dated in high school was currently going to school there. My ex hated this person and that drove a wedge between us. Said friend was awesome and super sympathetic and was also down for a revenge hook up. (Since my ex hated this person so much, what better choice, am I right?)
Anyway later that evening she introduced me to about 20 of her friends and this one girl (we will call her Lucy) caught my eye. I was trying to chat her up and see where that would take me and this girl was polite and sweet but she was not having it. I started asking her about herself and what she was into. She brought up dance, ballet in particular. I brightened up and was like, wow, I grew up in dance classes. Tap, jazz, ballet, baton, gymnastics… all of it. But she just looked at my 5’9″ 260lb body and called bull (internally) and kinda just walked off.
Fast forward a year or so later, she was talking to my friend and I got brought up. ‘He seemed really nice, but I think he was just making up stuff to get in my pants.’ Then she told my friend what I said. My friend responded ‘well he probably was trying to get in your pants but he wasn’t making stuff up. That’s not his thing. He really was in dance and all that and he got a lot of flack for it growing up.’
Well at this point I had been dating a girl for a little while and Lucy by some weird set of events became her tutor for a class. This brought us back in each other’s lives and over the next year we became friends and I even got her a job at a movie theater I ran (turned out we grew up 15 miles from each other.) We became closer and things with the girl I was dating didn’t work out. And then in November of 2006, I realized I was in love with Lucy. She invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner with her family. We spent New Years 2007 together and a few weeks later, the day after her birthday, I told her I was ‘in like’ with her. Turned out she was ‘in like’ with me too. That was 11 years and a bit ago. We got married in 2011. It’s been the best adventure of my life being with this amazing person.
It’s was a broken road with loads of wrong turns along the way, but it led me to my current wife. I wouldn’t change any of it.”
She Didn’t Just Find The Side Piece
“He said he didn’t have a Facebook account, but one day I saw that he had the app on his phone, so I searched him up, and a little stalking later found out some things. First, his name wasn’t Sam, that was his dog’s name. Also, he had a wife, and the ‘family vacation’ he had gone on a few months back was actually his wedding. Worst of all, I was definitely the side chick.
Then everything started to make sense… He would spend the night at my place every once in a while, but I never really went to his. I never really met his family or friends, although we made plans for that sort of thing. When we were supposed to go, something always came up and plans were changed or canceled.
The confrontation was… unpleasant. We’d been together for almost two years, and looking back from where I am now, I realize he’d always been a manipulative, abusive loser, but I didn’t want to see it for what it was. Emotional abuse is full of lies, manipulation, gatekeeping and gaslighting. If he didn’t text for a few days, it was something I did to annoy him. If he changed plans, it was my fault because I should have planned better. If he stayed out all night it was because I wasn’t ‘doing my job’ to keep him happy. Basically blaming me for everything to hide his lies. So many lies (I mean, he didn’t even tell me his real name!) and so much manipulation. To be fair, he legit went on a lot of business trips, and sometimes I’d go with him. But day-to-day… everything I did was ‘wrong’ and he would ignore me to ‘punish’ me. Maybe I was just naive, but I legitimately loved him and he manipulated me to make me feel like everything that was wrong with our relationship was my fault.
I eventually left him, but some days I’m not sure I’m over him. That relationship broke me.”
He Didn’t Know It Was THAT Kind Of Dude Ranch
“I was pretty oblivious to it all for a long time. Keep in mind that we lived in a fairly small town (5,000 people), so people ‘know things.’
I was actually bragging up my now ex-wife to a coworker. Saying how proud I was of her for finally getting a job that she loved after being a stay at home mom for about the last eight years. I was talking about how she was working as a ranch hand on a few long cattle drives, staying in the bunkhouse of the cattle ranch. My coworker said she knew that ranch, only lived a few miles from there and that there was NO bunkhouse. The only residence was a single house that the ranch lead hand lived in by himself.
That really confused me. I asked my wife about it and she denied it up and down and had an explanation for all of it.
A few weeks later, another person I knew in town was talking with me and I mentioned my wife being at home, which surprised them. They told me that they thought we were split up. It turns out the guy she was sleeping with was this person’s cousin. Their cousin had told them all sorts of graphic details about what he and my wife had been doing, and now they were sharing them with me as I kept saying things like ‘no way’ and ‘they must be talking about someone else.’
Faced with this new information, I confronted my now ex-wife again just outside our house as the kids were inside. She initially tried denying it again, but then finally came clean. I was absolutely gutted. I was a grown man crying uncontrollably in my laneway, and she got in her truck and drove off to be with him again that night, leaving me and the kids at home.
I could barely eat or sleep for days, the only thing that kept me sane during my waking hours were my kids. I focused on keeping everything as calm and stable as possible for them every day. They saved me.
It’s been about nine years now. I haven’t been in a committed relationship since. I don’t know if I ever will be again.”
She Took One Look At The Video And Saw Enough
“One day, my husband was getting ready for work and I saw him packing his GoPro case so he could take it to work. I thought, ‘hmmm that’s weird, why would he be taking it to work?’
So, when he jumped into the shower, I replaced his GoPro with mine and thought I’d look through the files when he leaves for work. My suspicions were on alert because he had just taken a trip with some friends. It was a guys only weekend kind of thing.
I fired up the camera and found three videos, and lo and behold, there he was in all his glory barebacking a Filipino woman, probably one he paid to have her suck him off, looking and posing for the camera like he was an adult superstar.
I was enraged (luckily when I got tested later and I was clean), but also looking at this fool acting like he was some adult film star was hilarious.”
By The Time He Went Digging It Was Too Late
“I found out my ex was cheating on me on New Year’s Eve 2014. I was on active duty in the army at the time and had just come home from signing in off of leave. My ex was 12 hours away ‘taking care of her sick father’ at the time. I got home, logged into her laptop because she had some decent photos of me I needed for my LinkedIn profile, as I was transitioning out of the Army at the time. I was digging through the photos when I stumbled across a bunch of screenshots of text messages between her and the guy she was messing around with, close to where her sick father lived. I also found a bunch of lewd photos she had taken that were never sent to me. When I called to ask her about them, of course, I was reading way too much into these texts (I hadn’t even told her what texts I had seen) and those photos were supposed to be sent to me ‘but she forgot.’
Mind you, her dad really was sick. I actually got a call from my ex’s aunt a few days later because she had to go help him get off the floor because my ex had disappeared and my ex-father-in-law couldn’t reach her. Apparently, she had taken off, left her dad alone so she could go sleep with this dude in a motel a couple of hours away.
I was a wreck at the time. Like I said, I was transitioning out of the Army, I was scared to death of that, I was afraid of being left with two teenage sons to take care of on my own, so I was stupid and willing to take her back. She came home about a month later for a few days for her work and to see our son, since it was close to his birthday. I tried to patch things up, I tried being a new person for her, I tried to be all the things I wanted to be and she wanted me to be.
But she was always distant. She wouldn’t talk to me about anything, all she said she could think about was her sick father. She just needed to make sure he was okay and then we could work on us.
She went back to him about three days after she got home when her aunt called her because he got worse again. I saw her off, gave her money, and thought we were on the right path to making things like they were.
Nope. The very first place she went was her new guy’s house. The idiot didn’t realize she had her phone tagging her location and sending notifications to her social media accounts.
She pretty much only came back once after that to get her stuff. She left me with our house, our two teenage sons, and all of the bills. She didn’t fight me for anything in our divorce, which was good for me. I ended up getting a pretty good job after I got out and had about two months of transition leave for me to get ahold of myself.
She’s still with him and that fine with me. He was a trucker, she’s now a trucker and they’re both out running the roads together.
I remarried not too long ago after meeting someone else, and my ex-wife and I are much better off without each other. She sees her boys about once or twice a year when I take them to the same area where both of our families lived, but that’s about it. My current wife is a much better maternal figure than their real mom, who’s good for phone calls and birthday cards but that’s about it. My oldest teen son is moved out and doing his own thing. He still has a lot of issues from how his mom left, blames both of us for a lot of issues he’s currently putting himself on.
But that’s how I found out. It certainly was a terrible ordeal in the beginning and it was really hard on me and my boys but we pulled thru, mostly. And we’re better off because of it. You really find out who your real friends and family are in that situation, how they deal with that. Quite a few people blamed me, made excuses for her to just leave her boys and never do anything to help take care of them. Others were just really supportive of me. They didn’t give me any false hope of getting back together when I thought I wanted to, they didn’t spare me any harsh words when I needed to pull my act together for my boys but they didn’t never turn me away when I needed to vent, needed a laugh or needed a drink.”
Well, That Certainly Changes The Relationship
“I knew something was up when my boyfriend posted a selfie he took with his other girlfriend on Facebook. I actually commented ‘Cute’ on it just to see what he’d do. He said ‘Thanks :)’ but then I assume he grew a brain and realized it was me.
I’m not sure why, but I’ve never actually cared all that much when people cheat. I just think, ‘Welp, that’s that.’ And I’m over it, no harsh feelings, I just don’t care. The relationships that tear me up are the ones where it ends because he doesn’t love you anymore, or life gets in the way and neither of you wants to let go.”
Sometimes It’s More Than Just Physical
“He felt pretty guilty, so he started being less and less covert about it.
Over time, his infidelity just sort of slowly became apparent. His cheating wasn’t just physical, it was a relationship. He was buying her gifts, taking her out, fixing her car for her, etc.
As he got more into it, he was obviously spending more time away from home. I am not suspicious or jealous naturally, so at first, I thought they were just friends. He finally told me he wanted a divorce, still not admitting that it was an affair and insisting they were only friends. I asked him for three months of counseling before we decided for sure whether to split up. He agreed, but he didn’t put in much effort as he was already one foot out the door. I couldn’t stand to be in that house with him anymore, so I found a cute little place to rent on Craigslist and moved out.
I took the cat with me, and she and I set up a home together and got on with our lives. It was a really hard time in my life, but I’m really grateful for the direction my life took after that. I hadn’t realized how much that relationship was holding me back from doing and being what I wanted.”
If The Cheating Wasn’t Bad Enough
“I found out my first girlfriend cheated on me after her best friend told me. I was skeptical at first due to my girlfriend saying that her friend had a crush on me. This happened during my freshman year in college, so I had a lot of emotions with very little experience to deal with it. It didn’t take too long to get over her, and it made it easier seeing her on Dr. Phil years later with her ‘rebound’ after the breakup.
I found out another girlfriend was cheating on my a few years later after her mother and father called me on speaker phone with her brother who had figured it out. She had a ‘history’ with a guy who moved back into town and did some snooping because he hated him. They found out and set up the pow wow to let me know. I wasn’t too upset as I was getting the feeling we weren’t a good fit, so it wasn’t nearly as big of a blow as the first.
About 10 years ago when I was in the Navy, I started dating a girl from my boot camp division after we both flew down to our training command for A-school. We ended up becoming engaged after eight months. I was later told by another boot camp friend (her best friend) that she was having an affair with a married Petty Officer who was there training for a new job (the one my SO was learning). I went through the motions of reporting it after ghosting her for a few days and collecting evidence. The military disciplines affairs for married couples as it’s conduct unbecoming of military personnel, so I got both of them in trouble before changing command locations a few months later. She also hooked up with a few guys to try to bribe them into messing up my car, but they got caught and one of them got injured while resisting arrest.”