Estimated reading time: 18 minutes
I caught doing something incredibly stupid: I cheated on my girlfriend of four years. I love her deeply, and until recently I thought we were headed toward marriage. Now I may have blown up the best relationship of my life, and I don’t know if there’s any way to fix it.
About a year ago, work became overwhelming. I was up for a promotion, traveling frequently, and feeling insecure about whether I was good enough to move into leadership. Around the same time, my girlfriend and I hit a rough patch. She wanted to talk more seriously about timelines for engagement and kids. Instead of being honest that I was scared about commitment, about failing, about not measuring up and feeling overwhelmed by the pressure I was under, I got upset at her and chose to act out instead. I chose to cheat on her as a way of establishing my control of the situation and to give myself an ego boost of having a secret and getting away with it. It was like punishing her without her knowing I was doing so.
For four months, I got away with it and she had no idea. Then I got careless and slipped up repeatedly. On one of my work trips, I reconnected with a former colleague at a hotel bar. We’d always had some chemistry, and after a few drinks I leaned into it. It escalated, and I ended up going back to her room. It was a one-night stand, one of the rules I had made for myself to avoid complications and lower my risk of getting caught. No ongoing affairs, no emotional relationships, nothing that was likely to follow me home. There was a part of me that thought this made it better than if I were having an emotional affair with someone. I know that doesn’t make it better, I’m just explaining my thinking.
After I slept with my colleague, I started to realize just how much my behavior was weighing on me. I was feeling awful about my behavior, but at the same time, I didn’t want to confess. I just carried the new and heavy guilt and tried to overcompensate by being extra attentive at home. Ironically, that’s what made her suspicious. She noticed I was suddenly protective of my phone. One night she saw a message pop up from the colleague thanking me for “last week.” She confronted me, and I crumbled almost immediately. I admitted everything.
She was devastated. She moved out two weeks ago and is staying with her parents. She says she doesn’t know if she can ever trust me again. She’s agreed to talk eventually and occasionally but says she needs space and isn’t promising anything.
I know I’m the villain in this story, and I am genuinely remorseful. I’ve started going to therapy and I’ve come to understand that I have a history of self-sabotage when times get hard. Since then I’ve been trying to make things right with my girlfriend. I’ve offered her full transparency: phone, email, location, whatever she needs. I’ve cut off all contact with everyone I cheated on her with and told her explicitly that it was a mistake and will not happen again. None of this feels like enough.
I know forgiveness can’t be demanded, and I know I’m not entitled to another chance. But I want to show her that this was a terrible decision born out of fear and immaturity, not a reflection of how I feel about her. How do I demonstrate that my remorse is real and not just panic at losing her? I feel like she doesn’t believe I’m truly sorry and I’m at a stage where I’m thinking of how big of a demonstration I need to make to prove that I’m sincere. I’m almost ready to buy a billboard to confess everything in hopes that she’ll see it, since she has been refusing to return my calls or even read most of my messages.
Is there anything I can do beyond giving her space? Or do I have to accept that I may have permanently damaged this beyond repair?
Regretful in My 30s
Man, when you fuck up, you don’t do it small, huh?
Look, RIM3, I know I’m on the record as stating that cheating isn’t the worst thing you can do in a relationship and that not all infidelities are equal. But there’s a difference between “I got drunk and failed my Wisdom saving throw while I was traveling” and going out and deliberately choosing to hurt someone you care about. You know… like you did. The fact that you thought she wasn’t going to find out doesn’t make it better; the intent, in your own words was that you were out to “punish” her for… why, exactly?
Oh, right, for talking about the future of a relationship you were both invested in when you were feeling stressed.
I can sympathize with feeling overwhelmed. I can understand making a mistake in the heat of the moment. I can understand freaking out and hitting the self-destruct button. Hell, I can even understand (but not condone) having a naughty secret. But – and I can’t stress this enough – you did this deliberately and with malice aforethought. That puts shit in a very different class of fuck-up and you, super chief, fucked up very, very badly.
I will be honest with you: I’m a little surprised your ex left the door open to the possibility of talking. I don’t know if she knows about all the cheating or just the one where you got caught, but the odds that you’re going to come back from this are infinitesimal. It’s not zero, but you can definitely hear “zero” knocking on your bedroom door and asking to be let in.
Let’s be real here: you’ve caused someone a lot of pain and you did it for very stupid reasons. The fact that you acknowledge that they were stupid doesn’t mitigate it. It just underlines it.
The same goes for what you’ve been doing since. It’s good that you understand how badly you fucked up. It’s good that you’re going to therapy. It’s good that you understand that what you did is apparently part of a pattern of self-sabotage. Knowing why you did it is helpful, since it means you know what needs to be worked on so you break this pattern instead of repeating it.
But being aware of why you hurt someone doesn’t make it better. Intent isn’t magic and neither is self-awareness; the fact that you have a pattern of blowing shit up when you get stressed doesn’t change things for the people who were at ground zero when the bomb went off. The motive for the explosion doesn’t undo the damage and things don’t hurt less just because you change the context of the detonation.
Just as importantly: being sorry doesn’t fix things or make it better. Being sorry that you did it (as opposed to “sorry that you got caught”) doesn’t mean you get a second chance or even deserve one. To mend the sort of injury you’ve caused – and please note very carefully that I’m saying “injury” and not “mistake” – you don’t need “sorry”, you need to make things right and not cause more harm. And right now, you’re on the verge of making things worse.
Your ex – and she is your ex, let’s just get that out of the way right now – knows that you say you’re sorry. She doesn’t need to be reminded of that. She especially doesn’t need that reminder being broadcast to everyone in town – people who didn’t have any right or need to know what’s up between you two.
In a moment of cursed serendipity, as I’m writing this, I’m looking at an article about an Olympian who has chosen to use winning a bronze medal as an opportunity for confessing that he cheated on his partner and hopes that his “committing social suicide” will show her how much he regrets it. This is precisely the sort of behavior that makes things worse, because it’s not about being sorry. What he’s doing is a form of performative penance, a self-flagellation in front of the world to show how bad he feels. Except what he’s actually done is not only drag their business out for everyone to see, but put pressure on her to forgive him whether she wants to or not. Sure, tons of people may think he’s just being a weirdo, but it still creates public pressure on her to take him back. Look at how sorry he is! Who couldn’t forgive someone who is that sorry?
A public confession and humiliation may seem like penance, but it doesn’t fix anything. He hasn’t done the work to regain her trust. He hasn’t shown how he’s going to ensure this never happens again. It’s just one person saying “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” and hoping the words will magically make it all go away.
That’s all a public demonstration of remorse like this is. It’s performance, not substance. If you want her to truly see how much you regret things, then you need to do the necessary work with the full understanding that this is probably over. If the only reason you’re trying to work on yourself is to get her back, then you haven’t fully learned the lesson, you just don’t like the consequences. Real growth and change is going to have to be because you don’t want to be this person any more, not because you think it’ll get you another shot.
So here’s what you do: you leave your ex alone. You don’t try to tell her again how sorry you are. You start doing the hard and necessary work of digging into your self, addressing your behavior, your triggers and your issues, and then focus on living with integrity and demonstrating that you can be trusted through your actions. You do so without hope of forgiveness and without calling attention to it. And you leave the next steps in the hands of your ex, whatever it will be.
It’s up to your ex to decide if she can trust you again or if it’s even possible for her to forgive you for the way you hurt her. A lot of the time, it isn’t; the wounds are too deep and the scars too thick. You’re going to have to accept that. If she does decide to give you a second chance, it will in her own time and on her own terms. You will have to decide if you can live up to those terms or not. What she asks of you may not be fair. She may even come to realize that she can’t forgive you despite trying to make the attempt. That’s all on her. It’s on you to decide if you can accept those terms or not, and to own those decisions.
If she wants to give you the opportunity to re-earn her trust, then you have your chance, and you will have to show that you are now above reproach. If she doesn’t… well, this is what happens when you, quite literally, fuck around and find out.
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
I’m a first time writer-in but been reading you since Kotaku, and need help to understand a mistake that I made with someone I thought I had a connection with. I’m writing to you because I feel like you might understand based on what you call your “bad old days”.
I’m an aspiring creator working in fandom spaces, mostly working in animation and gaming doing character designs and storyboards. Recently I’d been playing around with the idea of switching careers and doing illustration work and maybe even drawing my own comics. After putting together a portfolio, I started going to conventions to network and promote my work. I’ve made lots of friends that way and it’s usually a good time.
Last summer, while I was at a small con that will go nameless, I met a young woman and we had an instant connection. While nothing happened at that con, she and I traded contact information and connected on social media where we were very flirty in our DMs with each other. We had even started sending each other pics – no nudes, but it was definitely spicy. Because we live half way around the world from each other, we’d eventually agreed that we were going to hook up at the next con we were both attending. It was about six months away.
I got it into my head that six months was too long and I suggested that maybe she could come visit me or I could come visit her before that. She said that was a nice idea, and she’d think about it. I guess I took that as her saying that she was definitely interested, because a few weeks later, I asked if she had been making plans and whether it made more sense for her to come see me in my city. She said she had to think about it because money was tight and flights and hotels were expensive. I mentioned that I had a spare room in my apartment while my roommate was on an extended sabbatical (his father had long-term complications from COVID and he’d gone to help his mother take care of him), so she could save on the hotel. I mentioned I could also help with the ticket price if necessary. She said that was sweet and she was still thinking it over.
All of this happened around the same time that I had noticed that the tone of our texting was different. It was less flirtacious, she would often only reply with a reaction and while I was still sending the occasional picture, she wasn’t sending many and those were just “here I am at this place” selfies that she’d post later on her Instagram. I decided to ask one more time if she was still interested in visiting me before the convention, at which point she told me that this was too much and she needed to step back from this. She told me flat out that she wasn’t coming to see me and that we were not going to meet up at the con. Since then, she hasn’t returned my messages and I’ve seen comments on Threads that seem like they were low key about me. They weren’t complimentary. Neither were the replies.
I’m honestly devastated. I know I fucked up somehow but I don’t know why what I did wrong. There can’t be a way to fix this can there? Or can I at least get her to tell me what I did, so I don’t make that mistake again? I feel like I had something amazing that got yanked away at the last minute and I don’t know why.
Red Flag on the Last Lap
Oh I can definitely relate to this, RFLL, because I have done this very thing. I have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory more often than I can reasonably count and I have lost out on a sure thing because I couldn’t leave well enough alone.
This is a time when, amusingly enough, your fuck up can be best described in Simpson’s references:
Homer: You know, a D turns into a B so easily. You just got greedy.
That’s what happened here. You had what was a reasonably sure thing if you had just waited – you and your friend had some serious chemistry and plans to have wild greased-weasels-on-meth sex at the next con. You tried to push the timeline forward by either going to see her or her coming to see you. She gave you a polite-but-uncommitted response, you took that as a “yes” and you kept acting like it was a “yes”. And that’s where things started going off the rails. You’d already pushed for an upgrade (as it were), and just kept pushing, not realizing that what you were doing was telling her that a hook up with you would not be advisable, chemistry be damned.
When you asked a second time, she wasn’t saying “I’d like to but I can’t afford to”, what she was doing was giving you a soft “no” by putting an obstacle in the way. “I would love to but alas, woe and alack, I simply can’t afford to,” is a polite fiction, the socially plausible excuse she was handing you to say why this wasn’t going to happen. At this point, the pre-arranged tryst was already getting shaky, but not insurmountably so. If you had dialed back and said something akin to “I totally understand. It’s just hard to hold back from the excitement,” you might have been able to pull things back. Give some awareness that you misread that first “maybe”, show some emotional intelligence and let her feel comfortable with the idea of being naked with you again and you could get back to enjoying spicy texts and trading thirst traps leading up to the big day.
(It was by no means guaranteed that you would go back to flirting the way you had been, but it certainly was the best path forward to preserving that chance.)
Instead, you took this as a sign to offer to clear those obstacles out of the way. Paying for – or at least contributing to – the ticket was sending some uncomfortable vibes. Offering to let her stay at your place was… well, that was probably the point where things went off the rails for good.
Here’s the thing: you two may have been hot for each other at first. You may have had chemistry so volatile that Alfred Nobel would’ve been afraid to touch it. But you were still relative strangers. She may have been willing to get naked with you in a hotel room during a convention. But staying with you, in your city? That’s a high-risk move for her.
Being sexual with someone means making yourself vulnerable in many ways – physically, emotionally, even socially. The potential risk is high compared to the potential reward, and the risks aren’t distributed equally between men and women. Sexual attraction is one thing, but for actual desire, turning impulse into action, that requires trust and safety. Your behavior was starting to suggest that maybe you weren’t someone she could feel completely safe with, which is what started making that desire evaporate like the sun burning off the morning mist. It wasn’t even necessarily a case of “well, he’s clearly planning to use my skin to make a blazer”, as much as “How much of a shit-show does this have the potential to be?”
Even if her physical safety was guaranteed, there’s still a shitload of potential for things to get deeply weird and uncomfortable and she wouldn’t have anywhere to go – certainly not without additional expense and effort. So to her mind, there’re far too many ways this could go badly – even if the “badness” is a hell of a lot of awkwardness and discomfort – without either a reward commensurate to the risk or ability to minimize the potential fallout.
After all, you didn’t pick up on multiple soft “no’s”, didn’t realize that you were making her increasingly uncomfortable and – from her perspective – kept refusing to take the implied “no” for an answer. It’s not really a surprise that things started to turn; she was trying to de-escalate your relationship without calling direct attention to it in hopes of avoiding an ugly scene. While it might have been nice if she’d told you, straight up “hey, this isn’t happening, here’s why,” the way you were acting wasn’t filling her with confidence that you were going to take that with good grace. There were a lot of ways that could go badly, even thousands of miles apart. Sure, you knew you’d never Hulk out on her over saying “hey, let’s just not”, but she has no way of knowing that. So she took the path that was safer for her.
And look, I absolutely get it. I empathize with you over this, I honestly do. Like I said: I have been through this, made mistakes that were near-as-dammit to yours and had to learn my lessons from it. And it stings like a motherfucker when it happens. But the fact of the matter is that there’s not really a path forward here. The best thing you can do is let the whole thing drop. If you see her at the convention and if she talks to you first (and that is a mighty big “if”), you can apologize. You can say “Hey, I just wanted to apologize for the way I was acting when we were texting. I was being pushy and out of line and I’m sorry.” But then leave it at that. Don’t explain further, don’t say “can we still talk/be friends/whatever”. Just let her know you recognized that you screwed up, how you screwed up and that you’re sorry. DON’T, whatever you do, give an “I’m sorry you got upset” or “you misunderstood” or any other sort of deflection of your behavior; that’ll just tell her that you’re blaming her instead of owning what you did.
And to be clear: when you apologize, you’re just apologizing. You’re owning your behavior, acknowledging the effect it had on her and expressing regret for what you did. You’re not asking for a second chance, you’re not trying to get back to a place where sex or make-outs are on the table. You’re just apologizing. Everything – up to and including whether she wants to talk to you – is going to be up to her. You can’t guarantee that she’ll be willing to talk and be friends again, but you sure as hell can ensure that she won’t if you take it beyond a sincere apology.
It sucks, I know. And it hurts. What you’re feeling is the pain of premature enlightenment if you allow it to be. If you take this pain and learn from it so that you understand the mistakes you made and won’t make them in the future… well, you may feel like shit, but it’s the shit that helps you grow and mature.
Don’t get too down on yourself. I know you feel like a loser, and I know some folks will be tempted to yell at you about it. At the end of the day, you made a mistake, and you made it from a place of excitement and eagerness and not a little bit of ignorance. You got overeager and got out over your skis. It happens to pretty much everyone. What matters is what you take away from this and how you apply these lessons in the future.
You made some decisions with the best information you had at the time. Now you know differently and have more information than you did, which means you’ll make different and better choices in the future.
There will be other opportunities for you. I promise. And when those opportunities arise, you will be better prepared to handle them with class and grace, instead of chasing after it like an over-eager puppy.
Good luck.
