"My Entire Relationship Was A Lie": People Are Sharing What To Look Out For If You Suspect Your Partner Is Cheating
Last month I wrote a post about people sharing the moment they realized they were being cheated on. The BuzzFeed Community bravely shared their heartbreaking experiences — which inspired many commenters to share their cheating stories too.
Here's what some of them shared.
Some of these stories have been slightly edited for clarity.
1."My son hid my phone so I picked up my husband's (who was sleeping) so I could try to call my phone from his phone. I found that he fell asleep mid-text message of 'I love you' to a girl he worked with. Then spent over an hour reading three months worth of cheating. It continued for another five months after I found out."
—Anonymous
2."I was spending the night at my now-ex’s apartment in college, and we fell asleep on opposite sides of the bed than usual, and around 11:30 p.m., I saw a text come through from a girl saying she hoped he was having a good night. I asked him about it the next day saying, 'Who was that girl who texted last night?' He answered, 'I’m not cheating on you.' That was not my question!"
3."Trust your gut. I didn’t want to date a guy since I knew he was a cheater, but he was persistent and I agreed. A couple of weeks in, a mutual friend told me he’s cheating on me with a co-worker of mine. I confronted him, and he gaslighted me so hard. I broke it off with him, but not before I got some punches in. He went on to date the co-worker, who then cheated on him while they were on vacation and left him stranded there. Karma."
4."I got up in the middle of the night hungry, and my husband walked in at 2 a.m. He said he was outside smoking. It happened again the same week, so I got a GPS tracker. Turns out he was going to a single woman's trailer for six hours a night."
—Anonymous
5."I have two exes (one especially) who would always think I was cheating. I was not. It was fucking exhausting. I learned a few things. The first is NOBODY has a right to go through my personal things. Not my drawers. Not my phone. Not my computer. Not my letters or journals. I don’t care if I’ve known you two months or 20 years. If you want to invade my privacy, hit the fucking road. The second lesson is that your 'gut feeling' doesn’t equal truth. Also, my phone being face down is a habit of mine so people at work can’t see messages that pop up that may be inappropriate. For every cheater, there is somebody else that may be falsely accusing their partner."
6."He went to Puerto Rico for a week-long vacation with his best friend and others. I didn't hear from him for a week after he was supposed to be back, which was VERY unusual. I was so worried something bad happened that I dropped by his place (which he shares with his father) to see if I could find out anything. Well, a woman opened the door — turns out, she was his on and off again, and had just moved in two weeks prior. I'll be unpacking this trauma for years."
—Anonymous
7."I knew my husband of 20 years often cheated on me. I had only small amounts of proof, and as a homeschool mom to many children, my various part-time jobs didn’t allow me the financial stability I needed to escape. Eventually, he confessed to a particular girlfriend. He wouldn’t cut off the relationship. I also caught him with pornography many, many times through the years. Our marriage became emotionally abusive, and I was hopelessly manipulated and isolated from others and mentally exhausted to the point of confusion."
"Shortly after that girlfriend, he created yet another dating app account under a fake name and hooked up with a much younger woman who looked exactly like the porn stars he was into. Five months into their relationship, they intentionally got pregnant. The short version is that he came home one day and told me that he had another girlfriend and they were having a baby."
—Anonymous
8."A week before our 11-year anniversary I discovered he was being unfaithful. I had my suspicions in the past and have been one of those people who has gone through his phone. I’m not proud of that. At that moment, I wasn’t doing anything malicious. Our cat had just passed, and his brother wanted some pictures to make a blanket for him. He asked me and I went through his iPad to find some photos because he always took so many pictures. I stumbled upon a curious album and opened it. It had some very scandalous pics that I had never seen before (aka: they were never sent to me). He synched all of his devices, and I just went into his messages out of insecurity and fear. I found a message he sent to someone to make plans to hook up while I was out of town on business. I confronted him about it when he got home that evening."
"He admitted everything. It turns out that he was a sex addict and had been hooking up with random people off of websites under a pseudonym for 10 years! My entire relationship was a lie. There was this whole side of him that I chose not to see. My entire relationship had been fabricated out of my blind love for someone who made me feel whole. I broke up with him instantly and forced him to move out. We lived together for a month, and it was hell.
Then, like someone with Stockholm syndrome, I continued to hang out with him for a year after that. Granted, we had just entered lockdown and I was so lonely, but I also still felt like he could change and was still so na?ve and oblivious to his actions for some reason. I was so completely blinded by the absurdity that he would somehow just be different. Shocker to the story, he did not change."
–Anonymous
9."He accidentally forgot to hang up after a phone call between us. So I listened in. It sounded like he was having supper with someone at her home. Then, he gave me a gift packed in a box that had an address to him but at a different address than I knew him to have. Turned out the gold digger had moved in with a rich old woman behind my back while still seeing me."
10."We'd been dating for about six months. I introduced him to my son. We all hung out together. Sundays were our days together when my fam hung out with my son. He cut one hangout very short to help out a 'friend.' I phoned him in the evening to discuss how it made me feel a bit undervalued. He couldn't give me a straight answer as to when he'd be home so we could talk properly. I pressed him to the point that the girl he was on a date with while we were on the phone cottoned on. Thankfully he walked away without either of us, as she walked once she found out. Cheating sucks, and it was intensified by the fact that he knew about my past of sexual assault, abandonment, and general trust issues, AND that he continued to hang out with my son and me whilst cheating."
—Lucy
11."About two months before our breakup, he started pulling away from me. He was quiet and withdrawn, spending a lot of time with friends, and not inviting me. The thought crossed my mind that maybe there was someone else, but knowing he had been cheated on in the past and how much it impacted him, I thought he would never do that to someone, especially me. I trusted him. Anyway, the night before our vacation, he broke up with me, saying he didn’t love me anymore. I was heartbroken, but not even three weeks later he had a new girlfriend. My suspicions were confirmed when a friend of his reached out to tell me he had a pattern of cheating and having other women lined up before he left his current relationship. It’s been devastating and has made me question everything, but also has kept me from missing him while healing."
—Anonymous
12."My ex had not been wanting to be very intimate for a couple of months, and all of a sudden, she wanted to be intimate without using condoms or any birth control measures. She told me soon after she was pregnant. After spending lots of time and money getting ready to have a child, although I had a gut feeling, I went along with everything, and then after 'my son' was born, my mom finally convinced me to get a DNA test from the drug store. I did and sent in the samples and got the results back... He wasn't my child. To make it more disturbing, the name she gave him was the name of the actual father who she cheated on me with. A man 20 years her elder she said was a family friend any time I made a comment of suspicion. Two years later she lured me back in, and I slept with her and found out she was married."
13."My boyfriend was acting strange. He picked a fight one day so I left our apartment. When I went back the next day, I noticed our pictures weren't up, and my stuff was hidden from plain sight. I asked him about it, and he said he invited a friend over to smoke weed. The more I asked, the weirder his story was. So finally when he fell asleep, I checked his phone and found emails from Craigslist. Turns out he had been posting ads looking for random hookups. He had been messaging many girls. I found so many explicit messages."
"I forwarded myself the messages and left him. Turns out he had been talking to other people our whole relationship. Looking back, there were many signs that I ignored. It was so difficult to not feel worthless with that level of cheating. I have worked hard to rebuild my self-worth and constantly fight to feel good enough. I know deep down his cheating was about his own problems, but it still cut deep. My advice would be to trust your gut, especially early in a relationship."
—Anonymous
14."One day I found an empty condom wrapper in the entryway bowl where we kept our keys. I thought this passive ‘sweet’ man I had spent seven years of my prime 20s with could never do something so blatantly mean and stupid. I was sure there was some explanation. He explained that he liked to masturbate with a condom sometimes, which was news to me, and why not use the bathroom trash can for the wrapper? But I was in denial. Later that day I opened a junk drawer and saw a pack of novelty shaped balloons I had (like mouse ears) and as a joke to lighten the mood I laughingly tossed them his way and said, "Here, try these next time." He was so mad! I still didn’t suspect. We broke up weeks later when he said for the first time he never wanted kids. That broke my heart, but as I soon found out, he had a new girlfriend and had also hooked up with several more women from his new friend group. He’s still with that girlfriend almost 15 years later, and they have several kids!"
—JFC3
15."My ex-boyfriend and I got together quickly. Within the first two months of dating, he had spent every night with me, with one notable exception. He was a bartender so he’d usually come over while I was sleeping, but the night that he wasn’t there, I had a dream that he kissed someone else, and I woke up and texted him about it. We laughed it off, and I truly didn’t suspect anything amiss. He and I had shared information about our previous relationships, and he said he was always very seriously a monogamous type of guy. About a month later, I was staying with him, and he was napping. For the first time, I had this bad feeling — I had remembered the dream, and it wasn’t sitting right."
"And I did something that people would take issue with — I went through his phone and found text messages with a girl that he had clearly hooked up with and messages with a friend talking about how he had a one night stand. It was also clear from the messages that he had gone over the next night to her house to watch a movie, which somehow felt worse than him fucking her. I woke him up immediately, and I asked him if he had anything to tell me. He said no. I asked if he cheated. He said no. I then told him what I did, and he confessed. He had to go to work, and I just sat there and cried. I should have left the relationship, but I convinced myself that it was a one time thing. It wasn’t.
A few months later, I saw him texting surreptitiously. He took a nap, and I went through his phone, again. I discovered he had a Tinder account. He had been away for a family vacation, during which time I had to say goodbye to my family dog. He refused to talk to me about it, and instead of making any effort to console me, I could see that he had no issue messaging multiple women trying to hook up. I was pissed. I decided to change his whole Tinder profile to highlight his cheating. I rewrote his bio and said something about how that, despite having a girlfriend who loves him, he likes to fuck around and is a piece of shit. I changed his photos to pics of me and him and started matching with everyone. Women, some of whom he talked to in Wyoming, messaged me in support, and it was surprisingly really nice talking to them. I managed to keep him off his phone for the rest of the day, as I wanted as many people to see his profile as possible. And the next day, I told him what I did. He was pissed. I didn’t care. We ended things. And then he came crawling back.
And we continued this unhealthy cycle for years until the only way I could get out of the relationship was to move to the other side of the country. People will say I was stupid for staying, but the reality is that many, many women continue on in unhealthy relationships for reasons that are complex and sometimes heartbreaking, and leaving sometimes doesn’t seem feasible. Breakups also aren’t always so clean cut, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about not leaving sooner."
-Anonymous
16."The other woman told me. She tried to come off all tough and say some shit like, 'If you had kept him satisfied...' and I cut her off and said, 'Thank you for saving me so much hassle and money. He’s all yours.' This happened a few weeks before we were supposed to close on a house and get married. That woman saved me so much by telling me before I was fully financially stuck. She dumped him a year later when she caught him cheating with her sister."
17."I was eight months pregnant. I called my boyfriend's cellphone one day, and a woman answered. She was mad AF when she found out who I was. Apparently she wasn't OK with being the side chick. Of course, she blamed me. Although my boyfriend and I lived together, she insisted I was the side piece. I cried so much that night that I almost went into labor."
–Anonymous
18."I was with the love of my life for a few years. Supported him and his son while he figured out the career I handed him on a silver plate. I moved back to my home state because he was cheating on me. He spent almost two years wooing me and my family that he changed, saying he really wanted a life with me. He picked out a ring, and I finally made the choice that I would move back down there because he must be serious. I arrived the night before his son's b-day (for who I planned a party and bought a DS for on my ex's request). We had an amazing night, went to bed, and woke up at 5 a.m. with a woman standing in my doorway."
"I screamed, and he looked up and hid underneath the blanket. While she yelled at me for being a slut, she climbed into bed (both of us are naked) and proceeded to yell at me for almost 10 minutes. Then just got up and left. He said nothing and walked away. I was so embarrassed and humiliated. She also knew me as his girlfriend — she was a drug dealer and had a boyfriend also. I ended up staying the whole week because I promised his son I was visiting."
—Anonymous
19."We were moving in together. I was having a friend help he and I move boxes, and we found one with hundreds of love letters between him and her. And I just knew. I also knew he would lie when I confronted him. He kept cheating and cheated the whole seven years we were together. Before we moved in, I had initially said no and I wasn’t ready — but he kept asking because him and his roommates needed someone else to help with rent. I should have trusted my gut, especially when I was moving in to help with rent and not because he wanted us to live together."
—Anonymous
20."The side chick wound up pregnant. He had no choice but to tell me."
—Anonymous
21."The jerk had an ongoing fling with his baby momma. I trusted him, thinking that was the mature thing to do. She lives seven hours away, and every time he went to see his son they went out and dined as one happy family. It became obvious that they were an item when I discovered he slept at her house instead of his mom's like he claimed. When I inquired, he claimed nothing happens. The mistake he made was leaving his phone unlocked, and I discovered the texts that she loved and missed him terribly. Needless to say I was crushed."
—Anonymous
22."My boyfriend and I had been having issues in our relationship, and we were trying to work on it when I noticed he was having this semi-inappropriate relationship with his married co-worker. I told him we can't really work on our relationship with her involved, and he agreed to keep it professional with her. He started getting texts and calls at strange hours of the night and told me it was a wrong number. I found out he was lying to me while he was in the shower and she texted him. He had deleted her number from his phone, but failed to delete weeks worth of texts to and from that 'wrong number.' When I confronted him on it, he admitted what he was doing, and it ended horribly. What was so annoying was the out I gave him weeks prior and that he didn't take it."
—Anonymous