Life does not get more convoluted when you lie to your partner about cheating on them (you didn’t but you say you did).
While I do understand the need to “fight back” with the goal of hurting someone as much as they have hurt you, this is just too far and has no real upside over time.
AITAH for telling my husband i cheated on him even though i didn’t?
So, I (26F) have been married to my husband (30M) for six years. About two years into our marriage, I found out my husband had cheated on me with a highschool friend that he met at one of his friends wedding (i didnt go with him because it was a few days after the delivery of my first baby). He claimed it was just a one-time mistake, that he had a few drinks too many, and that he regretted it. I believed him. I wanted to believe him. At that time, our daughter was only 1, and I didn’t want to break up our family over something he swore was a mistake. I “forgave” him, or at least I thought I did. I convinced myself that it was something I could be okay with because i was afraid to start over, but honestly, I was too young and inexperienced to fully understand how deeply it had hurt me.
3 years into the marriage we had our second child, our son, who’s now 3. Around that time, I found out my husband didn’t just cheat once. He had cheated multiple times with different women during the early years of our marriage i found out when my MIL’s birthday was coming up and i wanted some pictures of her for a collage that i wanted to make for her, i was scrolling through my husbands photos when i found screenshots of women’s profile from dating apps so i went through his message from years ago to find out that he had been cheating on me even before the girl from the wedding. the texts were usually vague but enough to confirm my suspicions.
I confronted him, and at first, he tried to deny it, but I had the proof. The messages’ dates exactly matched the periods he had reassured me that everything was good. He then gave up on the lie. When he finally confessed, he collapsed into sobs, gripping my hands, saying how much he hated himself for what he’d done. telling me how, in those days, he had been foolish, immature, and afraid of losing me. he begged me not to leave him he promised that he had changed. he said it was not something he had done since we had our son. and that his family meant the world.
Admittedly, his apology really got to me. I hesitated when I saw how broken he looked. I couldn’t determine if it was sincere regret, desperation, or guilt. I told him forgave him even tho I never really did. The trust was broken, and the anger persisted despite my best efforts to move on.
Since then he has been acting like the perfect husband, as if to compensate for what he did. I’ll admit it felt good to be the center of his attention after so long. but for the last two years i have been nothing but tolerating him because when i look at him all i see is lies.
now getting to the title……..last weekend after putting the kids to sleep I decided to tell him that I had cheated on him. I didn’t, but I wanted him to feel even a fraction of the pain and betrayal I’ve been carrying all these years. When I told him, he was crushed. His face went pale, and he just kept saying, “No, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t.” He begged me for details—“When? Who? How could you do this to us?” He couldn’t believe that I had “thrown away” everything we’d been working to rebuild. He said he thought we were finally in a good place, and this destroyed him.
I told him, “I expect you to forgive me, just like I forgave you.”
Now, he’s completely heartbroken, barely speaking to me, acting like he’s the victim here. He says what I did is worse because we were finally getting better, and now I’ve torn us apart. Part of me feels guilty, as if i manipulated him but another part of me thinks he needed to experience even a piece of what I went through.
So AITAH?
The Final Word
For everyone in a relationship, this is NOT how you handle it. If you have trust issues, if you’re hurt, you need to get counselling and talk it out.
And I will say that when you are caught cheating on someone, the betrayal is so deep, and so hurtful, that there is no coming back from it, even if you try to forgive the person that cheated on you.
The cheater will forever be under suspicion. The partner cheated on with forever be untrusting.
You’re much better off getting vengeance the old-fashioned way, a divorce lawyer, and then see how really sorry the husband is for cheating on you. Put a dollar value on it and get on with your life.
You can your young family will be better off. Trust me, been there.
