How did you find out your parent cheated on the other spouse?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of adults inside and outside the family know and they found ways to let me know. And then my mom (who was cheated on) confirmed it. My relationship with my father (the cheater) has never recovered. After I found out, any attempt by him to parent me or tell me what not to do just seemed funny. Who was this loser, who couldn’t keep it in his pants, to tell me anything? On top of it, he had no remorse and tried to blame my mother. I hid my contempt until I left for college and then I was through.

25 years later, we communicate only through e-mail every two to three years. I haven’t seen him in real life or spoken to him on the phone in 15 years. He hasn’t met my husband and children and never will.

I don’t broadcast this in every day life, so only those in my family know. Even my closest friends don’t know I’m estranged from my father. IME kids who never forgive the cheating parent are A LOT more common than people realize. It’s just that family estrangement is stigmatized and kept a close secret.

This seems like a massive overreaction from a drama queen. He wanted to have sex with someone besides your mother, for possible reasons ranging from sympathetic to narcissistic, but regardless, it had nothing to do with his relationship with you.

You are absolutely incorrect PP. When a father cheats it usually breaks up the family, this directly impacts the children. Maybe not now, but in decades past divorced father’s saw their kids very little. It isn’t a large leap for a child of a father who cheats to feel their father chose the other woman over them and over their family. Also, once a child realizes their father cheats, the veil comes off and it is easier to see their other faults. My relationship with my cheating father isn’t as estranged as this poster’s, but we are not close for all the reasons I discussed (and more - to include some abuse).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of adults inside and outside the family know and they found ways to let me know. And then my mom (who was cheated on) confirmed it. My relationship with my father (the cheater) has never recovered. After I found out, any attempt by him to parent me or tell me what not to do just seemed funny. Who was this loser, who couldn’t keep it in his pants, to tell me anything? On top of it, he had no remorse and tried to blame my mother. I hid my contempt until I left for college and then I was through.

25 years later, we communicate only through e-mail every two to three years. I haven’t seen him in real life or spoken to him on the phone in 15 years. He hasn’t met my husband and children and never will.

I don’t broadcast this in every day life, so only those in my family know. Even my closest friends don’t know I’m estranged from my father. IME kids who never forgive the cheating parent are A LOT more common than people realize. It’s just that family estrangement is stigmatized and kept a close secret.

This seems like a massive overreaction from a drama queen. He wanted to have sex with someone besides your mother, for possible reasons ranging from sympathetic to narcissistic, but regardless, it had nothing to do with his relationship with you.

You have a lot of defensiveness and anger over a situation that has nothing to do with you. Let me guess — you’re a delusional cheater trying unsuccessfully to convince your children it’s no big deal? They’re going to cut you off. Save your jabber for your AP.

[Anonymous]

My father cheated and left. While he was taking fancy vacations with his new girlfriend, we were poor and hungry. We didn't qualify for free lunches because he made too much money. In the meantime my mom worked at Walmart and had to take over the mortgage payment along with all of the other expenses. My feet would bleed from wearing shoes that were too small. I remember how hungry I was during that time.

To the person who thinks that him having sex with someone else had nothing to do with me, I beg to differ.

[Anonymous]

I found out two years ago a few months after my father died. My older sister told me. Everyone in my immediate family but me knew 15-30 years ago that my father cheated for years on my mother. Despite my mother's insistence to the contrary, he was not, in fact, working 100 hours a week all those years. Meanwhile, I've been in a depressive, withdrawn and anxious state since middle childhood--when the cheating began. I'm furious that my parents shrugged and persisted with the narrative that they were happily married, he was a workaholic with a job that required lots of overnight travel and I am the ungrateful, withholding, glum and impossible to please daughter.

Meanwhile, my BIL was in the local news for sketchy, not quite illegal behavior with a minor that cost him his career and my ex-husband was a parasite who drove me into bankruptcy, all the while telling me how impossible I was to please.

My parents had to deal with the public humiliation of seeing their son-in-law in the news for months
and they willingly paid for my divorce (I did not ask them to). Sweet, poetic justice.

I'm remarried and we've created a stable, boring-in-a-good-way life for our two sweet kids who seem to be doing, feeling and relating well as they progress through elementary and middle school. Im stunned at the contrast to my own upbringing and the impact of not meeting children's bare minimum social emotional needs for daily, loving contact.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of adults inside and outside the family know and they found ways to let me know. And then my mom (who was cheated on) confirmed it. My relationship with my father (the cheater) has never recovered. After I found out, any attempt by him to parent me or tell me what not to do just seemed funny. Who was this loser, who couldn’t keep it in his pants, to tell me anything? On top of it, he had no remorse and tried to blame my mother. I hid my contempt until I left for college and then I was through.

25 years later, we communicate only through e-mail every two to three years. I haven’t seen him in real life or spoken to him on the phone in 15 years. He hasn’t met my husband and children and never will.

I don’t broadcast this in every day life, so only those in my family know. Even my closest friends don’t know I’m estranged from my father. IME kids who never forgive the cheating parent are A LOT more common than people realize. It’s just that family estrangement is stigmatized and kept a close secret.

This seems like a massive overreaction from a drama queen. He wanted to have sex with someone besides your mother, for possible reasons ranging from sympathetic to narcissistic, but regardless, it had nothing to do with his relationship with you.

If you value your relationship with your children, you treat the other parent well. If you’re married, that means you don’t cheat. Period. Want to have sex with other people - divorce. And the reasons people cheat, including insecurity, narcissism, etc don’t always make for good parenting either. Totally understandable that a child of a cheater may not want a relationship with them.

[Anonymous]

My husband's dad cheated on my MIL years ago when he was in middle school. MIL followed him to the hotel, where OW was. They ended up divorcing and MIL stayed singled with multiple kids and my husband's dad married the OW and had a couple more kids with her.

We now live on the other side of the country while everyone else still lives in the same city in the Midwest. My husband only calls MIL regularly (usually to Skype with our kids), not his full siblings and definitely not his dad or half siblings. When we go to visit, we stay at MIL's house and we do see his full siblings often then as they will stop by MIL's house to visit, plus there's all sorts of family get-togethers with other extended family who also all still live there, but one awkward dinner each trip is the extent of any relationship he has with his dad and his other family. I didn't even meet any of that side of the family until after we had been married 5 years. He's never said the cheating had anything to do with the strained relationship but it's not hard to imagine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My father cheated and left. While he was taking fancy vacations with his new girlfriend, we were poor and hungry. We didn't qualify for free lunches because he made too much money. In the meantime my mom worked at Walmart and had to take over the mortgage payment along with all of the other expenses. My feet would bleed from wearing shoes that were too small. I remember how hungry I was during that time.

To the person who thinks that him having sex with someone else had nothing to do with me, I beg to differ.

💔 You deserved so much better.