Reply to When would you/did you confront SO about cheating? The aftermath if you’re wrong?

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "When would you/did you confront SO about cheating? The aftermath if you’re wrong? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You do not confront until you have 100% solid evidence. If it's just a suspicion the cheater will always lie and spin things.

And even when you do have the evidence, don't tell your partner that.  Present enough information to see if they come clean because they most likely will not and the way they spin their story will tell you a lot about them.

Confronting a cheater before you are sure it's true only gives them a chance to get better at covering things up.  They won't be shamed into stopping, they will just be prompted to try harder at the deception.

And you don't need to become a super sleuth to find things, you need patience.  Evidence will always reveal itself. But I get it, patience is super hard too. [/quote]

Read every word of this. It is so true. I lived this and made the mistake of being impatient. [/quote]

I agree with being patient and gathering clear and complete evidence before confronting. If you have incomplete evidence, or even 99% complete, there’s a good chance SO will try to lie and spin way out of it. That will leave you even more hurt and confused.

But where I disagree is that I think that when you have all the evidence, you should put it all on the table at once and say “I know you did it, now let’s talk.” If you dribble out the info you have, your SO will lie and spin and try to dodge. People are weak and they don’t like to admit they’ve done bad things, so they almost always lie. Yes, you’ll get the moral satisfaction of watching your SO twist and look like a fool, but your trust in SO will be even more destroyed, because SO will repeatedly lie to your face. I dribbled out the info I had (still haven’t released all I have, in fact) and having SO lie to my face for 7-10 days was horrible. I don’t know if I’ll ever really trust again. The destruction of trust is probably more painful than the affair itself. It has made our efforts at reconciliation very hard.

I guess you need to decide if you want to try to reconcile after you gather all the evidence. If so, I’d recommend putting it all out at once and leave no room for lies. If not, then dribble it out to see how truly duplicitous the person is. Good luck. [/quote]

I actually think that the point of dribbling it out is as you describe -- if their reaction to hearing the part of the story you know is to lie and contradict the part of the story you know but they don't know you know, well, then, you have an answer early and upfront about whether reconciliation is possible.  It won't be.

If their reaction to your dribble of what you know is to take the opportunity to come clean remorsefully and start to make amends and build trust through honesty, then there is hope of reconciliation.

Unfortunately, the chances of the latter happening are almost infinitesimal.  But, the benefit of the dribble, is you will have a clear answer about reconciliation early enough to make good decisions about leaving and rebuilding your life instead of wasting years of trying to rebuild trust and engaging in a cycle of dishonesty, being caught and being remorseful.  That is an abusive cycle and if you stay and participate in it, you are doing great harm to yourself.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics