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Hello Maria,
I'm a 21 year old girl from Scandinavia. I recently found out that my boyfriend for 17 months (who is also my very first boyfriend) cheated on me.
I would like to start by telling you that he was in a relationship for about 2 years before we got together. In that relationship he repeatedly cheated on his girlfriend by kissing other girls and texting them and one time he slept with another girl. He has always told me that the reason for the cheating was that he wasn't happy and he wanted out but didn't know how to. Finally his girlfriend found out and dumped him. When we got together he told me he had never regret anything as much as the cheating. He said he never wanted to cause anyone so much pain ever again and he could never cheat again.
About 3 months after we started going out I found out while i was checking my boyfriend's cell phone that he had slept with another girl after we started seeing each other. We had been talking for about 3 weeks and had slept together by that time. I was devastated when I found out and he was also. He told me he would never hurt me again and i believed him. Although i believed him i have always had a pretty hard time trusting him.
Then about 2 weeks ago my boyfriend was acting rather strange and told me one night that he thought he had feelings for another girl he was working with. He is 22 but she is 28 and has 2 children. He didn't tell me so much, only that she was always coming on to him and he thought he liked it. We talked and found out that it had just been a small crush because we had been fighting a little and he liked the attention he got from her.
After I found out about this crush i checked my boyfriend's phone records and saw that he had been texting her a lot and calling her many times for the past one and a half week. I was crushed and confronted him. He said he knew I would find out but didn't want to tell me. Then we talked more and he told me that he had kissed her once. After all of this he called her and told her he didn't want anything to do with her, i was with him when he did it so i know.
A few days later this girl sent me message on facebook asking why she couldn't be friends with my boyfriend on facebook. I told her he didn't want to and some other stuff and what I got back was that there hadn't been only one kiss but many and that my boyfriend had told her he thought our relationship was over. I confronted him once again. He then admitted that there had been three kisses but he never told her that he thought our relationship was over.
I was completely broken and didn't know what to do. My boyfriend told me that he regret it so so much and wish he never did it. He told me he wanted to do everything to make your relationship whole again. I am so much in love with him and want to work things out.
I can't begin to describe how hurt I am and how disappointed I am in him. He has told me so often that he will never hurt me again and then he does this. I can't understand why he did it because he says he loves me so much and because he promised to never hurt me again. How can you hurt someone you love so incredibly much like he tells me?! I hate that he didn't just tell me everything at the same time but always kept a little lie to himself. How can I be sure there is nothing more and he has told me everything? How can I know that he loves me as much as he says and he wants to be with me more than anything if he can do this?
I know that it is a big step for him to come clean and tell me, but he didn't tell me everything, I had to find most of the dirt out by myself. I know he didn't sleep with her, but the fact that they were always talking and texting and he kissed three times is so horrible!
But mostly, how can i trust him to not cheat on me again with his history!?
Please can you help me, I want to love and trust my boyfriend so bad but i don't know how to!
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The goal of this website is to give support to people who are facing problems in their relationship related to cheating, abuse and narcissism. I am living in Europe and English is not my native language, I wish you will excuse me if I make some grammatical errors. I have a background in neuroscience and behavioral sciences and I am currently doing brain research related to these topics in university in my home country. I decided to write in English because I wish to reach as many people as I can around the world.
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Dear Friend,
Thank you for sending your story. I am so sorry to hear about your pain. This has been your first long relationship and your boyfriend has hurt you in a worst possible way. You wrote you feel strong pain due to his behavior. Anyone would feel the same way in your situation. To love someone and to hear that this person has been intimate with another person is one of the worst things that can happen to a human being.
 People who have not experienced such situation might say "oh, it is sad but not the end of the world, there are worse things in life, like illness, death etc". Yes, illness and death are of course devastating things, however most people who are visiting this website have experienced the pain related to betrayal performed by someone one loves. Everyone who has experienced that knows how you are feeling.
Even though your boyfriend claimed he "only" kissed this other woman, that does not ease your pain. It is just as painful to deal with kissing than to deal with actual sexual affair. This is your first relationship. That makes the pain even stronger for you to deal with. I wish my feedback will help you and will give you some ideas as to where to go from this point. To understand the basis of your negative emotions and to learn how to ease emotional pain, I recommend you to read this article of mental tools that help to overcome emotional pain.
I understand you wish to be able to trust your boyfriend and somehow find a way to get over this. I wish to be very frank with you, because I strongly believe in a long run it will benefit you the most. Your situation is difficult, however it is not hopeless. It is important that you are aware of all the facts before you make the decision regarding your future with your boyfriend. Here are the facts:
1) Your boyfriend slept with another woman 3 weeks after starting to see you
I can understand that this hurts you. When this happened, you were just starting to get to know each other. I do not know what were the circumstances under which your boyfriend ended up sleeping with another woman, but it can be that in his mind he was not yet committed to you. If this is the case, it will be easier for you to forgive this incident. I understand that it is painful for you to think that he was capable of sleeping with another woman when he was just getting to know you, especially when you are aware of his history as a cheater.
In a way this incident shows that your boyfriend was not at that point "head over heels" in love with you, because if he was, he most likely could not have slept with another woman. However, it is good to be aware that for men it is often possible to separate sex and emotions more effectively than it is for women. Even though your boyfriend had sex with another woman, that does not necessarily mean his feelings for you were not strong. You know your boyfriend the best, only you can judge how he feels towards you (by observing his general behavior towards you etc behavioral signals). To conclude, I would say that this first incident is very unfortunate but in some ways more understandable than the following incidents.
2) Your boyfriend told you he might have feelings towards another woman
This is much more alarming than previous incident. First of all it is very cruel to say such thing to one's girlfriend. Your boyfriend must have realized how bad such statement makes you feel, especially when you are aware of his history as a cheater. I do not know if he said this because he is a person who is not capable of feeling empathy towards others, or because he feels it is important to be honest about everything. Again you are the best person to answer this since you know him well.
If the reason was that your boyfriend simply did not care how that statement would make you feel, I think you should seriously consider leaving him. It is very difficult to change that kind of personality trait. You are still young, I really wish you do not waste several years of your life with a person who is not treating you well. This is your first relationship. You have already experienced traumatic things related to your boyfriend's interaction with other women. There is a danger that it will be very hard for you to be able to trust people in the future if you let yourself to stay too long in a negative relationship. I do not wish that to happen to you.
However, if the reason why your boyfriend told you about his feelings towards that other woman was because he felt he wanted to be honest towards you, in some ways that is not as bad as previous alternative. Your boyfriend may have felt he really wants to change his ways and not to cheat on you as he cheated on his previous girlfriend. This may have been the reason why he chose to tell you about his feelings towards this other woman.
3) Your boyfriend kissed this other woman and called her several times behind your back
For what you know, your boyfriend kissed this woman few times. It is very likely that your boyfriend has some feelings towards her. We do not tend to kiss random people towards whom we have no feelings whatsoever. We also do not tend to call so often to people we do not care about. Just think what you would do if you were in your boyfriend's situation. Would you kiss a person towards whom you have no feelings whatsoever? Would you call that person several times a day? I do not think so. Dear Friend, I know it is very painful for you to even think that your boyfriend might have feelings towards her, but it is important that you are aware of all the facts. Only that way you can make the right decision regarding your future and not feel sorry about your decision later in life.
 If your boyfriend has feelings towards this other woman, he may have felt he wanted to tell you about it instead of doing things with her in secret. If this is true, in some ways it is good, because it helps you to regain your trust in your boyfriend (if this is the road you wish to choose): You can allow yourself to believe that your boyfriend is doing the best he can to change his ways and would not have chosen to carry on long-term secret affair with this woman or anyone else, instead he would have told you about it before things went too far.
Sometimes it happens that one develops feelings towards someone else even though one is in a relationship. The best thing to do in that situation is either to suppress the feelings and not act on them, or tell one's partner about the situation and perhaps even separate instead of starting a secret affair. If you feel in your heart that this was the reason why your boyfriend told you about his feelings towards this woman, then it might be worth it to try to stay with him, if that is truly what you wish (and what he wishes).
Should one trust a boyfriend who has a history as a cheater?
Your boyfriend's history as a cheater is making it very hard for you to trust him. It is no longer a question whether your boyfriend is a cheater, you already have an answer to that: Yes, he is. This man has cheated in his past relationship and he has cheated on you at list once (it was cheating to kiss that other woman even if there was no sex). The first incident of him sleeping with another woman when you had been seeing each other for only a short time may not count as cheating if he felt he was not yet in a committed relationship with you. However there are no question marks regarding this second case.
So the fact is that your boyfriend cheated on you. He told you how sorry he is and how he will never hurt you again. This is something you have heard many times before. Your boyfriend was sorry he cheated on his previous girlfriend. He promised never to hurt you, but he broke his words when he slept with that first woman. Again he was sorry, and promised never to do it again. And yet he did. Dear Friend, I am sorry but I cannot strongly urge you to trust the words of this man, because it seems his words do not have lots of value. I am sure you understand this yourself too. The reason you are not allowing yourself to trust him fully is because you are a smart woman, you are drawing conclusions based on his behavior and your conclusions are correct. It would be foolish to trust your boyfriend blindly at this point.
 Now please let me say something positive. Even though your boyfriend may have feelings towards this older woman, that does not mean your relationship is hopeless. It is (unfortunately) quite common that people can time to time develop feelings towards people other than their spouse, especially if relationship has been lasting for long time. You have been together with your boyfriend for almost 2 years. If we look at the statistics, that is the critical time point in a relationship. After being together a bit more than a year, the sharpest edge of excitement and thrill towards one's partner starts to go down. This is the point in which a couple must examine their feelings to see whether they really love each other and wish to stay together and wish to start to build future together.
If the attraction between a couple has been mostly physical and there are only few or none similarities in personalities and no mutual targets of interest, many couples go apart after the first attraction starts to fade. This is actually a good thing, because it is very unfortunate to end up spending one's life with a person with whom one does not have anything in common. If one ends up in this kind of a relationship, it is very likely that cheating or other unpleasant things happen at some point. Even though it can be sometimes difficult to end a relationship even if there is no strong mutual love and attraction, in a long run it is best to go apart before problems start occurring. It is easy to become mentally addicted to a bad relationship. The longer one stays in bad relationship, the harder it is to break free.
Dear Friend, you are now standing in a crossroad. You must decide if you wish to stay with your boyfriend and try to regain the trust or if you wish to go your separate ways. There are pluses and minuses in both options. If you stay, it will take time (perhaps quite long) until you are able to trust your boyfriend again. Always remember that this is not your fault. Your boyfriend has broken the rules of relationship with his behavior and he has seriously violated your trust towards him. However if you feel like you want to give it a try, then stay at list for a while and see how your feelings towards him will develop.
Observe your boyfriend's behavior and if you see any signs of further dishonesty, then please leave, there is no point in staying in that situation. It is so much harder to get over second betrayal. You are still young, I would not recommend you to spend years of your youth trying to regain trust in this kind of a relationship. You will only end up suffering when you should enjoy your youth. If your boyfriend lies to you again, it is very likely he will continue to do so also in future. It really is not worth it to stay and wait for the next betrayal to occur.
To read more about how to get over cheating and narcissism in a relationship, please visit page Recovery After Cheating and Narcissism.
Warm hug,
Maria
If you wish to submit your own story and get feedback and support for your situation or if you wish to contact me for any other reason, send me email to
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he actually never cheated..so...