Women of reddit, those of you who dated or married a person who they know had cheated on their ex, how did it work out for you both?

37 comments

  3. My husband knew I cheated on an ex many, many years ago. He also knew my ex was mentally abusive and cheating on me while constantly accusing me of cheating on him. I finally ended up thinking “fuck it” and did what he always accused me of. I left him a week later.

    Our marrige is going strong as always. We’ve been together 15 years. I never want anyone else but him.

  4. We’re still together after 17yrs! I cheated on my then husband with current husband, he (current husband) cheated on his then girlfriend with me.

  5. He cheated on me, I cheated as revenge. It was awful, I didn’t want sex with anyone but him. But I didn’t tell him that. I did it just to show I could cheat on him in less than 8 hours if he did that again to me.

    We broke up but returned stronger 6 months later. So this was the only time I cheated and I regret the act, but not the punishment to my husband. Don’t fuck with me, that was the message.

  6. As far as I know, he never physically cheated on me, but he did catch feelings for someone else. I remember being so shocked when he told me, I didn’t even know what to say, so I did exactly that. I said nothing and never brought it up. We dated for a little while after that but we didn’t last. Who knows if he ever actually did cheat on me, I wouldn’t be *too* surprised if he did.

  7. To quote him ‘I did did cheat on you too, but not in the physical sense so that’s not as bad’. I did learn a valuable lesson not to date losers who cheat though

  8. He cheated on his now then wife with me, but I always felt awfull, created a trut issue because he didn’t needeed that much convicing… So he could do it with me. Not together anymore.

  10. I dated although he had cheated before and was cheated on 3 times during the relationship.

  11. It worked out horribly. He cheated on his gf with me, then cheated further with two other women. I didn’t find out until long after I already cut it off with him, because I knew I couldn’t trust him out of my sight. Who can live like that?

    He ended up marrying one of the later cheating partners, so I guess she must’ve known what she was signing up for. By then I had blocked him on everything. Out of the blue, years after I blocked him, he started stalking me on LinkedIn and I guess he was too dumb to know that I could see when he searched my profile. A couple weeks later he found my new Instagram account and started following me and liking my posts.

    I blocked him again and told our mutual friends what he was doing. They were shocked. I found out then that he was not only married, but he and his new wife were expecting their first baby. I did the math – based on the due date, he started looking for me online right around the time when his wife would’ve gotten her first positive pregnancy test.

    Now I’m just glad to know I dodged a huge bullet.

  13. We’re both happier. And with long term new partners. Worked through the bitterness and it’s OK. Rough as fuck at the time though

  14. He cheated about 12 years ago on an ex gf. We are happy, trying for a baby and engagement ring shopping.

    We are both older, 37. Unless someone is consistently cheating on all their partners I do not believe ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’.

    People are going to make horrible and painful mistakes, including non-cheaters. And some will learn and evolve, and some won’t. That’s life.

  15. I am not in this situation, but how the cheating happened and how your partner talks about it should tell you a lot. Did they cheat with more than one person? Did they justify it or do they think they should have handled it differently? My ex husband would tell his gf that I mistreated him and made him feel unloved. He used to basically paint me as someone incapable of emotion. I was a robot who he loved desperately that just wouldn’t love him in return, so what could he do but seek love elsewhere? I have majority custody and am a teacher. I feel like those two things alone should have been informational. Once his gf and I became friends, his story really was hard to maintain. They do not have trust. He is taking accountability now, though. He talks about how he messed everything up, and was just too immature to see that then. So, I hope he really means that and won’t cheat in the future on his gf, but she doesn’t trust him, and I don’t really blame her. He just came to accept fault in the last couple months.

  16. I was the one with whom he cheated, not physically but emotionally, I guess.

    We met 6 months before we started dating. Soon after we met, we started chatting daily. Since we were living in different countries at the time, neither of us thought that anything would come out of it, at least at first. Few months in, he admitted that he has feelings for me and would be willing to try long distance. I refused, even though I was interested in him as well. We left it at that.

    We both went out with others (no relationship, just dates and stuff). Well, he began fwb relationship with an older woman (10+ yrs) on her initiative. Suddenly, she declared that they are in the relationship even though both of them were only interested in booty calls and nothing else, and also my SO was honest about his interest in me.

    6 months after our first meeting, we met again when I participated in one project in his country. As soon as we got back in his town, he ‘broke up’ with her and few days later we started dating.

    Been together for 12 years, including long distance. Cheating didn’t create any issues for us.

  17. Is this the same guy that several of your last posts are about?

    You two seem to be a bad fit. It does not sound like a healthy relationship for any of you.

    It sounds like you’re in here trying to find reasons to be ok with him cheating on you in the past. Please note that there seems to be a common thread about the stories where it ended well. It was the one symptom on something heading wrong. They had good communication and dialogue to rebuild trust.

    I might be jumping to conclusions here, but they are based on your post history. You two do not seem to have a good and respectful dialogue ongoing. You’re most likely talking about the guy who blamed you for being sexually assulted. That is not healthy.

    Please. For your mental health’s sake, break it off with this guy. Block him. He’s already been given way too many chances.

    (And in relation to cheating. I’d say it’s situation and relationship dependant. there is no black or white rule if you can ever forgive or trust them ever again. It would have been so much easier if that was the case)

  18. Oddly enough, even though I knew he had been a cheater before, the person in the relationship that was most paranoid was him. He was constantly worried I was cheating.

    We are no longer together (I’m with someone else now) but we stayed together for almost 2 years.

  19. He cheated on me. Like a lot. 10/10 do not recommend dating a previous cheater. I know some people can change, but some people don’t and it’s not worth the risk for me.

  21. My ex husband would’ve cheated with me, but I was super young and didn’t really think about it like that at the time. We became friends in a group setting, and after some time he confessed that he had feelings for me, and asked how I felt about him. But he was dating someone so I said I’m not discussing that, but he can come back and ask me when he’s single. So he broke up with his girlfriend and asked me out. Older me realizes how inappropriate he was and that he was technically already being unfaithful to his girlfriend at the time. He started pursuing me while he was dating her. No surprise, he cheated on me.

  22. I have never knowingly dated someone who was cheating on someone else, but I was in a relationship who I found out was carrying on two “parallel” relationships at the same time. It resulted in me finding her, and the two of us showing up at his house one day. I wish I had a picture of the look on his face when he opened that door to us on the front porch.

  23. Sometimes I think with men it’s once a cheater always a cheater and that women are more apt to not, but I don’t know if that’s generally true. I just had that experience myself so I thought it was general. Does anyone have a story of a man that cheated and then never cheated again?

  24. I cheated on the partner I had before the present one. Now we’ve been together ten years, never once had the urge to do so.

  25. Well he told me he had once cheated on one of his exes because his current gf was “not interested in s*x, so he had started talking to another woman before breaking up, and he would never do it again because he knew how fucked up it was,”. I should have just stopped whatever back then, but I was dumb and dated him for 3 years.

    He cheated on me as well because he “got bored of me” and now is pissed off his actions got put on blast in our friend group so he decided to lie about how I was physically abusive to “deflect” of his own actions, and how “scared he was of me” which is bs because he visited my city after we broke up to f*ck.

  26. Not a woman, but they ended up cheating on me lol. Go figure. She really “wanted me” and I wasn’t like “the other ones”. I was younger and non the wiser. If a date told me they cheated on previous partners, I will nope out of there so fast. Not something I’m willing to risk that again.

  27. I was a dumb teenager who felt guilty that me and his ex had overlapped, but I was honestly just desperate for male attention and validation. It didn’t make me feel good, I just tried to forget them.

    He of course cheated on me a ton of times and told me I deserved it. I thought I did, thought it was my karma, thought I was a bad girlfriend and him cheating was bound to happen, and we went on to have a horrible relationship for a few more years before I finally realized I actually didn’t deserve that.

    To this day I feel guilt, but I’m an adult now and can’t change the past.

  28. Many years ago, he got drunk and cheated on an ex while she was away on a school trip, after finding out she also cheated on him during the trip. Being drunk, or her being unfaithful as well, doesn’t excuse it. Given his behavior over our marriage, and how he actively avoids any situations where something similar could happen again, I still trust him. When he’s talked about it, it sounds like he realizes it was an immature, emotional overreaction. He’s never displayed any suspicious behavior during our relationship, so I’m comfortable writing that off as a one-time mistake.

  29. My partner of 4.5 years cheated on an ex in high school (were in our late twenties now). He seems to have learned his lesson, he says he felt very guilty. Additionally, he no longer engages in the behaviors that led him to cheat (being drunk at parties without his partner). He’s never done anything to break my trust and in fact is very respectful of our relationship and clearly prioritizes me.

    I don’t have any issues with him going to parties without me but he prefers not to, he’s more of a homebody any way.

    So, so far so good!

  32. Ooh I can chime in here.

    I hooked up on and off for years with an older guy I worked with who was a known womanizer. He was in an on again, off again relationship with a woman he’d known for 20 years. I look back now and think there was definitely overlap with me but I ignored that at the time.

    I was in love with him. He kept telling me he wasn’t in a good place to commit, that he didn’t know what he wanted, that I deserved better, etc. He also admitted he’d cheated on his GF with more people than me, other people we worked with even. He’d cheated on his ex wife and probably most of his past relationships if not all.

    When he finally broke things off with that woman for good, I thought it meant we’d finally have a real chance. But he told me that he couldn’t commit to me because he wanted to sleep with whoever he could and I’d make him feel bad if we were still a thing because he knew it’d hurt me. He also said he would 100% cheat on me if we started dating for real.

    Now? We don’t speak. He wanted desperately to keep me as a “friend” but I knew what that meant. He’d kick me to the curb until he was bored or lonely and then he’d expect to hook up again down the road. So I cut him off for good. Last I heard he’s been hooking up with his 60 year old boss.

  34. My ex had an emotional affair with me (I had NO idea he had a gf at the time and when I found out I immediately ended all contact with him). Later after they broke up we reconnect and were together for 5 years, until he had an emotional affair with someone else while he was with me so I ended it there and then. How you got them is how you loose them, they say? 😅 Never again.

  35. My husband was a serial cheater. I expected him to be a rebound because I was getting divorced and he was who he was. 13 years later we are married and he has been faithful since we made the commitment to be exclusive. There was a lot of self work he did to figure out why he was doing the things he was doing and many clear boundaries set by me.

  36. I didn’t cheat however my mom cheated on my dad and then my dad cheated on my mom and they stayed together. They will always have trust issues. Both of them. But they haven’t cheated since that I know of. I recommend being with someone you trust. As their daughter I would NOT get with someone who has cheated in the past. If you aren’t mature enough to end the relationship before the next you don’t need to be in a relationship.

  37. He cheated on his ex girlfriend long before we even met and when he was still very young (timeline murky, somewhere between his teens and v. early twenties). AFAIK, at that point in time, the relationship was dead with neither partner wanting to admit it and she was also already looking elsewhere. When he told me about that in the earlier stages of our relationship (and feeling super bad about it, too) it made me a bit insecure and I told him that if I ever caught him, our relationship was done and over with, no second chances. He didn’t really have much to say about that. However, over time I almost forgot that story and I don’t have any issues trusting him.

    We got married and have been together for almost 10 years now with no infidelity. I don’t believe cheating once and especially at such a young age makes one necessarily a serial cheater. He also had relationships in between her and me that he didn’t cheat on.

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