Guilty but not a cheater

My boyfriend and I have been together almost two months and I cheated on him. It just happened. I was drinking and when I drink all my "monsters" start surfacing. My boyfriend already has trust issues considering his soon to be ex wife left him and took their two kids. It had nothing to do with him but everything to do with me. I'm scared he's going to resent me. And then I can't forget that he's my first love. Also that I may be pregnant by my boyfriend.

I am sorry for your situation, this sounds terribly scary. You first need to accept the facts: 1.) You did cheat on him; 2.) You can't blame alcohol for your decisions that you made while drunk, even drunk, they were your choices. Cheating doesn't "just happen;" 3.) You need to talk to your boyfriend.

I don't mean to sound harsh, I have been in your shoes. I cheated on my son's dad as a way to seek revenge after he cheated on me- although after it happened (and the alcohol faded), I felt horrible. My solution was to not tell him, and in the end he found out (they always do. S*** hit the fan. It was a nightmare. I found out I was pregnant a few weeks after.

It wasn't until the paternity test came back that he started on the path toward forgiveness, and in the end, it was a large part of why we could never work. Not so much the act of cheating, but the act of concealing it. My first suggestion is to get a pregnancy test. You HAVE TO KNOW if you're pregnant ASAP. I can't stress that enough.

Secondly, you need to tell your boyfriend what happened. Be prepared for a knee jerk reaction, chances are the aftermath will hurt. It is only through being honest that you're able to start forgiving yourself. Your mistake does not need to define you, however. Good people do bad things. Let him know it was a lapse in judgement and be accountable.

If there is a deep love between the two of you, he may learn to forgive you in time. You cannot make him do so, however. Be patient, gentle, and no matter what mean things he says (as I'm sure that'll be part of the knee jerk reaction), remember that you are still a good person, you just did a bad thing. I wish you luck and truly hope this works out. You have a hard road ahead, but you can get through this.

I have told him. I told him the next day it happened. It hasn't fully sunk in with him and I'm scared he's gonna realize that he can't stand me and won't be able to look at me. He's done nothing but love me and I've own up to my mistake. I understand if he doesn't or can't forgive me. I can barely forgive myself for it.

Telling him the truth is a good thing. He is bound to be hurting at the moment, that will subside though and then he can make a decision as to how he feels about you and the relationship.

If he decides to stay then both go see a relationship counsellor and try and work through things....I hope things work out well for you both and you can move forward.

I recently suspected my partner of cheating, I am pregnant (8months). If he had been truthful with me about it I would have done as above if he wished to work things out.

My situation is slightly different in that there was no proper communication between us in the aftermath and he was admitted to hospital with a nervous breakdown.

I am trying to be there and be supportive even though he is in hospital and the only person he will allow to see him is his father.

I just believe, like AOB says above, even good people, can do bad things. Provided you both wish to work through things and stay together, then that is up to you both. You could end up with a stronger relationship, better communication and understanding and something worth all of the hard work and effort it will take.

However, as with everything in life, it made difficult by the fact that you are both individuals and both have different feelings and emotions and you will have to be patient and see how you both feel. The fact that you are both communicating is definitely a good thing though.....I wish you all the luck in the world and send a big hug....x

The part that concerns me is the title that includes "....but not a cheater" I would like to know what prompted you to say this? Because what defines a "cheater" is just that, someone that cheats or has cheated. Whether you want to or intend to continue to be one is up to you but you first have to get out of denial. Even though you have "admitted" to the mistake it seems as though you're deflecting taking the full responsibility of it. No one, even drunk is completely without choice unless they are passed out and cannot effectively make a choice (as in being taken advantage/raped). You still chose, albeit you were less inhibited to do so.

The scary part of all of this is... many times when someone is drunk they say they do things out of character but I say much of the time it brings out those things that exist in us that we hold inside when we are in control and more inhibited. Even though you have started on the right path, it's not going to be a short or easy one for you or your bf. He is going to have a hard time trusting you and I tell you the truth you CANNOT leave the burden of trusting you on him. It is up to you to go out of your way to accomodate and understand his fears. I cannot guarantee he'll ever get over it. But the only way is to understand, never do it again, and go out of your way to make yourself very transparent to him so he'll have every opportunity to trust you again.

On your part you need to do some soul searching. no one cheats for no reason. What drove you to even consider doing something like this when you say your bf loves you so much? Until you figure out why you would even do such a thing, you will not be able to get past it and change.

Hope this helps
~S4

I understand all that. I know why I cheated and it had nothing to do with him. It had everything to do with my demons resurfacing that I thought I had dealt with a long time ago.

Do what you can to get those "demons" taken care of, if necessary use a therapist.

Again, just try not to expect him to get "over" it, and be understanding and acommodaing as possible. Be transparent, as I said. It is something you can get through if you're truly wanting to.

Am I reading this right, you think you are pregnant, drinking brings out your unresolved baggage('demons'), and as a result of troubles from your past, you use sex as something to soothe those demons?

What did you feel, you'd resolved, that resulted in sleeping with someone else? Though, you seem to be 'owning up', to the fact you did sleep on him, the truth about what it is about you when drinking that brings this behavior out, is truly more owning up, that just saying, yep, I slept with that guy, right over there, on this night because I thought I'd laid my past to rest, oops, guess I didn't...

Do you realize that you might be pregnant with a baby who was conceived by a drunken mother, and, depending on the amount of alcohol, that baby might Fetal alcohol syndrome - MayoClinic.com

It seems to me that you did not drink that much, because you do not report being out of it - you talk about demons, so, I take it, so long as you were aware of the demons, you were sober enough. Or wait. Wait. You believe that you might be pregnant by the bf. So, I take it, you do not suspect that you might have gotten pregnant during the incident with the demons. So you must have used condoms during the incident, right? Well, smart girl! Still, even if you think that you might have gotten pregnant via having sex with the boyfriend after the incident, there might still have been alcohol in your blood, so I do not know. My parents were a lit intoxicated when they conceived me, and, as you see, I do not have cognitive problems, but, the thing is, you never know. Ideally, you want to an alcohol-free conception, plus, if you want to conceive, you should be taking prenatal supplements for three months before stopping contraception, because the folate in the prenatal supplements prevents neural tube defects, and building it up in your bloodstream before conception is ideal. Just to be on the safe side. I did it only for my last child, and the others were, knock on wood, born fine, but I am just saying that in an ideal scenario, those things are important.

So to me it seems that you are thinking of wrong things. If you think that you might be pregnant, then get two urine sticks (they come in a kit as a set of two) from a grocery or drugstore, and take a test. If you test negative, rejoice, because you are probably too young for a child, because you call the bf your first love, and from that I can surmise that you are young. Plus, you and your boyfriend have only been together for 2 months, so it probably is too early to talk about more children - his efforts would be better spent on a court battle with the soon to be ex wife to get more visitation time with the two children he already has.

I am just finding it hard to believe that in the middle of a pregnancy scare, you are so consumed by the thoughts you have expressed on this thread. I would deal with the pregnancy scare without any delay. If you are not pregnant, then oh joy that big issue is off the table. If you are pregnant, then you need to think about what to do - it does not seem, all things considered, that you and your boyfriend should become parents now.

Also, you know this? "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein quotes

I am not saying that the incident with demons would necessarily repeat itself, but given that those kind of incidents may, with a larger dose of alcohol, result in getting pregnant by a guy other than the bf (right now even getting pregnant by the bf is bad news and getting pregnant by some other guy would be disastrous news), so I would get on high effectiveness contraceptive (meaning that it has less than a 1% failure rate). Getting on a high effectiveness contraceptive would also prevent you from getting pregnant by your bf since, as I hope I explained in great detail, you do not want to get pregnant at all now.

After all of those pressing things have been taken care of, you can relax and indulge in the luxury of talking about guilt, demons, etc. First, you take care of the basics. Then, you can afford to talk about things that are not immediately pressing.

So are you pregnant or not pregnant?

On your general predicament: I think that when you say that you are not a cheater, you are trying to say that you reported the incident to your boyfriend immediately, do not plan to have sex with the man again, did not have an intent to have sex with that man, so the elements of calculated, cold, premeditated, planned sex outside of your new relationship are missing, plus, repeatability is, we hope, no present as well. This is all valid, plus, "cheating" as a word means gaming the system - consider academic cheating, cheating on the income tax return, etc.

cheat
CHēt/
verb
1.
act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, esp. in a game or examination.
"she always cheats at cards"
swindle, defraud, deceive, trick, scam, dupe, hoodwink, double-cross, gull; More
informal
be sexually unfaithful.
"his wife was cheating on him"
synonyms: commit adultery, be unfaithful, stray; More
2.
avoid (something undesirable) by luck or skill.
"she cheated death in a spectacular crash"
synonyms: avoid, escape, evade, elude; More
archaic
help (time) pass.
"the tuneless rhyme with which the warder cheats the time"
noun
noun: cheat; plural noun: cheats
1.
a person who behaves dishonestly in order to gain an advantage.
"a liar and a cheat"
synonyms: swindler, cheater, fraudster, trickster, deceiver, hoaxer, double-dealer, double-crosser, sham, fraud, fake, charlatan, quack, crook, snake oil salesman, mountebank; More

So the operative words are deceit and taking advantage, and I do not see you as doing any of that - you rather seem to be a lost and hapless creature. So I think (see emphasis above) that you strayed - it is listed as a synonym of cheating, but it is not a full synonym, because the connotations are so different. You cannot stray on your income tax return, etc. So - you strayed as a result of a lapse of judgment provoked by alcohol.

Expressing the feelings of guilt and remorse towards the boyfriend would be appropriate if you do not overdo it - remember that he lost his kids to the ex spouse, and as somebody who has been through that, I can tell you that he is, most likely, constantly thinking of his kids and grieving the way of life he had when his kids lived with you. So you need to be supportive of him in that grieving, and if you keep saying that you were horribly guilty again and again, you would make it all about you (it would be a twisted form of attention seeking). So sort of say it, but also try your best to figure out what he currently needs in terms of emotional support. Is he getting visitation with the kids? Do you know the kids? If you know him, will you be present during visitation? If you will be present, then it is important that you be prepared - have some games to play with them, cook for them, etc. If you want to become a permanent fixture in his life, learning to interact positively with his kid would be key. In general, what I am trying to say that you are currently consumed by guilt, worry, fear of his resentment, and are as a result self-centered, which is not helping your relationship given his divorce crisis. Of course, if HE told you that the major fear he has left as an aftertaste of the divorce is the fear that you might leave him, then, perhaps, it is his major current concern, but unless he expressly and explicitly told you so, expect him to be in emotional pain on account of losing his children. IT IS NOT ALL ABOUT YOU in his life.

After you have expressed your feelings of guilt and remorse, you need to come up with a plan of prevention. In other words, you need to THINK.

Intelligent people start with recognizing patterns - a good portion of IQ testing is pattern recognition, and even autistic, non-verbal children are able to recognize visual patterns.

So you noticed what your pattern is, and that was intelligent of you. Your pattern is ALCOHOL in a SOCIAL setting --> DEMONS resurfacing, or, alternatively, MONSTERS -->lapses of judgment that result in sex you later regret having.

OK, so now we have two approaches. The simple approach is not to drink alcohol when your boyfriend is not around. It guarantees results, because your demons resurface only when you drink. Alcohol in moderation is a wonderful thing that aids social cohesion and offers numerous health benefits, so I am not saying that you should give up alcohol - drink it at home with your boyfriend, or in social settings when your boyfriend is by your side, but not when you are alone at parties.

This approach is difficult because it is hard to reject offers of alcohol at parties - you will have to be disciplined. My migraine attacks, it turned out, were triggered by coffee, so I now do not drink coffee but rather drink tea. When I get invited for a chat over coffee, I order tea or hot chocolate, saying that coffee triggers horrible headaches in me. Alcohol can trigger migraines, but luckily does not for me, but I am offering it for you as an easy way out - 9 Common Migraine Triggers

Since this is a mental health site, I imagine that you might have mental illness and might be on medications that interact with alcohol, but you do not want to say "I do not drink alcohol because of my psych medications", and blaming a migraine attack would not give away your mental health issues.

Another thing - do you know about the basic hygiene of alcohol consumption? In other words, do you know to eat a complete meal with alcohol, and, to have 1:1 one full non-alcoholic drink per each alcoholic drink? If you have not been doing that, then maybe you can experiment with the proper drinking routine, because well fed and well hydrated, your brain will be much better able to make the right judgment without lapses.

The second approach is to try therapy to deal with the underlying causes of demons and monsters, but that would take a very long time, so even if you plan on doing that, not drinking socially while your boyfriend is away is still the right stopgap measure to take.

Finally, once you decide what to do, and you need to formulate a plan of preventing further incidents of lapses of judgment, present it to your boyfriend, orally or in writing. He will be impressed that you have applied problem solving skills to nip the issue in the bud. It would much more impressive than repeated declarations of remorse, because it would show that you really care about not straying in the future. Say, I am probably twice your age, so let us assume that we are inside a company and I am your boss and you are my report. And, you did something awful. Just completely awful. And, there is a good chance that you will do it again. So let us say we have a one-on-one meeting, and during which you cry and sob and repeat that what you did was the most horrible thing on Earth. And, you cry and sob and cry and sob and repeat that you feel guilty. Initially, I would let you cry and sob, realizing that you are in a tough place emotionally, but eventually I will start looking at my watch hoping that you would realize that you are wasting my time, and get your act together. Once you are done sobbing, I already have another meeting to go to, so we postpone discussing the incident until later. I have a lot of stuff going on, with tight deadlines, and I postpone discussing a plan on how you would not make the same horrible mistake in the future. I go about my business and soon learn that you made that same mistake again. I call you to my office and you sob even more, explaining that your guilt was so overpowering that you completely lost your bearings and did not notice how you made the same mistake again. I fire you.

Cf. you come to my office after the first incident and say: "I am really sorry for the pain I caused you. I understand that I lost all credibility with you, but I hope to regain your trust via stellar performance in the future. I have done a post mortem (root cause analysis) on the incident, discovered why what went wrong went wrong, and developed a plan that solves the problem that caused the incident upstream (in your case, getting rid of the demons in therapy and/or abstaining from alcohol when not in your bf's presence are ways to solve the problem upstream, as opposed to continuing on as usual, consuming alcohol, and relying on willpower, which would be an attempt to solve the problem downstream, when it is usually much harder to solve it). Here is my plan to review."

I look at the plan and it strikes me as a well thought out plan. I give you a couple of suggestions for minor changes but otherwise acknowledge that I am glad that you have devised a good plan and that I will be available for further feedback and support in the process of your implementing your plan. I leave the office glad that you seem to be on the right track, and eventually, not seeing any more incidents, I regain trust in your professionalism.

See the difference? It was a bit of the art of project management applied to drunken straying girlfriends

That is fine that you are scared - start imagining the worst case scenario. He will resent you. He resents you. He has resented you for a while.

Picture his resentment. You have survived picturing it? Likewise, you will survive experiencing it in reality. It is not the end of the world.