The woman was horrified when her boyfriend caught her cheating on him with her engaged neighbour, but she’s vowed never to tell the other man’s fiancée what happened
If your partner had cheated on you in a drunken one-night stand, would you want to know?
For most people, cheating is a dealbreaker in a relationship. After all, you need to be able to trust your partner, and that trust is often broken once you learn they’ve been seeing someone else behind your back. But do you view a drunken one-off in the same way as a longstanding affair? And if your significant other made one mistake that they deeply regretted and had no intention of making again, could you forgive them? What about if they never told you it happened?
That’s the situation one woman has found herself in after she cheated on her boyfriend with her newly engaged neighbour during a party at her house. The woman explained she and her neighbour were hanging out together in her hot tub when they ended up kissing, and her boyfriend caught them in the act.
Neither the woman nor her neighbour – whom she gave the fake name Joe to protect his identity – are interested in one another and they don’t want to see each other again, but they now can’t decide whether they should tell the man’s fiancée what happened.
In a post on Reddit, the woman said she and Joe had only spoken a few times before the party, but she invited him over as a kind gesture, and after a few drinks the pair ended up in the hot tub. Joe told the woman he “wanted to have sex” and she said she didn’t want to go that far, but they did “make out” – which is when her boyfriend caught them.
She wrote: “I really don’t remember what happened, other than I remember Joe telling me he wanted to have sex, and starting to try. I do remember that I told him no, but rather than it being a real ‘no’ I told him that we should wait until the following Tuesday when my boyfriend would be out of town.
“I truly have no idea why I did this and I feel absolutely awful and disgusted with myself. At some point, my boyfriend came out to see us full-on making out and essentially chased Joe out of the yard. My boyfriend said he could see Joe ‘grinding’ on me.”
After the event, the woman said both she and Joe had “fuzzy” memories of what happened, but they both regretted it and didn’t want to put either of their relationships at further risk. And while the woman was actively working on improving her fractured romance with her boyfriend, the pair said agreed it would be better not to tell Joe’s fiancée.
The woman added: “My instinct, and Joe’s, is that there is no reason to hurt his fiance and their relatively new relationship by telling her what happened. He and I are not having an affair, nor have we ever. And so while we don’t really understand why we did it, both of us know it will never happen again.
“I have never cheated on my boyfriend previously and I tend to believe Joe when he says the same. I feel like any guilt that may be alleviated on our side is going to be massively outweighed by the emotional cost it would inflict on her.”
Commenters on the post, however, told the woman that Joe’s fiancée deserves to know as relationships are built on trust and by not telling her, Joe is lying to her – and that could come back to haunt him later. One person said: “Relationships are based on honesty, respect and trust. You’re not preserving their new relationship, you’re leaving a dirty bomb there, ready to blow to smithereens the paper-mache house that Joe is trying to paper over the bomb with.”
While another added: “She deserves to know the truth. If your boyfriend did what Joe did, I assume you would like to know about it,” and a third posted: “You MUST tell her. No excuses. You directly tell her.”
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