#RelationshipTuesday: What would you do if you discovered your wife had an affair 20 years ago? 🤔💔 Would you stay or would you leave? My brother asked me this tough question last night and I’ve been thinking about it since. My initial reaction was to walk away, but then I started to wonder if that’s the best decision. I know most guys may say to leave, but is it really that simple? 🤷♂️
Have you ever been in a similar situation? Share your thoughts and experiences below! Let’s discuss and see if we can come to a conclusion together. 💬✨ Remember, honesty is key.
I’ve only been with my wife for ten years, and this is a difficult question to answer. I don’t think the people answering actually have experience being married. Anyone who’s been with someone for twenty years would know you’re both different people from when you met. You’ve lost and gained friends. You raised your kids together. You’ve lived through the excitement and boredom of each other. You’ve helped each other a million times over. You could possibly have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in assets, and your families are intertwined.
I’m not saying you would have no emotions and move on with your life, but uprooting your life for a 20 year old mistake isn’t the easiest decision. The only people who would be quick to say divorce are those who’ve been looking for a reason to be divorced and were too scared to pull the trigger.
I’d leave.
This is crazy because I literally had a dream of just this like two nights ago. My wife and I have kids and love one another deeply. So in the dream when she told me she cheated at the beginning of our relationship I was devastated. I wanted us to stay together because of how long ago it was, but ultimately now that I know it only creates an environment of no trust. That’s not a future anyone needs or wants. As hard as it would be, I would have to leave. Which is what I did in the dream.
Most people like that only tell part of the story, the truth is probably way worse
She was lying to you for 20 years, so I’d say that’s a problem. And that affair is the one she confessed/revealed. How many others could there be?
It would depend on a whole lot of factors.
* Did I find out from my wife, does she know that I know?
* Why did she tell me now?
* How was our relationship 20 years ago?
* How is our relationship today?
* After hearing the news, can I honestly say that I still love her?
* After hearing the news, can I honestly say that I can rebuild trust?
* Is she willing to put in the work to repair the relationship?
Leaving would not be automatic for me, I would evaluate the overall relationship, people are human.
My wife has been there for me through many tough times a rock that kept us both moving forward and upwards.
She has so much credit on the positive side of the scales in our relationship,
I owe her a lot of opportunity to see if we can move past the historical issue.
I’d leave. I can’t imagine trusting someone who lied to me for 20 years.
So if I married at 30, she cheated at 35 and 20 years later I’m 55. I don’t want to go through a divorce, dating and another marriage. For the sake of children and my well being, I’ll stay married. As a payback, she should convince her younger sister to fuck me.
I would leave without a second thought. If it happened once, and you found out about it, then perhaps there were other novels that are still secret.
nah
Find out why? Why did it start, why did it end?
Don’t impulsively throw away a twenty years plus marriage, especially if there are kids, even grown kids.
A cousin did this and now his future has been destroyed. He’ll never recover financially and now he’s cut off from his kids and grandkids.
As someone who unfortunately just had a guy confess to me that he’s been banging his lifelong best friend’s wife (who is also his soon to be ex-wife’s best friend) for years…. You have to remember the incredible manipulation and selfishness inherent in the character of the cheater. It never ends.
Soooooooo …
For me, I cannot stand cheating. My view is “If you’re not happy, sort the situation out before you move on”.
But a devil’s advocate view could well be …
“She thought she might like a new car, went for a test drive but decided that she didn’t like the new car and kept her daily driver for the next 20 years”.
Has she become faithful in the preceding 20 years, hard to tell. Are there any other affairs yet to be uncovered. Unknown.
Might there be more in the future. Unknown.
But so much of our future is unknown. It’s hard to decide how to treat behaviour that happened two decades ago.
Im out.
FYI you’re asking a bunch of teenagers and young 20 year olds about what they would do if something happened 20 years ago.
I guarantee you that 90%+ of the people responding in this thread have zero clue what they are talking about, have never been married, nor had a family of their own, much less done so for 20 years. As a result you’re just going to get the same mindless advice of “dump her, separate the family, and hit the gym” as though you were breaking up a college relationship.
Even as a man in his thirties I feel incapable of giving you a proper response. I just want you to know the context for 90%+ of the responses you’re seeing.
Its never **an affair** 20 years ago. It’s only **an affair** that was revealed. You don’t know how many skeletons are buried in that closet
Depends on what the last 20 years have been like. I’ve been with my wife for 20 years and if she told me she cheated on me in week 6, it wouldn’t negate the other 19 years and 46 weeks we’ve had that have been amazing. People fuck up. If it was once and it’s been over in the time since? Yea, it’s water well under the bridge at this point. I’d be hurt and we’d have to do work, but I’m not tossing my life for that.
My husband was unfaithful to me and i came here to know what men think. i decided to break the relationship 5 years ago. betrayal is not forgiven, that is my thought.
I’d be looking at what kind of partner she’s been to him SINCE THEN. If someone makes a terrible, one-time mistake, do all the good things no longer exist? If she’d told him they’d have lost this life together. I think, as I said in my other answer, there are things to look at. A big picture. It’s human to want to categorically say “I’m gone!” But I think the OP is looking for some perspective.
We’re we married 20 years ago? Then I’d file for divorce.
Even if we weren’t, it’s the kind of lack of character that would make me immediately completely lose respect for the person and then the relationship is over so, divorce anyway.
In case of an affair: LEAVE
In case of 20 years of lies: LEAVE
This is a double run for your life
One thing is that trust once broken is broken forever, the other is that women who get away with this will never respect the man again. So either way, he loses
It would be hard for me to stay considering she has been lying to me for two decades. On top of that, there’s no telling if it was a one time thing either
It’s easy to give a blanket answer when it’s a random question.
For people who have had a life for 20+ years, it’s much more complex. I don’t believe that once a cheater always a cheater. There’s plenty of examples either way.
It’s a complicated scenario, and would really depend on how things have been for 20 years. Marriage counseling would be scheduled.
Not the clever or snappy answer you want, but it really would depend on a lot of factors.
Depends on the quality of my life. If I have a great life, I’d just say, “Oh wow, you aren’t as great as I thought. How about we eat out tonight?”
For me, it is not the end of the world. Hurt? Absolutely, and we would absolutely dive into possibly other lying, etc. But this isn’t an automatic “leave”.
Also, if you have to leave, then leave. But violence, or threat of it, is never acceptable.
I am very curious about all the men who instantly call this unforgivable…
– Are you married? For 8-10 years at least? Or is your answer all hypothetical? (My answer comes from experience.)
– Have you ever cheated? Would you agree that is unforgivable when you (or your friend) does it?
Hell no.
Personally, I wouldn’t be able to get past it. For a start, she wouldn’t be the person I thought she was.
Finding out that you have been deceived for 20 years is a massive pile of shit, no matter which way you slice it.
It would be one of those things where the where the saying “it was years / a long time ago ” would make no difference.
I don’t ask for much, but honesty, loyalty, and fidelity are pretty much front and centre.
Not being able to trust someone would be pretty much game over for me.
What else they have hidden? It would never end in my head.
Is this purely hypothetical?
A marriage is a business agreement first and a romantic arrangement second.
People change a lot in 20 years, especially 20yrs of adult hood. I don’t use the same decision making process now compared to 20yrs ago. If I had to constantly get punished for my 20yr old fuckups, then I’d just give up on it all. At some point you gotta live in the present learning from the pasts lessons.
Not allowing another human the essential human nature of making mistakes is extremely rigid and very unfair to the other person. You can’t grow, together or apart, without mistakes and missteps along the way.
Humans who have less access to sex tend to lump physical sex together with the complications of emotionally loving and caring for other humans. If your source of sex and emotional care only come from one place, then it’s hard to understand that they are separate. Another way to phrase it is that if I need apples, oranges and bananas, then I have the option to get all of those items at the same store. Alternatively, I can stop by the store for bananas and also swing by the farmers market for apples and oranges. When I was dating the field for example, I could regularly have a few gals in the rotation but typify one I cared about more than the others. Having sex with gal B does not take away from how I care for gal A.
My personal opinion is that most cultural requirements for female fidelity are in place to ensure men can determine whether their kids are actually theirs or not. These underlying cultural requirements have not caught up to DNA verification technology. You don’t want her stepping out because you don’t want to raise someone else’s kid your whole life.
Once had a gf who admitted to cheating on me over a year in the past. I was mad but got over it. Turned out it was NOT over a year ago, wasn’t even a week ago. She just lied about the timeline figuring I’d forgive her if it was a long time ago.
20 years ago for her, yesterday for you.
Uhhh…is your brother okay OP? That’s a pretty specific question to randomly bring up.
I’ve given a lot of thought to this. My wife and I have been married for 18 years. We had some rough years, especially the first decade or so with young kids. We separated at 14 years for a weekend, but decided then to work on us individually and together.
The relationship we have now compared to the first 15 years is completely different. We were younger, less mature people. We fought dirty and hurt each other a lot by what we said. I always had to cut deeper with my words. I realize the depth of the pain I caused her through counseling.
I’m not faced with the decision, thankfully, but if I were I might consider things for a very long time before making a final decision. My wife is an amazing woman, a great mom, friend, companion, etc – I could go on for along time, but I’ll sum it up with my username. Which is true.
I just don’t know if I’d want to re-roll my hand and maybe get someone who’s half as great as she is over something that happened in the past when we were vastly different people. I mean, I’d be pissed off at wife 1.0 and the pain of the betrayal would hurt no telling how bad. It would really depend on the type of betrayal as well and who it was, but I could imagine scenarios where we might move past it.
Okay so I actually know of a few people something like this has happened to, both men and women, and all I know is that it’s all very situational.
The harsh truth here I think most people will avoid is that this is something a lot of people will choose to work through or forgive. It’s easy when you’re not in the situation to say “nah bro she cheated of course I’m leaving” but if this is a situation where you’ve been with someone for OVER 20 years, the revelation is actually less damaging to your lifestyle than a potential divorce and settlement.
Here’s the crux of it: this is someone you’ve also, presumably, been good with since that affair happened. The affair and knowing about it is of course damaging and painful, but if everything has been great since then and you’ve been happy, and fulfilled, then for a lot of people it’s going to make sense to stay.
That doesn’t mean of course that it shouldn’t be worked out and addressed, and maybe in that process the relationship degrades and it’s now worth ending, but there’s two ways to look at it (and both are 100% valid): she lied to you for 20 years, or she’s been great to you for 20 years since.
(This isn’t really a gendered thing either, plenty of men have obviously cheated and maybe men and women would present / receive this information differently but the situation itself is pretty universal)
Really I think it comes down to how someone chooses to digest this kind of revelation. If you see it as a betrayal that taints the entire relationship since then of course it makes sense to end it. If you see it as a mistake that was made and then continually made up for, then I would understand someone choosing to stay and work it out.
The only wrong answer here, to me, is to forgive without doing any more work. Maybe that works for some people though as well, but I’d imagine that comes from a place of guilt as well (maybe they had their own affair so it’s easy to forgive – they’re even) or they honestly just don’t care and they’re happy enough in their life that an old affair isn’t really shaking their foundation that much.
I think a lot of men in this sub, if you haven’t had much of a relationship, don’t understand the nature of a relationship that long. Not only have you been through a lot together, good and bad, but you’ve probably seen friends and family on both sides have affairs, divorce, or just generally be shitty to each other. When you’ve been through presumably half (or more) of your life together there’s bound to be things in there that would end the relationship if the relationship itself wasn’t so important to you. That connection and that bond, even though it’s been frayed and flawed sometimes, might just be one of the only things that can really anchor your life and even if you find out they cheated decades ago it might be worth keeping around.
Again, I get why people will also just en masse say to end the relationship, and I don’t disagree at all, I just wouldn’t blame someone if their 20+ year relationship transcends the opinions of online strangers.
None of my buisness
How many times has she done it though? Hard to tell if she has been lying to you for 2 DECADES
This isn’t even a choice.
She’d have divorce papers the next day.
Having been cheated on, it can’t break me anymore. Been there, done that. Trauma can’t be the same as the first time as you’ll have the experience to deal with it and it isn’t such a bad life ending thing.
I’ll be abit more women who’ve been cheated on. in the sense that I will slowly pull away my attention and affection and my love for her won’t be the same way anymore.
But doesn’t mean I won’t stay in the marriage. I probably would if there’s still tangible benefits such as lifestyle compatibility and access to her finances.
I can probably find another partner, but it’s such a hassle and harder to start rebuilding again. Time and energy I’d rather devote to my own mission and life. So I’d live with it provided she isn’t repeating it now.
Modern women treat Marriage like a business, it’s time men do too.
Nope, trust is gone.
It depends a lot. How did I find out? Did she tell me for the purely selfish reason of wanting to relieve herself of guilt, or did I happen to find out by chance? Does it seems she wants out of the relationship, but wants to play victim by making it look like it was my choice?
Also, who else knows? Has my wife told all her friends, and made me look like a fool for the last 20 years, or was this a secret she kept to herself all that time?
And then, who else is going to be affected by this? Do we have young kids? Can I afford to break up with her? Is she offering to just let me have the kids and the house?
Anyway, lots to talk about. But not outright dismissal.
>Would you stay ?
No way.
Leave. Once a cheater always a cheater.
I’ll be surprised because I’m 32, so that would mean she married me and cheating while being 12. Stupid jokes aside, I would leave. Not because of the affair, but because I couldn’t get the idea of “What else is she hidding?” out of my head.
I’ve been with my wife 10 years.
It really depends on the length of the marriage and when the affair occurred. And it also depends on the length of the affair and why it ended.
If my wife said “I cheated on you 10 years ago”, it’d be less impactful than if we’d been together for 15 years and she cheated on me 10 years ago.
If we were going through a rough patch or something, it at least would make sense.
I don’t think things are as black and white as people think they are. Theres nuance. There are so many questions I’d need to know about the specific relationship.
I’d probably go to individual and couples therapy before anything else and I’d ask for a temporary separation while we figure it out.
Twenty years ago we had just met. The bond we have today is a direct result of the days and nights spent in the early part of our relationship. Everything was built on that. Knowing that she lied during those years would be the end.