Can You Forgive a Cheating Spouse? For Me, It Depends on How I Find Out

Yes. For me, that makes all the difference.

I remember having this conversation with some friends once. There were about four or five of us, and somehow the subject got so heated that some were even offended by the mere thought that their partners could cheat on them.

To them, the mere entertaining of the thought meant accepting that it was true. One of them, who was particularly vehement about it, said it would be over if his girlfriend ever cheated on him. And that it didn’t matter how he found out. It made no difference whether she’d come forward on her own and confessed, or he caught her himself. There were no second chances once she cheated. No way out of it.

“So, how are you sure your girlfriend hasn’t been cheating on you now?” I asked him.

He said he was sure, and I replied, “What you’re sure of is that you haven’t caught her. Period.”

That was when I told them that I could actually forgive a cheating partner, but that depended heavily on one factor.

How did I find out?

I went on to narrate an experience with an old girlfriend who called me one day explaining that there was something important she had to tell me. It turned out that she’d gone to visit a guy she called just a friend, and they ended up kissing.

She said it was him who kissed her, but whether he kissed her or she kissed him didn’t matter much to me. What mattered was her claim that she never expected that something like that would happen.

I was like, this was a guy who’d said he liked you, then asked you out, but because you told him you were in a relationship and that you two could only be just friends, you expected that all the feelings he’d developed for you would just disappear into thin air?

But I commended her for having the courage to tell me, because if she had decided to keep it to herself, I wouldn’t have known. She asked if it meant we were done, or we were still together, and I said I felt she was genuinely sorry, and we were even better than before. Then we discussed ways to avoid unnecessary temptations like that in the future.

When I was done with the story, the four guys all looked at me like I had just said something incredibly stupid.

“Too soft,” the same guy said to me. “Too naïve. I can never be with damaged goods.”

But then, I asked again, “How can you be so sure yours isn’t cheating?”

“At least I haven’t caught her,” he said.

“Which is exactly my point,” I replied. “Won’t it be better that she tells you herself than for you to catch her yourself? It wouldn’t automatically mean that you would forgive her, but at least it should make the betrayal easier to deal with.”

Because when you catch someone, I told them, you are suddenly left wondering how much you don’t know.

You cannot help wondering: Was that the first time? Or the fifth? How long has it been going on? Would she ever have told me if I hadn’t found out? You don’t know. And, sometimes, you’ll never know. That uncertainty can be more damaging than the act itself.

Better the devil you know than the angel you don’t.

In the end, my friends didn’t buy into my perspective, and so we agreed to disagree.

But I’m satisfied with this philosophy. It keeps me open and free from the false security of thinking that it could never happen to me. I’ll never fool myself into thinking I cannot be cheated on. I’m not greater, wiser, or smarter than anyone who has been cheated on.

Also, I do believe that some cases of infidelity result from a singular lapse in judgment rather than a calculated double-life, and so it may help to give the guilty party a chance for redemption, if they genuinely seek it.

I would want my spouse to know that it is okay to tell me if she’s made a mistake, believing I’d listen objectively as we find a solution. And I would want to know she’d listen if I made a mistake as well.

Sometimes hiding one mistake creates another problem.

Imagine someone is secretly receiving treatments, terrified they may have exposed their partner to a sexually transmitted infection. They care for their partner, so they don’t want to pass it on.

But at the same time, they also don’t want to get caught. So when their partner makes a move for sex, knowing that suggesting a condom would raise immediate suspicion, they hit their partner with excuses. Not in the mood. Too tired. Too hot. And any one of those things.

Eventually, they run out of excuses, and their partner gets infected anyway. And that is how one bad decision can become several more.

But the truth sets us all free here. Granted, our spouse may not forgive us and we may lose the relationship when they learn what we’ve done, but at least we are ending the relationship with the truth instead of spending years living inside a lie.

I don’t know if my spouse will ever need to tell me something like that. I hope not. But I know I’d rather hear it from her than find it in her phone.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.