To anyone who has ever cheated on their (past or present) S/Os, what do you think (or know) the reason was?

I bet this question will get a lot more “Great Questions” then “Great Answers”.

GQ!

@whitenoise LOL I was thinking the very same thing. People here would admit to smoking pot, cross-dressing, you name it, but cheating? I don’t think so.

I’ve never cheated on anyone, but a girlfriend cheated on me once because she was emotionally immature and did not know how to break up with me in anything other than a passive-aggressive manner.

I’ve never cheated on my husband, and I never will.

When I was single and dating, I did cheat on one boyfriend. He and I had a long-term (about 6 years) relationship, and I knew that it was going nowhere. I cheated because I was trying to disengage myself and get on with my life. I thought that I could break the bonds between us if I started to see other guys and develop a life of my own.

I did eventually break away, and it was all for the best. This guy lives in my neighborhood, so we sometimes see each other and talk. He’s now a commitment-phobe in his mid-50’s who can’t hold a job or keep a girlfriend.

@PaulSadieMartin Wow, good job, you’ve damaged him for life! LOL Just kidding.

I met another woman and we jus happened to have a lot of chemistry. That’s about it. If you’re wondering if I had relationship problems at the time, I was. I found myself not as attracted to my current girlfriend at the time.
I did break I off because I wanted to do the right thing, but that was after I already cheated on her. I did no tell her I cheated, but she probably already knew it was another woman.

Sorry for the grammatical errors. I hate smartphones.

@Self_Consuming_Cannibal :-)

I have a feeling you’d get more answers to this question if you described it as having a sexual relationship with more than one person in an overlapping time period.

Both times I cheated, the relationship was over and I was still kind of in denial. One guy I cheated on and broke up with the next day. The other one I was living with, and he was batshit insane, so the breakup took a couple months, but at the time I cheated on him I knew the relationship was going to end as soon as we finished college in a few months.

My mum cheated on my dad and her reason was simple, she was no longer in love with him but was worried about ending the marriage because of my brother and I. I would imagine that’s a fairly common situation and I keep an open mind about it nowadays. I don’t blame my mum for “being immoral”, I do not believe it is that black and white. Before it happened she never thought she would cheat on anyone, I’m sure most people that cheat would never believe they could do it, until they do.

I asked a question on here recently about how statistics show a large portion (40% or something similar) of people have cheated on their S.O’s but yet, on here, at least, people got really upset at a married Jelly who asked a question about kissing another man at a holiday party. My question was in reference to the large portion of people who cheated but that very few people admit to it and act like they’re very against it (in the manner of former NY politician Elliot Spitzer).

When my father died, there was a box of letters in the materials sent home from his office. I read the letters first, and discovered that my father had been having an affair for almost twenty years. He’d never left my mom and I had to figure out whether I should let my mother see them. I decided that if she found out, it might hurt her really badly. She was doing badly enough with his death. So I took the letters and burned them.

Sometimes I wished I hadn’t done that. It made it impossible for me to ever tell my mother. I mean, how could I admit that I had taken these letters and burned them? How could I tell her what was really in them and have her expect to believe me? And without telling her, how could I have asked her about it?

So we never did talk about it, and I’ll never know if she noticed the difference. She was very sad after my father died, and only lived a few more years, and never seemed to improve in her mood. Or maybe she was starting to recover, but her death was unexpected, to say the least, so we’ll never know what would have happened. Shoulda coulda woulda.

@burntbonez You went out of your way to protect her from heartbreak. What good would that have done? You’d never know. Would it have hurt her? You bet it would have. So, I think you spared her the pain of putting the pieces together, like, Oh! That’s why he was acting so strangely in this or that occasion, etc.

@Yeahright Well, that’s why I did it. But I still feel a need to understand why. What happened? Who was she? Is she still alive? But most importantly, what does this mean about me and my life? Does this have anything to do with why I am the way I am? I’ll never be able to find out.

@burntbonez Shoulda coulda woulda :( If u’d kept the letters longer, you’d be able to check for underlying info that might have given you more clues and maybe some answers. Those are a lot of Qs that maybe she couldn’t have helped you with anyway.

@Yeahright perhaps not. But perhaps….. oh, never mind. These kinds of thoughts are not helpful for me to think.