Auntie SparkNotes: I’m Afraid My Boyfriend Hates Me for Cheating

Dear Auntie,

I’ve been in a relationship with a guy for just under a year now, and it’s been wonderful. He’s a truly great guy and I can really see us being in this for the long haul. However, to put it mildly, I messed up.

I went out with some friends of mine in another city last month, and, having got increasingly drunk throughout the night (I’d had an incredibly stressful week and I admit that I took it way too far in search of some catharsis), one also very drunk friend and I ended up going home with a couple of guys we’d met at a bar and I ended up in bed with one of them. I don’t remember too much about it because at this point I was blacking out, but I’m certain it didn’t go further than third base because I do remember protesting when it reached that point and the guy did back off.

The next day I felt more guilty than I had ever felt about anything. As soon as I got home I went to my boyfriend’s and told him everything. His reaction actually made me feel worse: he instantly asked if I was okay and if I needed to report anything to the police, said that he knew it was just a bad drunken mistake and then asked if I was unhappy with anything in our relationship, blaming himself for what I’d done (he has some fairly serious self-esteem issues that apparently have impacted his previous relationships). The next day he started to get more angry, asking me questions about the guy and how far it had gone, and eventually he just completely broke down, still blaming himself for everything. The next few days were very awkward to say the least with him mostly ignoring me even if I was in the same room, but eventually they started to improve and now we seem fairly back to normal, if not in a stronger place.

However, there’s some part of me that’s terrified that he’s just pretending things are okay and that he either secretly resents me for it or that he’s still hating himself for not being good enough. I still feel awful about what happened, and I don’t expect him to have just got over it. I want to make sure that he is really okay but I have no idea how to bring the topic up, or if I even should bring it up. Do I just leave it alone and trust that if he were unhappy he would tell me? Normally we’re very open with each other, but if he thinks he might hurt me it’s possible that he might be suffering in silence and I can’t stand that idea. But at the same time I don’t want to stir things if he is “okay” with it (as much as he can be). What do I do?

The hardest thing in the world, Sparkler: You bite your tongue and trust him.

Which, of course, is the same thing that your boyfriend must do, if you’re going to move past this and resume a normal and healthy relationship. Dealing with infidelity happens in two stages: there’s the part where you confess and confront the cheating, and address what (if anything) led it to happen. But there’s also the part, which is a lot more difficult and lasts a lot longer, where you’ve said everything there is to say and talking is no longer useful—and where reopening the subject becomes akin to ripping the scab off a healing wound. Your boyfriend’s job in the next few weeks will be to forgive and forget as best he can, if he can. Your job, as the person asking for forgiveness, is to make that job as easy as possible.

And that means letting him take the lead when it comes to when or whether you talk about this again, difficult as that is. You say you don’t expect him to be over it, and that’s good, because let’s be real, he’s almost certainly not. Even if he’s genuinely doing his best to put this behind him, it takes awhile for the rift that infidelity creates to fully heal. But he’s also not obligated to reassure you on that front, or to process his feelings in any way or on any schedule other than his own. (Well, within reason, anyway—more on that in a minute.) And that fear you feel? That’s your burden, kiddo. It’s the price you pay for having cheated. Not forever, of course; time will work its magic over the next few weeks and months to dull your guilt, and eventually, you’ll have enough space and perspective to think of what happened as a distant mistake, when you think about it at all. But in the meantime, you’ve gotta sit with it until it dissipates. It’s only fair.

So when you ask whether you should just trust that he’ll tell you if he’s unhappy, the answer is yes, that’s exactly what you should do. (And if you can’t do that, then you should fake it as best you can.) The more you and Boyfriend both pretend that things are fine and good and not weird, the sooner they’ll get that way for real.

… Unless, of course, it turns out that one or both of you can’t let this go. Which brings us back to that caveat from a couple paragraphs ago: If you get the sense after several weeks that your guy isn’t moving on—if he’s treating you badly, or questioning you incessantly, or setting outrageous rules with the goal of “preventing” this kind of thing from happening again—then that’ll likely be a sign that your relationship just isn’t built to weather a shakeup like this. (That’s also true if, as the weeks go by, you find yourself still dwelling on this just as hard as you are now.) And unfortunately, I can’t tell you for sure that things will or won’t work out between you, or that if they do, something else won’t still happen that results in your eventual breakup. But for what it’s worth, everything in your letter suggests that you and your boyfriend are mature, caring, responsible, and dedicated enough to make it through this and make it work, which puts you in a better position than many. I wish you lots of luck.

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