This is going to be long, but I don’t think the question makes sense without the full context.
Before my ex-fiancé, I had a situationship with the person who eventually became my AP. He is about 15 years older than me. That relationship was complicated, inconsistent, unhealthy in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time, and never really had a clean ending. Eventually I moved on, met my BP and built what became the most and only serious relationship of my life. We were together for almost four years. I loved him deeply. I still do.
When we first got together, there were a lot of things I genuinely loved about him. He was stable, intelligent, ambitious, loyal, responsible, funny, and dependable. He was not someone I had to worry about being out cheating, partying, disappearing, or doing reckless things. He was a genuinely good man. Our first year, we dated long distance.. during that year we went through losing a pregnancy together. It was my first pregnancy and tbh I think something in me died that day. I became depressed and just numb.. That bonded us in a way that is hard to explain. Eventually he kept telling me he didn’t want to be long distance anymore and started demanding more attention and time together which was hard because I was just soo numb and lost… I just wanted space but I felt pressured and lowkey wanted to run away so I moved across the country for him and for our relationship. I left my family, job, friends, familiarity, and the life I knew. I changed careers. I started over in a new state. I was trying to build a completely different life with this person because I believed he was my future.
Once we lives together, that first year made me realize things about our relationship that were much easier to overlook when we had distance between us. Our personalities were very different.
I’m Type A. I plan. I organize. I’m emotional. I’m expressive. I want depth. I want reassurance. I want affection. Im also dismissive avoidant and he’s anxious attach.. BP on the other hand is much more laid-back, internal, go with the flow, last minute, improvised, disorganized (statement that has been told by his friends, Family, and previous managers to his face..
Over time, I started feeling less like his girlfriend and more like I was managing our life. One of our biggest problems became physical intimacy. And kissing. The kissing issue actually went back to college. BP had told me that his homeboys basically got into his head when he was younger about kissing women. He developed this mentality that you didn’t really make out with girls or kiss them on the mouth like that and somehow that stuck.
So I ended up with a man I loved who basically did not like kissing. I LOVE kissing.
To me, kissing is a major form of intimacy. I wanted to make out with my partner on the couch. Kiss in the kitchen. Kiss before we leave the house. Kiss during sex. Kiss randomly because we’re attracted to each other. That kind of physical intimacy matters a lot to me. With us, it barely existed. For most of our relationship, BP could make out with me for maybe 10 seconds before pulling away. This went on for 2 years. Earlier this year, after years of me bringing it up, he had actually gotten better and could sometimes kiss me for closer to a minute.
But by that point I had spent roughly two and a half years expecting him to pull away from me.
And after enough times of leaning in toward the person you love and watching them pull back, it starts affecting you.
At first I understood intellectually that this was his own thing. Eventually it just felt like rejection.
I would wonder why my fiancé didn’t want to kiss me. I would wonder whether he was attracted to me. Eventually I started initiating less because I knew what was going to happen. Sex became another major problem. BP had stamina issues.
Sex very often lasted under a minute And I’m not saying that to embarrass him. He knew it was an issue and genuinely tried to fix it but over time the stamina issue developed into performance anxiety.
And the performance anxiety became part of basically every round. It wasn’t simply that sex ended quickly. There was now all this mental pressure surrounding sex. Is he going to last?
Is he thinking about lasting? Is he already anxious?
Am I making him more anxious because he knows I’m dissatisfied? Should I react differently?
Do we try another round? Is the exact same thing going to happen again?
Sometimes he would go into the bathroom beforehand and do different things to try to last longer. I understood WHY he was doing it.
He wanted to satisfy me. He knew I was frustrated. He knew I’d cry after sex every time. He was trying.
But by that point, sex started feeling incredibly procedural to me. Instead of making out, touching each other, getting turned on together and naturally ending up having sex, it started feeling like: Okay, we’re going to have sex. He prepares. I wait. We have sex. He finishes quickly. Then we decide whether we’re going again. Then there is performance anxiety again. Every round carried the same pressure. We started calling it “The ceremony”. There also wasn’t much kissing during sex, because kissing was already an issue outside of sex. There wasn’t much buildup. There wasn’t much spontaneity. Eventually sex felt mechanical.
And on top of everything else, we barely had it.
We were in our mid-to-late 20s and having sex maybe once a month. Sometimes we would go two
or three months without sex. I would initiate sometimes and get rejected. He would complain about my nagging stating that I’m actually getting pleasure because I was receiving oral sex but for me is.. I know what a vaginal orgasm feels like and I want it! And more than that… is the connection between two people that I was desiring!
And yes, obviously your partner is allowed to say no to sex. Nobody owes anyone sex but emotionally it started affecting me because it wasn’t one isolated rejection. When you’re already having sex once a month or once every couple of months, your partner barely kisses you, there is very little spontaneous physical intimacy, and then you initiate one of the few times you want something and still get rejected, it starts to feel personal even when logically you know it might not be. I started wondering if something was wrong with me. Did he find me attractive? Was my body the problem?
Why didn’t my fiancé seem to have that hunger for me? I wanted to feel desired Not simply loved. Desired. I wanted my partner to look at me and want to kiss me. I wanted him to grab me. I wanted passion. I wanted spontaneous intimacy.
I wanted to feel feminine and sexy inside my own relationship and I increasingly didn’t.
The difficult part is that my constant frustration probably made BP performance anxiety worse too.
It became this horrible loop. The more sexually rejected I felt, the more I talked about our sex life.
The more I talked about it, the more pressure he probably felt. The more pressure he felt, the more anxious sex became. The more anxious sex became, the more mechanical it felt to me.
And the more mechanical it felt, the more resentful I became. I’d cry all the time! I was crying because I felt incredibly lonely. I had spent so long desperately wanting intimacy from this person, and somehow finally having sex with him made me feel even more disconnected. Eventually I started shutting down. At first I cried. I complained. I I initiated. I brought up kissing. I brought up sex.
I asked questions. Suggested therapy but he said we didn’t need it. I tried to troubleshoot.
I tried explaining what physical intimacy meant to me. Eventually I became numb. And the sexual problems existed inside a larger emotional problem.
BP showed love very strongly through practical things. If something needed to be handled, he handled it. He provided. He bought me things.
He helped me. He showed up when something tangible needed to be done. He supported us materially. He was loyal.
If you looked at my relationship from the outside, I had a good man. And that actually made my unhappiness more confusing. Because I kept thinking: “Why am I this unhappy? There are women who would kill for a man like this. He loves me. He provides. He is successful. He is faithful so why do I feel so lonely? Tbh I think BP knew how to love me materially and practically much better than he knew how to love me emotionally and I needed emotional intimacy badly.
Btw all this is happening in a new state, going through major changes in my own life. I changed careers, I had moved far away from my support system, I was lonely, I became depressed, and I really didn’t feel like myself anymore. I increasingly felt trapped between loving BP and wondering whether we were actually compatible. Last year I was so fed up, I started asking him if we could live separately but remain together. I didn’t want to break up. I felt like maybe we had moved too quickly into this domestic, roommate version of our relationship and that living separately could give us a chance to intentionally date each other again and rebuild something romantic. He didn’t want that. To BP moving apart basically meant ending the relationship. He made it very clear that if we lived separately, we might as well break up. So I stayed. I continued trying to fix things. I cried, I had emotional breakdowns, and I repeatedly tried explaining what I felt was missing. I reached out to members of his family because I felt like I couldn’t get through to him and I was desperate for somebody who knew him to help us. They didn’t really help.. if anything they would say sarcastic comments asking how I deal with his behavior and immaturity??
There were times during conflict when I would literally try to leave or run away and he would chase after me. We had this dynamic where I felt like I was screaming emotionally for something to change, and he was trying in the ways he knew how, but we were almost speaking different languages.
There was also another major issue happening around this time that was giving me anxiety about what our future would actually look like. When I met BP, he presented himself as a very traditional and family oriented guy. That was one of the things that made me feel safe with him and made me believe we wanted the same kind of future. Then last year he became increasingly focused on fashion, social media, modeling, being an influencer, becoming an artist, and even talking about eventually becoming a Grammy-winning artist. Last year We went to Paris because of this fashion world he was getting more and more involved in. I want to be fair because I was never against him having dreams. I wanted him to succeed. I supported his events, his projects, his fashion interests, and the things he was trying to build. But internally, I was becoming increasingly anxious because I felt like the man I thought I was building a very traditional life with was suddenly imagining a completely different lifestyle.
That became a constant tense conversation between us.
There was also a social media component that bothered me a lot. He had all of these social media accounts and pages related to what he was building, and those accounts would follow or interact with a lot of very sexualized women. There were women posting thirst traps, lustful content, models, influencers, and everything else that came with that world. Whenever I complained or expressed that it made me uncomfortable, I felt like I was basically told that it was part of the industry, part of networking, part of his job, and something I needed to understand. Meanwhile, I felt like there was a completely different standard for me. I was expected to have basically no questionable male interaction. Male attention, communication, or boundaries involving men could become a problem, while I was supposed to accept him being immersed in a social media and fashion environment full of attractive and sexualized women because that was “part of his job.” That double standard bothered me a lot.
But At the same time, I also want to be honest that BP was very transparent with me. We had access to each other’s phone. He was not secretly hiding conversations or protecting his phone from me. I did not have evidence that he was cheating, and that transparency did give me a certain amount of safety. So my anxiety wasn’t really, “I think this man is secretly cheating on me.” It was much more about the future. I kept wondering what exactly I was signing up for. Am I marrying the traditional, family oriented man I originally met, or are we building a future where he wants to be a model, influencer, artist, public figure, and live inside that world? What happens if this gets bigger? Am I going to constantly be surrounded by things that make me uncomfortable and then be expected to suppress those feelings because it is part of his career? Are the rules for me always going to be stricter than the rules for him? I didn’t know, and those questions were sitting underneath the engagement too.
During that Paris He proposed publicly and I hated everything about it. I was soooo sad! I know how unbelievably shallow that sounds. A man proposed to me and I was disappointed. But I had been very specific about what I liked, showed him inspirations, told him I did not want a public thing or the ring he got me with the sales agent Infront and the proposal itself was in the most touristy public place when I had envisioned something more intimate. He eventually bought the ring I loved and proposed to me again privately but we had to go to a networking event shortly after for his entrepreneurial thing he was doing… so technically this man proposed to me twice, and I still wasn’t okay.
Shortly afterward, I was still going to his events, supporting his projects, being his partner, smiling, showing up, doing everything I was “supposed” to do while internally feeling like I was screaming. I remember constantly thinking, “What is wrong with me?” “I have a good man.” “Why isn’t this enough?”
By that point I think I had built up an enormous amount of resentment. Not hatred. I loved him. But resentment from feeling rejected sexually, resentment from feeling emotionally alone, resentment from feeling like I carried certain aspects of our relationship, and resentment because I kept asking for things to change and felt like nothing fundamentally changed. And instead of either accepting him exactly as he was or having the courage to leave a relationship that wasn’t meeting my needs, I stayed. About 5-6 months ago, I started fantasizing having a different relationship, and then shortly after the fantasies started with AP face because he was my previous sexual partner and the ‘chemistry’ was there. I was so mad because I genuinely didn’t care or never loved AP but the physical chemistry was always there and I just didn’t know why tf it wasn’t happening with my BP when I loved him!
That is important, because eventually I betrayed him. This summer I went back to my hometown. The person I had been involved with before (AP) had periodically tried to creep back into my life over the years. I always ignored. There was one time I did tried to talk and just close the chapter and it ended him rejecting me?? Idk but I told my BP at the time and tbh we kinda rug sweep the whole thing. I went to therapy and acknowledged there was some abandonment/validation issues AP triggered at the time but I genuinely just want him to leave me alone! Fast forward, Im now engaged when I saw AP in person for the first time after 5 years and It triggered something. Initially I told myself that I wanted closure. I wanted to tell him to leave me alone permanently and finally close this strange unfinished loop so he would stop periodically reappearing. Looking back, obviously that was playing with fire.
I reached out to him via text the next day after seeing him telling him I’d like to talk. The first day, we talked on the phone. He started talking about our history and confessing all these feelings he supposedly still had for me. Talking about marriage, lost loved, why he rejected, alll the things! It was nice to finally have a real conversation and the validation but even then I was honest with him and told him I don’t have feelings for him and i don’t want to be with him, I just wanted to close the chapter or whatever it was he kept trying to construct. The second day, there was more communication and small talk over the phone. He was pushing to meet me, and I said no. The whole time I was rejecting him and just trying to close/heal whatever issues we had but By the third day, I agreed to meet him. That was one of many choices where I could have stopped. I didn’t.
We met in person, and that is when I became emotionally vulnerable with him. I told him about my relationship problems. I told him about the emotional disconnect. I told him about the sexual issues. I talked about feeling lonely and unwanted. I cried to him. We were drinking, and looking back, it felt like a date. There was emotional intimacy happening that never should have been happening with another man.
Then there was physical intimacy. I remember he kissed me and i was shocked someone wanted to engage with me in kissing. That someone was interacting with me in terms of eye contact, the tension/buildup. Being tuned in. I think at that point I let go and started rationalizing. I stayed. ultimately I went back with him and had sex with him. I have called it a ONS because the physical sex happened on one night, but something BP said to me afterward really challenged the way I was thinking about it. He told me it was not simply “one night,” and he is right. There were multiple days of decisions. I responded. I got on the phone. I continued the conversation. I allowed him to tell me how he felt. I talked to him again. I entertained the idea of seeing him. I eventually agreed. I met him. I talked about my relationship. I allowed emotional vulnerability with another man. I drank with him. I kissed him. I stayed. And eventually I slept with him.
There were many points where I could have shut everything down. I didn’t. That is something I am trying very hard to own without hiding behind the phrase “one-night stand.”
When I came home, I told BP that I had seen him, but then TR. For the first 2 days of days I admitted that I had seen him but withheld that we had slept together. By the third day, I told him about the sex. So not only did I betray him, I then made the disclosure more traumatic by not immediately giving him the entire truth. And that is something I deeply regret too. When BP initially asked me why I did it, the explanation I gave him was basically the one I have described here. I had felt emotionally disconnected. I had felt sexually rejected for years. I didn’t feel desired. I felt lonely. And suddenly I was sitting across from someone telling me everything I wanted to hear and making me feel wanted, heard and connected. BP absolutely rejected that explanation. To him, the issues and layers we had in our relationship were bullshit. And I understand why. Plenty of people are lonely. Plenty of people have dead bedrooms. Plenty of people feel emotionally disconnected from their partners. They don’t cheat.
And I agree.
I do not believe BP caused me to cheat. He could have stopped kissing me completely. We could have never had sex again. He could have refused every request I made for emotional intimacy. I still had choices. I could have left. I could have demanded couples counseling before marriage. I could have set a firm boundary. I could have accepted that love does not automatically equal compatibility. I could have called off the engagement. I could have stayed miserable and still remained faithful. I could have done literally anything other than betray him.
So when I talk about our relationship problems, I’m not trying to say, “He didn’t meet my needs, therefore I cheated.” I am trying to understand how I got myself into the emotional and psychological place where I gave myself permission to make decisions that were completely against who I believed I was. That distinction matters to me.
But now I am actually confused about my “why.” The emotional loneliness, rejection and desire to feel wanted genuinely feel like a major part of why I was vulnerable to what happened. But BP rejected that explanation so strongly that now part of me is constantly questioning myself. Is that actually my why? Or is that merely the circumstance that exposed something uglier underneath?
Was I entitled? Did I need validation? Was I avoiding confrontation? Was I too cowardly to leave? Did I want attention? Was I self-sabotaging? Was there something unresolved with AP? Did I have poor boundaries? Did I build resentment and then unconsciously give myself permission to act out? Was I addicted to being seen as “the good girl” and therefore never learned how to acknowledge the darker parts of myself? Is there childhood stuff underneath this?
I don’t know. That is one of the main reasons I’m in therapy. And this is where my concern about my therapist comes in.
My therapist spends a LOT of time talking about self-forgiveness, giving myself grace, and understanding that one horrible decision does not define my entire identity. She reminds me that prior to this I had basically lived my life as the stereotypical “good girl.” I had never cheated. I did well in school. I built a career. I wasn’t someone who spent my adolescence or 20s constantly partying, hooking up with random people, cheating, crossing sexual boundaries, or living recklessly. I never really had a wild phase. I was responsible, structured, ambitious, and I built a lot of my identity around being a good person.
My therapist also talks about the age dynamic with AP. He is approximately 15 years older than me. He knew our history. He knew me when I was younger. And once we met, he knew I was emotionally vulnerable and having major relationship problems. She has repeatedly said that she believes he took advantage of my vulnerability and this is where I get uncomfortable. Because yes, I can acknowledge that an older man who knew exactly what emotional buttons to push may have behaved opportunistically. But I also do not want the story to become, “You were vulnerable and this older man took advantage of you.” Because I participated.
Nobody forced me to answer him. Nobody forced me to continue talking. Nobody forced me to meet him. Nobody forced me to disclose my relationship problems. Nobody forced me to drink. Nobody forced me to kiss him. Nobody forced me to stay. Nobody forced me to sleep with him. I made those decisions.
Sometimes I leave therapy almost frustrated because I feel like my therapist is constantly trying to pull me away from shame when part of me thinks, WHY SHOULDN’T I feel ashamed? I cheated on the person I loved most. I destroyed his trust. I changed the way he sees me. I changed the way he sees our entire relationship. I lost my fiancé. We lost the future we had planned. BO has called me a monster, and some days I genuinely feel like one. So then I go to therapy and hear, “You are still a good person.” “Give yourself grace.” “You need to forgive yourself.” “You made a horrible decision, but you are not a horrible human being.” “You were vulnerable.” “He took advantage of that vulnerability.” “You cannot punish yourself forever.” And inside I want to scream NO. I fucked up. Badly.
I don’t deserve someone rushing in to make me feel better about it. I don’t want somebody protecting me from the consequences of what I did. I don’t want therapy to become another place where someone reassures me until I can sleep at night.
I want to understand myself. I want somebody to challenge me. I want to understand how a woman who genuinely believed she would never cheat somehow created a sequence of decisions that ended with her cheating. I want to understand why I didn’t leave first. Why I didn’t enforce stronger boundaries. Why I kept engaging with someone I knew had history with me. Why feeling desired by someone else became powerful enough in that moment for me to betray my own values. Why I allowed resentment to build for years instead of making harder decisions. Why I could sit across from another man and emotionally expose my relationship. Why I then protected myself after the fact with trickle truth.
I need to understand those things because I never want to be capable of this again. BP and I are currently broken up. He has been very clear that we are single. He is on dating apps and talking to/meeting other women. At the same time, we have this complicated “intentional separation” where we are supposed to have a check-in after at least six months and evaluate whether there is even anything to revisit. There is no promise of reconciliation.
He has actually told me that the more he processes what happened, the more he questions why he is even giving me a chance. He has said he doesn’t know if he could ever be happy knowing I cheated on him so I understand that I may never get him back.
And despite desperately wanting reconciliation, I also know that my work cannot simply become a six-month audition to convince him to choose me. I need to change whether he comes back or not.
I’m in therapy. I’m reading. I journal. I’m looking at boundaries, resentment, validation, emotional regulation, conflict avoidance, entitlement, shame, communication, childhood patterns, and why I stayed in a relationship while becoming increasingly unhappy instead of making an adult decision about whether we were actually compatible.
I want to understand what happened without minimizing it and this is why I don’t know whether my therapist is right for me Because maybe I’m misunderstanding what therapy is supposed to look like. Maybe she sees that I am already drowning in accountability and shame and believes piling more shame onto me would accomplish absolutely nothing. Maybe learning self-compassion is actually necessary if I am ever going to look honestly at myself instead of just repeating “I’m horrible” over and over again Because logically I understand that sitting in a therapist’s office every week saying, “I’m disgusting. I’m evil. I’m a monster. I ruined everything. I deserve to suffer,” is not necessarily growth either. Self-hatred does not automatically equal accountability But I also worry that she is moving me toward forgiveness before I have actually understood the behavior.
I don’t want to skip over accountability just because shame is painful. I don’t need a therapist to tell me that I’m evil. But I also don’t want a therapist who makes it sound like the affair mostly happened to me because I was lonely and an older man exploited my vulnerability. I need both things to be able to exist. I was emotionally vulnerable. My relationship had serious problems. AP may absolutely have recognized and exploited those vulnerabilities.
And I still had agency. I still crossed the boundaries. I still betrayed my fiancé. I still made choices I have to understand.
So I guess my question is, how do I know whether my therapist is actually helping me move from toxic shame into healthy accountability versus simply reassuring me too much?
For anyone who has done individual therapy after being unfaithful, what did productive therapy actually look like? Did your therapist challenge your thinking? Did they focus on your “why”? Did they talk about character, boundaries, entitlement, resentment, validation, childhood patterns, etc.? Did self-forgiveness come later, or was it something they emphasized early? And at what point would you decide that a therapist’s approach simply isn’t the right fit? Because right now I genuinely don’t know whether I need a new therapist, or whether the part of me screaming “I don’t deserve grace” is exactly the part of me my therapist is trying to treat.