SAVAGE-Letter-of-the-Day-STAMP-2017.jpg

I’m a 29-year-old male with no idea what to do about my “relationship."

In November 2015 I had a serious accident: a ladder slipped from under me and I fell about 28 feet, crushed my wrist badly and shattered my knee in six pieces. During my time in hospital a friend of almost three years looked after me, visiting me every day and just being the best friend she could be. After I was released from hospital we started a relationship and everything was going great until I had a mental setback with the trauma from the accident. (Post traumatic issues, call it whatever.) So we sat down, discussed my issues, and I my plan to see a psychologist to get my head back in the game. I needed time to think and work through everything, in and outside of the relationship, and she assured me she would be supportive and that she would always be there for me and that we would do this together.

Then in July I came to realize that she had been cheating on for almost three months. For me this was a massive break of trust and respect. She, of course, regrets what she did, and says she will never do it again and she wants to be with me for the rest of her life and so on. They are still friends but she assures me she will end the friendship if I want her to. The majority tell me to get on with my life and forget about her, but we have a deep connection and I still love her. But here is the catch: In my previous relationship of four years, I cheated on my ex on three separate occasions over the last year, each time with a different woman. My ex never found out and I ended the relationship.

I was faithful during this last relationship, even though I wanted other women as well. (My current girlfriend doesn’t know that I've wanted other girls as well.) I told her that we can take it slow and see how things work out, but she wants me to make a decision about our relationship now, saying we mustn’t waste our time if we can't get through this and have a future together.

My questions are:

1. Is it possible?

2. Why do I feel so brutally hurt and disappointed about this?

3. Should we give the relationship another shot?

4. Is it worth the effort?

My family and friends all hate her for doing this to me and I don't think they will ever accept her as part of the family again.

I'll really appreciate your input and advice.

Regards From South Africa

My answers are:

1. Anything is possible.

2. Why do you feel hurt and disappointed? Because it sucks to be cheated on.

But your feelings of hurt and disappointment may be more keenly felt because you're implicated in this, RFSA. I don't mean you're implicated directly—you didn't set her up with the dude she cheated on you with—but her wrongs obviously call your own to mind. And the same majority that hates and despises her for what she's done to you would hate and despise you if they knew what you'd done to your ex. But they don't know and your ex doesn't know and your current girlfriend doesn't know. You could tell the majority and the current GF (no need to bother the ex)—you could say something like, "Look, I've cheated on someone myself and I have to take that into account while I figure out what's next for us"—but telling this particular and contextualizing truth would mean sacrificing the moral high ground. Right now you're seen as the wronged party—the pure one, the good one, the victimized one—but you know it's more complicated than that. To protect you from feelings of guilt and/or grayness, to preserve your "wholly pure" status, your subconscious mind could be ramping up those feelings of hurt in order to cover and atone for your own infidelities.

3. Do you want to give it another shot? Then give it another shot. She swears never to cheat again, you swear never to cheat (without disclosing your priors), you take each other back. Maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't. Maybe she'll cheat again, or you'll cheat again, and cheating will ruin your relationship and all your friends and family will rush in and scream their I-told-you-so's in your face. (The unsuspected/uncaught/unconfessed cheaters will be the ones screaming the loudest.)

Or...

You could give honesty and self-awareness shot. Open up to your girlfriend about your priors, RFSA, by disclosing your own history of infidelities. Then have a radically honest conversation with her—cheater to cheater—about whether you should really be making monogamous commitments to each other or anyone else. A committed non-monogamous relationship can still be destroyed by infidelity, of course, since cheating can happen even in open relationships. But infidelity always destroys monogamous committed relationships entered into by those who are incapable of actually being monogamous.

4. Is anything really?