What does it feel like to cheat on your partner?

I cheated, and I felt guilty for about 5 seconds, until I remembered how miserable I was in the relationship. I didn’t get out because I had such horrible self esteem, I thought that was the only way I would even come close to maybe getting married someday because nobody else could love me.

Stupid.

I’m happy to say I’ve never had the experience.

I almost cheated on a girlfriend once by taking another girl out. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), I found that I couldn’t keep my mind on the date and kept thinking about my girlfriend. I never called that other girl again.

I never have but I think there would be some amount of guilt if your partner never cheated on you but let’s say that your partner did cheat on you first and you decided to get back at him or her this may make you feel like you got revenge. Either way I don’t believe cheating can help a relationship and before a person cheats they need to understand what and why they are doing this and think before they act.

It feels stupid. I didn’t want to be in the original relationship in the first place. I was very very young, and I didn’t know how to break up with him. This other guy asked me out, I told him I had a boyfriend, he said ‘okay, let’s just go out as friends’, so I did, and at the end of the night he kissed me, and I liked it. The story becomes long, messy, and less interesting after that point, but suffice to say, neither relationship was meant to be. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted yet. But the idea is to learn from your mistakes, which I did.

I think I’d feel like an absolute heel. I’d feel like crap.

I’ll never know. But, I hear it feels quite crappy if you truly love your partner. A lot of people are devastated by their decision in the long run.

Kudos for this question. I’ve never had the experience of cheating, but I’ve been cheated on & tend to view cheaters (from my own jaded perspective) as idiots who have no heart. I imagine that a lot of people are hesitant to admit they’ve been part of infidelity, but from the few that have, I’m seeing this running thread of it not feeling all that great. I’m not so sure this was the case with my ex, but it might be safe to assume it was.

So in conclusion: I think cheaters are still idiots. But maybe they have hearts, too. (...But I’m still having a hard time finding an excuse for them.)

Plagued with guilty. I never had the balls to tell her they were marked cards.

It’s a fine line I guess but I’ve kind of consider it cheating. I was living with a person where we were for all intimate purposes, broken up and had agreed to help each other by living under the same roof until we could go our separate ways. During this time, another man came after me very seriously and gave me a lot of emotional support and encouragement to finally move out on my own and re start my life. I had many opportunities to enter a romance with this other man before I left my previous partner but I held off until I was out from under his roof because it felt awkward already. Several friends have told me it wasn’t cheating but in my mind and in my heart I’d been with the 2nd man for a long time and it felt like cheating to me, it felt bad and sad at the same time.

Perfectly fine. I was quite the cheater in my pre-married days. I might have felt a bit guilty with a few of them, but whatever. I obviously wasn’t into it.

Terrible. It felt terrible.

@StephK You may want to see this question and the following answers if you’re of that opinion.

I thought I was doing it to save my marriage. I loved her, but we were not able to connect, physically. I thought I could get some on the side, and that would hold me, so I wouldn’t go crazy within the marriage. At the same time, I didn’t believe in sex without love. I solved that problem through believing I could love more than one person at once, and as long as I was honest with the women I wanted to have affairs with, I would never have to pretend I wanted to leave my wife.

I knew that wanting to have outside relationships meant there was a problem with my marriage, but I didn’t know how to deal with it. I went to a therapist who said I shouldn’t tell her. We were in couples counseling, but then other things got in the way, and we didn’t solve our problems. I began to think that this was all there was. Love without getting all you want. Filling in the holes with help from others.

It was craziness, and, as it happened, I was crazy. Maybe I was driven crazy by my unhappiness, or maybe my craziness caused my unhappiness. Certainly, it made it easier for me to act with poor judgment. I became more impulsive and irritable as things went on. Eventually, I realized that my dishonesty went against all my values, and I told my wife what I was doing, and we got into therapy, and I got diagnosed (bipolar disorder), and I’ve been working to get better and to fix my marriage and to love my wife more fully.

So, coming clean was a way to start fixing things. It’s a process. I’m not sure I felt guilty, because I believed I was doing the best I could. Later, it turned out my judgment was different from the way I made decisions at other points in my life. Some would say I was impaired. I am trying not to judge myself because I did that a lot and it was crazy.

I know I hated myself for a long time. I felt trapped. I was lost, and had no idea what to do. I didn’t know the right thing to do, but I always considered myself a moral person. I knew that almost everyone considered my behavior to be immoral, so I kept trying to figure out how to change the rules so it would be moral.

I still believe that the right thing to do is not always the conventional thing to do. I still think that most people don’t understand what goes on in the heads of people who behave as I do. I don’t want to be judged, because the more I am judged (or the more I imagine people would judge me if they knew), the more I judge myself even more harshly, and that made me want to die.

It wasn’t fun. It’s still not easy, although things are much better now. I still question myself and my desires all the time. I compare myself to others and find myself wanting because I am different, and I don’t seem to think like others. Maybe there’s just something wrong with me. I don’t know.

I don’t know what others feel like, but that’s what it was like for me.

@Saturated_Brain : Thanks for the heads-up.