I am NOT OP. The OP of this story is u/tm16801.
Trigger Warnings: Potential Sexual Assault, Accusations of Cheating.
Mood Spoiler: It's complicated, but things are getting better.
Boyfriend of 3 years blacked out and cheated on me and told me and I don’t know what to do., Posted July 12th, 2020.
My boyfriend and I have been together for 3 years now and we have always communicated and trusted each other and have thought we were endgame. Our arguments are short and usually just us explaining why we are upset about something and work to address it together.
He’s had problems with drinking and done a lot of dumb things (not to hurt me but around his friends) when he’s blacked out before and they usually just find it funny. Usually when he drinks he doesn’t have a limit to know when to stop himself and I used to be fine with it bc he wasn’t aggressive or mean to me but noticed it was getting worse. Currently I’m across the country and we haven’t seen each other in 4 months bc of COVID.
My bf called me sobbing and said that he needed to tell me that last month he got extremely drunk and doesn’t remember anything that happened except the very start but thinks he slept with a girl he knew in HS when they were catching up. He said he wanted to tell me in person but didn’t want to spring it on me right when I get back, and says he doesn’t know why he did it he was just out of control drunk and admitted he has an issue with drinking.
I’m still processing how to even feel and I can’t figure out what to do. I respect the fact that he told me even though I would have never found out, and he’s getting tested. If we were to stay together I’d want him to stop drinking completely but is that enough? Can a relationship work after he does something like this? Can trust be rebuilt?
Please give advice I’m so confused and hurt and aside from this our relationship has been incredible and I thought he was the one.
Relevant Comments:
I know this sounds off topic but does anyone else find this friend of his creepy for taking advantage of a black out drunk person?
Thank you for this input because I was thinking about this too. I asked him today and he said she was supposed to be DD for her and a friend but changed her mind late in the night and was definitely less drunk and was the one who initiated. But he said he still doesn’t want me blaming her because he still had an active role in it
UPDATE: BF(22M) of 3 years blacked out and cheated on me(21F) and told me and I don’t know what to do, Posted February 20th, 2025.
Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/s/mHU9QwDDbe
Hey all - it’s been a really really long time since this post, and I haven’t ever given an update. Figured I’d post if anyone was ever in a situation like this and wanted to know how it turned out. We are now 4 years past this incident, and have worked through this together.
So. What happened after this post? He owned up to his mistake. Without me telling him what I wanted him to do, he looked up online what he could do to build back trust. He offered to stop drinking, and found a therapist for himself that specialized in alcohol addiction and relationships. He also suggested couples counseling, and asked if I’d be willing to go with him, but that he would fully cover the costs of the therapy.
In the original post, many asked about if it was consensual. The answer: it’s mixed territory. He had a short memory (black-in?) of being willingly involved with her. As I requested, he called the girl to find out what actually happened. She was more sober than him during this night, and she said that they couldn’t have sex bc of whiskey dick and then out of nowhere he got up and ran out of the room. She got up to follow him and found him knocked out in bed. Once she gave him details, he told her their friendship was over and he was deleting her number from everywhere to focus on fixing his relationship with me, and building trust back.
He still doesn’t know if what she told him is fully true or not, and he would get upset and question it a lot, saying he wanted me to know the complete truth for us to heal but he can’t tell what is real and what isn’t. His therapist told him your mind can play tricks on you when trying to remember pieces of a blackout.
Our couples therapist has been incredible. She has helped strengthen our relationship and took no bullshitting. We built back trust by discussing the hurt & things we could do to feel more comfortable when he goes out with friends. We discussed the idea of “requests” instead of “rules”, as purely controlling someone else can turn into resentment. Phones are not off limits - we have each others passwords. At the start of finding out, we would go through texts and DMs together at my request, and we still do not hide incoming messages from each other (not that we ever did) prior.
It’s been 4 years since this, and while it’s a scar in the relationship, I see him as a man always willing to put in the work in our relationship and in life to make things right. He knew that I never would have found out if he didn’t tell me, but he knew I deserved the truth. If I were to bring the issue up today, he will still acknowledge the pain he caused, apologize for it, and give reassurance to me in whatever way I requested - whether it’s looking at his phone or talking through anything that is a trigger for me, or setting up a call with our therapist.
In some ways, this issue forced us to both mature to make the relationship work. Previously in the relationship, we loved to go out and drink excessively. At frat parties I would also seek out as much alcohol as I could to numb myself, and would yell at him at 3am in an empty frat basement when he was tired and wanted to go to sleep, because I wanted to keep partying. After this incident happened, we realized we were no longer college kids that partied and fought when drunk, and if we wanted to progress our relationship in a healthy way, we both needed to learn how. Counseling helped us become even stronger as a unit. Humans are far from perfect - they make mistakes. But humans are also capable of growing and changing, when they are fully willing to put in the work.
If you are in this situation, the most important thing is how the person owns up to their mistakes and makes active changes to do better.
Relevant Comments:
Looking through the top comments on your original post, it's clear that this sub has gotten a lot more judgmental and less forgiving in the last five years. Today, your post would receive a tsunami of "dump him, once a cheater always a cheater, alcohol doesn't make any difference.
True. Honestly even at the time I was kinda surprised that people were more positive on the post because I had seen so many that were negative. I was expecting people to immediately go “fuck that guy”.
He also felt so much extra guilt because he was looking through posts to try to find out how to be worthy of forgiveness, and there are so many people that claim once a guy cheats they’re trash and unworthy of any type of redemption. It took him a long time to be able to forgive himself as well.
You can forgive a person. And still choose to leave. Forgiveness does not mean you have to stay in the same situation.
Spending years 'checking your partners phone' living with anxiety.. hoping they're not going to do it again, requiring reassurance, working through therapy, crying.. straining your mental health, sometimes even having panic attacks.
No thank you. I choose forgive. But I do not choose to forget. I have enough self love and self respect to understand where my own boundaries are. I choose not to spend the rest of my life with a person who so carelessly would throw those to the side.
OK, so slightly rephrase my previous statement… I've never understood the idea that forgiving and deciding to give someone a second chance is at odds with having self-respect.
I just think it's a bit of poor form to come onto someone else's positive post about how things worked out well for them and imply she lacked self-respect because she didn't leave. And make no mistake, that's exactly what your comment comes across as.
I'm sorry but I don't see this as a 'positive post'. I see a disfunctional relationship that resulted in cheating, and has now resulted in a battle to stay together by scheduling counseling when they need to, checking mobile phones when they need to and recieving reassurance when they need it.
This doesn't sound like a victory dance to me. It sounds like co-dependence and a lot of tears.
Edit:
"Prior to this, our relationship was healthy
frat parties I would also seek out as much alcohol as I could to numb myself, and would yell at him at 3am in an empty frat basement when he was tired and wanted to go to sleep, because I wanted to keep partying. After this incident happened, we realized we were no longer college kids that partied and fought when drunk"
So which part was healthy prior to the cheating? The fighting at 3am? The drinking into oblivion?
That’s a big stretch there. Prior to this, our relationship was healthy, but we were also college kids that enjoyed to go out partying and drinking very heavily. That comes with consequences - health, friendships, relationships, school, etc. the only arguments we ever had (not many, but they did happen) were when we were very drunk. Once we started to grow up and experience our twenties (26 now), we matured enough together to realize we needed to make changes if we wanted to be better. I checked his phone maybe twice? The rest of the time now I just have his password, so if he wants me to text his friends when he’s driving, or do something when my phone is out of reach, I can.
Also - couples therapy isn’t bad at all. Therapy is a great tool for individuals to overcome trauma & issues, couples therapy is a great tool for two individuals to learn to handle these issues better together, as they aren’t in your mind and don’t know what you’re going through.
Not sure how to feel about this really. Only been black out drunk once. Didnt remember anything from after a certain point until waking up in my wifes bed, naked, with no idea how I got there or why I was naked.
So I guess idk how to really feel about calling it cheating...
Yeah, I feel the same way. Depending on who I talk to, people have different takes on it, including therapists. Cheating? SA? Some middle territory? In terms of couples therapy we mainly spoke about it as a break of trust and where to go from there.
Blackouts are scary when really thinking about it- you can act completely different and have no recollection of behavior.
Not to go all whataboutism or anything, but the guy was blacked out and taken advantage of when too drunk to consent. Alcohol issues? Yes. Cheating? Eh, if you count SA as cheating, then I guess so, but come on, the guy was assaulted and on top of that has to be the one to pick up the pieces of it in his relationship? I hope for his sake that therapy was focussing on helping him process it too, and not just about him being a dirty cheating liar or something
Yeah, I do agree. The incident at hand was extremely complex. It’s considered SA because if you’re drunk, you can’t consent, even though he didn’t say no& he partook. But also he can’t really remember most of it because he was blacked out. At the same time that doesn’t excuse someone in a monogamous relationship from having multiple drunk hookups and claiming it isn’t cheating as a result. In therapy we talked about it as a breach of trust, and where to go from there. That this was the only time I’d be willing to move on from this & if something like this ever happened again, I’d be done. This included a lot of discussions mainly around alcohol, as I truly believe this never would have happened sober.
This seems like one of the only cases where I could see the "cheating" be logically termed as a "mistake" in some way. Somehow, from his subsequent actions, he doesn't sound like a guy who would have consciously cheated on you otherwise...and he does seem serious about fixing it. But do ensure he has enough sense of responsibility to not get black-out drunk like that. Things far worse could happen in such situations.
Yeah I agree with you. Had his response been “it’s not a big deal”, or he hadn’t taken any actual accountability, that would have been the end of it for me. But he was fully willing to take any and all leaps to be forgiven. It definitely could have been much worse. From this, we are a lot more careful about who we go out with & having our guards up. If we are in a safe environment with close friends, we are able to let loose more, but if it’s with acquaintances we are a lot more cautious and make sure to check in with each other more often.
So much drama for such a young couple and relationship was also not that long.. Most ppl wouldn’t want to go through all that drama and just start new. But hey OP seems to want it so, good luck with healing!
I can understand your point of view, I was very mixed at the time on how I wanted to proceed. My take on it is that every long lasting relationship is going to go through some high highs, and low lows. Both of you are going to fuck up at times, and you’ll need to know how each of you respond to it. Now I know his behavior after making a big mistake & the proactive steps he takes to prevent it from happening again.
Reminder - I am not OP.