Before I get into the details,
…I’d really appreciate it if people could be sensitive in their responses and try to look at the bigger picture rather than immediately jumping to conclusions like “once a cheater, always a cheater” or telling me to leave without considering the full context.
I know our situation is complicated, and I’m hoping to hear from people who have experienced something similar, especially those who have successfully rebuilt their relationships.
Our Story [scroll down for TL;DR]
My husband and I have been together for eight years. We met in October 2018 and moved in together in 2021.
In December 2021, shortly after we moved in together, he created a Tinder profile. According to him, he wasn’t actually looking to meet anyone or cheat on me. He said he just wanted to collect likes because he needed the validation and reassurance that other people found him attractive.
He didn’t tell me about the profile himself. A female friend of mine came across it and told me about it. We had a huge argument, but we never really dug deeper into why he had done it or what it meant for our relationship. We didn’t properly explore why he felt the need to seek that kind of validation outside our relationship or how he dealt with his own insecurities. We argued about what had happened, but we didn’t address the underlying issues in a meaningful way.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether that was an early indication of a pattern we didn’t fully recognize or address at the time. What also stands out to me now is that, back then, I had to find out about it from someone else rather than hearing it from him. At the time, we never really explored what that meant for trust and honesty in our relationship.
Fast-forward to New Year’s Eve 2024, when we got engaged. I was genuinely excited about our future together. In May 2025, we went on a beautiful vacation with my parents, and around the same time, my husband was going through a difficult period at work and experiencing a lot of stress.
In July I had my bachelorette party, and about two weeks later, he confessed that he had cheated on me twice with the same person while traveling for work.
The first time happened after a work event when he had been drinking. The second time was different: it was planned, and he consciously decided to do it. In between those two encounters, we had even gone on a two-week vacation to the United States together.
He told me that the affair was purely physical and that there were no romantic feelings involved. He also confessed on his own, rather than me discovering the affair myself. Those things matter to me, although they obviously don’t undo what happened. It would have turned out differently if I had caught him, because I would have always wondered whether he would have told me himself.
After he told me, we had countless conversations, and we started seeing my therapist together. In many ways, we became more honest and open with each other than we had ever been before. We discussed things we had never really addressed in our relationship, and we both seemed genuinely committed to understanding what had happened and why.
My husband has ADHD and has struggled with burnout, stress, and issues rooted in his childhood. From what we have come to understand, he sometimes struggles with emotional regulation and seeks out things that give him an intense dopamine boost or help him feel better in the moment. This has also shown up in other behaviors that seem to function as coping mechanisms.
I want to be clear that I am not saying his ADHD, childhood experiences, or stress caused him to cheat or excuse his decisions. He is responsible for his actions. However, understanding some of the underlying patterns has helped us make sense of what happened and what needs to change if we want our relationship to work.
Despite everything, we decided to stay together and move forward with our wedding. We also had a baby during this period.
We got married because, at that point, we genuinely felt that our relationship was stronger than ever. We felt that we had worked through so much together and wanted to make a conscious decision to commit to each other and to the new version of our relationship — a fresh start for us as a couple.
Having a child had already been something we had talked about and wanted for us.
It felt like we were moving forward together with so much hope and really believed in the life we were building.
I know these are enormous decisions to make after a betrayal like this. Some people might think we moved too quickly or took on too much before we had really healed. I sometimes think that too.
But at the time, we were both genuinely optimistic. I was optimistic, too. We loved each other, wanted to be together, and believed we could work through this and build something even stronger and more honest than what we had before.
During my pregnancy, we had some difficult periods again. One of my conditions for moving forward was that he needed to start therapy. I felt that understanding and addressing his underlying struggles was essential if we were going to have a real chance of rebuilding our relationship.
For a long time, he struggled to actually make the appointments. This was incredibly difficult for me because therapy wasn’t just a suggestion or a nice extra. It was something I needed to see him take seriously if I was going to feel safe committing to our future together.
Eventually in march, he attended his first appointment, and he has been going regularly ever since.
Since then, a lot of things have improved.
He shows me that he is trying. We talked about the affair frequently, and when I have difficult thoughts, doubts, or questions, he listens. He doesn’t accuse me of dragging things out or tell me that I should be over it by now. He has been honest with me about what happened, and his actions have shown me that he genuinely cares about me and our relationship.
We also have a wonderful life with our son. There are so many moments when I look at our little family and feel happy and grateful for what we have. I love my husband, and I don’t want to ignore the progress he has made or pretend that everything between us is bad.
But I am still hurting.
Sometimes, thoughts and mental images of what happened come back unexpectedly. I can be having a good day, feeling close to him and hopeful about our future, and suddenly I’m reminded of the betrayal all over again.
Our sexual intimacy has also been difficult. Since the affair came to light, we have only had sex a few times. Even the process of getting physically intimate can trigger me emotionally and bring everything back to the surface.
Sexual intimacy is important to my husband, and I know he misses that part of our relationship. I – in fact – miss it too. However, he has not pressured me or made me feel obligated to have sex with him. He has been very understanding about this, and I appreciate it.
I wish I could simply switch off the thoughts and feelings, but I can’t. I am trying to heal, and I genuinely want to get to a place where I can feel safe and connected to him again.
Now, something has happened that has brought many of my doubts back to the surface.
Today was a particularly stressful day with our baby. Our son was crying a lot, and I was already feeling overwhelmed. While I was changing his diaper, I happened to look out the window and saw my husband at his computer. I noticed that he was vaping, something he hadn’t been open with me about.
We had agreed that absolute honesty and transparency would be the foundation of rebuilding trust. To me, that doesn’t mean he can never have any privacy or that I need to monitor everything he does. It means being upfront with each other about things that could affect our relationship, especially when they touch on patterns that have already caused harm.
What bothers me is not simply the fact that he was vaping. I have complicated feelings about it in the context of everything that has happened, and I do think that it is a very unhealthy way to cope with stress – but the secrecy is what hurts me most.
He told me that he currently needs it to calm his nerves and manage his stress. He is also taking medication for his ADHD, but apparently, vaping is another way he copes with the stress of caring for our baby right now. In addition to that we had to move in September with our 3 month old because our landlord wanted us out (personal use).
I can understand that parenting a baby is stressful, especially while moving. I can understand wanting an outlet, needing to switch off for a while, or looking for something that helps you regulate your emotions.
But I struggle with the fact that he apparently felt the need to keep this from me instead of talking to me about it openly.
What makes this even more difficult is that this isn’t actually the first time this has happened.
At the end of August last year, I discovered that he had been vaping secretly. We already had a big argument about it back then, because once again, I felt that he wasn’t able to be open, transparent, and honest with me. He explained that he had hidden it out of shame.
At the time, he asked me to threw everything away, no temptation.. We had already talked about how important honesty and transparency were to me, especially after the affair. I thought we had made it clear that, even when something is difficult or embarrassing to admit, we need to be able to talk about it openly rather than hide it from each other.
That’s why I feel so sad and honestly quite desperate that we seem to be in exactly the same situation again, with exactly the same explanation.
He says that vaping is essentially his only way to cope at the moment and that nicotine can be particularly helpful for people with ADHD because it provides short-term relief. I can understand that he is overwhelmed and that he is looking for something that helps him get through difficult moments. I’m not expecting him to be perfect, and I don’t want him to feel that he has to hide his struggles from me because he is ashamed of them.
In fact, what I wish had happened is that he had come to me and said something like: “I’m really overwhelmed with everything right now, especially with the baby, and I can feel myself falling back into another unhealthy coping mechanism. I know this isn’t good, and I don’t know how to get out of this pattern. Can we figure out together what might help me instead?”
That is the kind of honesty and openness I need. Not because I expect to solve all his problems for him, but because I want us to be able to face difficult things as a team. I want him to feel safe enough to tell me when he is struggling, even when he is ashamed of something, and I want us to be able to look for healthier ways forward together.
Instead, I have discovered it again myself. And that is what hurts so much.
It makes me feel as though we haven’t actually moved forward in this particular area at all. We have talked so much about honesty, trust, and the importance of addressing the underlying issues rather than simply dealing with the consequences. Yet here we are again, with the same behavior, the same secrecy, and the same explanation.
I know that changing deeply ingrained coping mechanisms takes time, and I don’t expect him to overcome everything overnight. But I am struggling to understand how we can rebuild trust when we have already had this exact conversation before and I am still finding myself in the same situation.
I don’t want to be the person who discovers these things, confronts him, and then helps him deal with the consequences. I want us to be partners who can recognize when something is going wrong and talk about it before secrecy becomes part of the problem again.
And honestly, I am beginning to feel desperate because I don’t know what else I can do. I have tried to be understanding, I have given him time, and I have acknowledged the progress he has made. But how am I supposed to build trust when I keep being confronted with the same pattern, even after we have explicitly discussed it and agreed that things need to be different?
I worry that I am seeing the same broader pattern again: turning to something that provides an immediate dopamine hit to cope with difficult emotions, rather than addressing those emotions directly. It reminds me of the patterns we have discussed in relation to the affair and, looking further back, his need for external validation when he created the Tinder profile.
I am not saying that creating a Tinder profile, having an affair, and vaping are all the same thing. They are not. But I am wondering whether they might be connected by an underlying tendency to seek external validation, stimulation, or escape, and whether that is something he is genuinely learning to manage differently.
I also don’t want to label every coping mechanism as an addiction or assume that everything he does is a sign of a deeper problem. I know that people need ways to deal with stress, and I don’t expect him to be perfect.
But given our history, openness and honesty are especially important to me. And when I discover something like this rather than hearing about it from him, I start questioning whether we are really as far along in rebuilding trust as I had hoped.
I feel as though we keep making progress, and then something happens that brings me right back to the place where I started. Every time that happens, it becomes harder to trust the progress we have made.
I know rebuilding trust after infidelity takes time. I never expected to be completely healed overnight, and I know forgiveness isn’t a straight line. I also recognize that my husband has made genuine efforts, and I don’t want to dismiss all of that because of this situation.
At the same time, I am exhausted by the feeling that I have to keep reassessing whether I can trust him.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering whether he is being completely honest with me. I don’t want to feel like I need to be vigilant or look for signs that something is being hidden from me. I want to be able to relax into our relationship again and believe that we are building something secure.
We have a son together, and I take our family and our future very seriously. I don’t want to give up on our marriage if this is something we can genuinely work through. I love my husband, I see his efforts, and I want our family to work.
But I also don’t want to stay in a relationship simply because we have a child together or because we have already made so many big decisions. I want to stay because I can trust my partner and feel emotionally safe with him.
Right now, I am struggling to know whether this is a normal setback in the long and complicated process of rebuilding trust, or whether it is a sign that the foundation we are trying to rebuild is still not as solid as I need it to be.
For those of you who have experienced infidelity and tried to rebuild your relationship, I would really appreciate your perspective.
How did you deal with situations that brought back your doubts, even when your partner was genuinely trying to make things right?
How did you distinguish between normal setbacks during healing and signs that the same underlying patterns were still present?
If your partner had a history of seeking external validation or using certain behaviors to cope with stress, did you eventually see those patterns change? What did that change look like in practice?
And how did you learn to trust your partner again without feeling that you constantly had to protect yourself from being hurt?
TL;DR:
My husband and I have been together for eight years. Shortly after we moved in together, he created a Tinder profile because he said he needed external validation. I found out through a friend, not from him, and we never really addressed the underlying reasons.
Years later, shortly before our wedding, he confessed that he had cheated on me twice with the same person. We decided to stay together because we genuinely believed our relationship was stronger than ever and wanted to make a conscious commitment to a fresh start. I got pregnant. Later he has started therapy, made genuine efforts to rebuild trust, and been supportive of my healing, although sexual intimacy remains difficult for me.
However, the issue of secrecy has resurfaced. At the end of August last year, I discovered that he was secretly vaping. We argued about his lack of honesty, and he said he had hidden it out of shame. I threw everything away, believing we had addressed the issue. Now, I have discovered that he is vaping again, and he gives me the same explanation: that it is his only way to cope with stress and that nicotine can help people with ADHD in the short term. I understand that he is overwhelmed, especially with our baby, but I wish he would come to me and say he is struggling rather than hiding it from me again.
The repeated secrecy reminds me of the earlier Tinder incident and the affair. I am not equating these behaviors, but I worry that the underlying patterns haven’t really changed.
I love him, see his efforts, and want our family to work, but each recurrence makes it harder to trust him.