I think I’ve been gaslit for so long that I can’t even recognize what a bad situation I’m in. Briefly, met my wife in my early twenties, dated for 3 years, got married. Never saw a red flag. Have now been married for 10 years with kids. Over the ten years, weird things started cropping up about her past which was extremely health dangerous level promiscuity, talking to ex’s, posting online about how she missed sleeping around, offering to send nudes to strangers. I’d confront her and she’d quickly say how she didn’t think it was a big deal but she understood how it could hurt me. She blame her impulsivity but say she’d do better the next time. Over and over.

Finally, I demanded marriage counseling. She admits there she slept with at least two people shortly before our wedding. But now that we have kids and have been married for so long, we need to work through it rather than divorce. And she claims since I’ve watched porn off and on, that’s the same as her literally have sex with others while we were together. She literally said that, with a straight face. Right……

I am so angry. It’s been 8 months since she told me, and I can’t get past it. The cheating, the decade+ of lying, the gaslighting, the “still having fun while being married” type of BS. She claims she’s finally ready to change. She’s trying to get better friends, go back to church, all that. She “desperately” wants to save the marriage…. Probably not because of me, but more likely because she would lose half the time with her kids and she would lose her “perfect” image she has tried to keep up with others. The marriage counselor keeps harping about how nobody is perfect and she’s making progress and divorce isn’t easy and on and on… he’s extremely biased.

What would you all do? I am so betrayed and angry and gaslit I just don’t even know what way is up anymore.

I've been suspicious for months. He has been very defensive over his phone. I borrowed it to look something up on a social media app I don't have. He searched for me, then handed the phone over. Then he hovered over me while I scrolled and was rushing me. (It was a social media page for our children's extra curricular program.) And I saw it. A text ending in babe. I demanded he explain. He said it was a spam text. I called BS. A lot of bickering later I got his phone back. Searched it. And found all of the women he has been talking to. He says "I never acted on it! I never slept with them!". Yet he was meeting with them while "at work". Discovery was 2 hours ago. I was immature. I told on him to his parents and sent him to their house. Now here I am. Lost as to what to do. I burned our marriage license, our photos, letters we've written over the years, and my wedding dress. I'm just so numb. What now? We have three kids. Our life is very cushioned and I can't afford it without him. Do I try to reconcile just for the kids? Because this soon afterwards I don't feel anything for him except hatred. And I don't feel like I will ever trust again.

Sorry for the long post. I feel empty and like I'm rambling.

I’m scared I’m reaching the end of R. DDay was 11 months ago and I feel like our relationship has healed very little.

Right after DDay my WH did some things that made me think he was really going to turn himself around and we would be better than ever. He bought infidelity books, he started going to IC, he told me he was going to look for another job. More than anything he was being sweet and attentive to me. But even from the get go he could not sit with my pain, and still can’t. It seems like a shame issue but as far as I know he hasn’t made progress with that.

Fast forward to now. He hasn’t finished most of the books he got. He missed his last few IC appointments. He’s still at his job with no sign of leaving anytime soon. I have been hurt by his reactions to my pain so many times now that I actually feel safer keeping things to myself than trying to talk it out with him. He reassures me less than ever. The sweetness and attentiveness are gone. Less “I love you”s and “I miss you”s than any other time in our marriage. I only really feel wanted by him when he wants sex. It’s heartbreaking.

I guess I should mention he isn’t doing nothing. He leaves his phone out most of the time lately. He stays in almost every night that he doesn’t have a work event. I also haven’t been perfect during this period. I have said and done some hurtful things. But I still feel like I’m putting in so much work and he is doing the bare minimum. I want it to work so bad but I’m losing hope. This relationship isn’t healthy and he doesn’t seem interested in doing his part to save it.

Did you reach a point like this? Did you end up walking away? Did anything happen to change things?

So, we’re trying to reconcile after my husband’s year-long EA/PA. D-Day 1 was 15 months ago, and D-Day 2 was 4 months ago.

I understand that, for reconciliation to be successful, we need to work towards building a new marriage. The problem is, I feel like he just wants to go back to our old marriage (25 years), to how things were before the affair (or, more accurately, before I started emotionally and physically withdrawing from him). And for me, that simply isn’t enough.

I recognise that my withdrawal contributed to the disconnection in our marriage and that, by allowing that disconnection to go unaddressed, we left our relationship vulnerable. But that doesn’t excuse his choices. We both could have communicated more openly about what was happening between us rather than allowing the distance to grow.

The thing is, if we simply go back to how things were, the reasons I withdrew in the first place will still be there. I need him to understand that something fundamental has to change if I’m going to feel emotionally connected to him again and genuinely want physical intimacy with him. I don’t want to just resume our old relationship and pretend everything is fine. I want to feel wanted, valued and emotionally close to my husband.

The difficulty is that, as far as he’s concerned, everything is great again. He seems happy to move forward and put the past behind us, whereas I’m still struggling with the feeling that we’re rebuilding on the same foundations that weren’t working for me before.

I have no idea how to broach this with him without it sounding like I’m saying he isn’t doing enough or that I’m holding the marriage hostage. But I also don’t want to silence my own needs just to make reconciliation easier for him.

Has anyone successfully navigated this? Have you managed to get your WP to understand that reconciliation isn’t just about ending the affair, recommitting to the marriage and returning to normal, but about becoming more emotionally available, addressing the issues that existed before the affair, and actively building a different kind of relationship?

Or am I living in hope that he’ll become the partner I need him to be, when in reality he just wants his old marriage back?

Wall of text, apologies. TLDR is that she cheated for months, broke it off. I found it. She's genuinely remorseful and I'm trying to find my peace.

M30 and F34. I've been with my partner since January. It was passionate at first, intense. We bonded really hard, really fast. Then things slowed down a bit, we learned more about each other. Positive and negative traits. Likes and dislikes. Things that made us happy with each other or mad at each other. We figured out how to be a couple and what it means for us.

She has a lot of trauma. She went through a lot of abuse in her childhood, and as an adult. She has 2 kids, one of the fathers was the worst kind of man, she was with him for 7 years for the sake of their kid. After that breakup, she was essentially manic. She would let herself fall into disrepair and do stupid things.

Around the time I had met her, she was beginning to calm down. She was still showing bursts of being manic, but I'm a quiet and content person, and I coaxed the calm out of her. She quickly fell in love with the nice cozy relationship I provided. It was calmer than anything she'd been in before. She told me she genuinely fell in love with me fast. Recently even told me that I helped her "find her calm". I fell for her too.

The other day, I was on her PC while she was away. She told me she never had anything to hide and that I was free to snoop. I tried hard not to, but I have an awful habit (that I'm working on) of snooping, so I went ahead. I saw some messages between her and a guy friend that "You don't ever have to worry about".

She had an ongoing affair from when we met, up until around May when she realised she was in love with me, and she trailed it off. I still remember the messages. "Grins I want to get drunk and pounce on you". "My partner doesn't appreciate my ass, do you like it?" (with nudes). "No-one will ever mean anything to me like you do". And him angry at me for existing. Wanting her for himself. She either didn't engage, or agreed that she wasn't happy with me.

Occasionally they made fun of me for my relationship wants and needs (I have really bad RJ, and prefer to date virgins. It's a whole thing I'm also trying to solve), and I was too honest and open about some looks-related things early on that I didn't get on with - her self esteem took a hit and she felt ugly. She would run to him, for familiarity and comfort. I also found out that she had broken up with another person officially that she was ghosting about a month or two after meeting me. I don't worry about that so much, it didn't seem serious and in those messages they barely spoke.

It tore me apart. All the visits we had gone on to each other. The cute dates. All the happy smiles and promises and future plans we made. The times she told me she loved me more than she had loved anything. The PC games we played, the little inside jokes we made. And during it all, she was running back to him to continue her affair. I could almost taste blood when I read it all. My heart was so loud in my ear. I felt the love leave my body, and I hated her. I didn't ever want to date a single mom, or someone in another country. I sacrificed a lot of my criteria because she felt THAT special. And she does this?

I confronted her. I was visiting her on holiday for 3 weeks (I'm UK, she's Swedish), and the only reason I didn't dump her on the spot was because I didn't want to waste my time, and I felt so vulnerable being away from my familiar and comforting home. That - and the bond we had made, and all of the ways we bonded were special to me. We talked a lot. She told me she truly loves me and she'd do anything for me.

She's devastated by herself. In her words "It's the worst thing I've ever done, to the best person I've ever known". She's been trying to deal with the guilt and make me feel like I'm her whole world. I genuinely believe her, nothing else I got to look at shows her as a liar. Her regret seems real. She has been crying on and off. Promised there's nothing else that would hurt me. Promised it will never happen again. Promised that even if I leave, she'd never move on because I'm her "it". I did something stupid, that worked out. I snooped on a chat of hers that she thought I'd never look at, with her best friend. She got quiet and scared. She was so worried that what I'd read would make me furious. She.. made a little light of it. Where she felt she had to. But she tells her friend EVERYTHING. Hides nothing. And everything she said lines up. No other guys. The affair ended when it did. She's a broken mess and would do anything for me. It surprisingly helped, a little.

I'm led to believe this subreddit is about supporting couples who choose to get through this together? Well, as foolish as I am, she's special to me, and outside of this awful thing she does have the kindest heart I've ever seen in a person. She's so empathetic and caring. She's the best mother to her kids, and an incredible woman. It's hard to believe such a cruel demonic thing like this came out of her. And she wants to move mountains to make it up to me.

I do actually believe her. I appreciate that she broke things off herself. She doesn't seem to be lying about anything. So.. I'm not sure where things go. When it's quiet and I don't have her next to me to soften the blow, I want out. When she's here, I can't deny that I love her and want to make it work. I'd like to find a way to fight the urge to run when things get too quiet and I spiral and panic. I'm so worried that when I fly back home, and she's not next to me to calm my fears and treat me well - that's when I may leave.

We'd love some advice. She needs to deal with her guilt and understand her actions. I need to know that it's okay to stay, for love. Or if it's just not enough.

Sorry this is so long 💔. I’m not entirely sure whether my experience belongs here, because as far as I know, there hasn’t been any physical infidelity. But I’m hoping to hear from people who’ve experienced something similar, particularly those who’ve tried to reconcile.

My partner and I have been together for over two years. Until recently, I genuinely believed he was the person I would marry and build a family with. Since we first started dating he has been very resolute in his belief that pornography is really damaging, particularly for men, and that it ‘ruins your pair bond’. I am someone who has genuinely never been bothered by porn, I’ve never considered it cheating or honestly given it much thought. I had thought that I was the one in our relationship who was probably more partial to it and even then, I almost never access it.

A few days ago, I discovered that my partner has a fairly prolific porn addiction. And nothing as basic as some pornhub access. Throughout our entire relationship, he’s been repeatedly searching for specific women by name across pornography sites and social media, including OnlyFans and Snapchat. He would view their instagram, then search for the OF accounts. He has also been following many of them on Snapchat and viewing their stories (I didn’t actually even know he had Snapchat). 

I subsequently discovered his OnlyFans account, which had 37 subscriptions, including two women he actually used to know from former social circles (he knew these people prior to meeting me). Since we’ve been together he’s paid money for Onlyfans once (that I could see), in total there was around $300 worth of transactions. 

I am a hypervigilant person, and I absolutely did not see this coming or even remotely suspect it. In the physical real world, he doesn’t look at other women, and has always beheld me with absolute awe. I never doubted this and still don’t, which makes it all the more confusing. 

I’m not insecure about the way I look or my body. I felt we had something sacred and intimate, and now it feels like he’s torn a hole right through it. I feel as though I’m grieving a relationship that never quite existed in the way I believed it did. The dishonesty wasn’t a single incident. It was present throughout our relationship.

He’s incredibly remorseful, and I’m aware that remorse is genuine. He has since admitted that he’s had this problem since he was 15 years old. When he met me, he wanted me to choose him so badly he presented a version of himself that wasn’t reflective of his actions, but was who he ideally wished he could be. I guess from then on the lie was too big and had gone on too long for him to know how to unravel it. 

It puts our existing issues into a much clearer light. He felt we had had a loss of intimacy, I felt he had stopped being romantic, stopped pursuing me, and he has some considerable issues around defensiveness. Now I see that it was easier for him to simply turn to porn rather than do the work. It also explains why the couples therapy we went to, to deal with this problem didn’t work, because the whole time his focus was on keeping this mega secret from coming out, rather than actually being present and vulnerable. 

Now that it's out, of his own volition he's found and booked two counsellors (not sure why two, but I didn’t ask), and he’s also started journalling? His defensiveness has disappeared (at least for now), and he has continued to tell me over and over that he will never stop fighting for me; he’s disgusted with himself, and he knows he’s ruined our relationship and my trust, possibly forever. He is going to prove to me that he will do anything it takes to "make you the happy person you used to be before I broke you". He’s deleted snapchat, put filters on his instagram algorithm so that the content isn’t constantly there when he scrolls. I believe he’s been journalling about porn addiction to figure out what it is within himself that’s led to this. He had an exceptionally neglectful and traumatic upbringing; I don’t believe he was ever shown how to love. I don’t say that to excuse him because I think his actions are disgusting and reprehensible, but idk, maybe it’s worth noting. 

I keep thinking about the women he sought out, not necessarily because I’m comparing myself to them, but because I can’t understand why he repeatedly chose them, or what those interactions meant to him. If, as he claims, it never meant anything, then why THOSE women specifically, why not just any random porno? 

I love him, and I’m not ruling out reconciliation. As it stands, it's only been 5 days. We're sleeping in separate beds. I miss him deeply, and I feel like I'm mourning what we had before this fracture. Like it actually aches. It wasn't until the second day that I was able to look him in the eye again, that was also the first time I let him touch me (he gave me a hug).

But I genuinely don’t know whether I’ll ever feel the same way about our relationship or our intimacy again. So, at the suggestion of my own therapist, I’ve given myself a 3-month deadline. 3 months where I allow myself to stop vigilantly checking what he’s doing or obsessing over his past choices. 3 months to just sit back and observe whether his promises actually lead to a change in behaviour, and if that eventually leads to a change in the way I feel. When that 3-month mark hits, I’ll decide if I’m going to stay or leave. I have told him that I've given myself a deadline, but have said that I will not tell him how long. I don’t want to risk him only adapting his behaviour until it’s safe to return to old habits. 

Has anyone experienced this kind of betrayal involving pornography or OnlyFans rather than a physical affair? How did you process the intrusive thoughts and the loss of intimacy? And if you reconciled, did that feeling of having something sacred between you eventually return?

I’d really appreciate hearing from people who’ve been through something similar.

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.

I may purchase this but I’m looking to hear if anyone read this and found it helpful to reconciling.

https://a.co/d/07PfZFxh

Im 20 and my partner is 21. We have been together for 3.5 years. We r both queer. Person I cheated with is same gender as I. Partner and I are different genders. Not that it matters at all. Last Saturday BP and I were at a party and I got extremely drunk, I sculled rum bc my friend was drunker than I was and they were going to drink it all and be sick. I recently got put on antidepressants.

One of me and my partner’s friends (let’s call them H) H and I were hanging out and apparently they are a big flirter. I don’t understand flirting much because I am autistic and don’t get social cues from flirting especially from ppl of the same gender. we were sitting down doing the complimenty thing that drunk friends do and all of a sudden we made out. My thought process going through it was- kiss happens - oh ok this is happening- WAIT WHAT NO NO NO I HAVE TO GET AWAY. I pull away after approximately 5 seconds and say ‘sorry I have to go’ and then run up to my partner shaking to tell them ‘me and H kissed oh my god I’m so sorry’ but they already saw and told me ‘get the fuck away from me I don’t want to talk to you’ so I ran away and the rest of the night was spent at the kebab shop bawling my eyes out with like 2 other people.

H keeps saying I initiated the kiss but I do not remember whatsoever. I haven’t been that drunk in months. I genuinely do not remember. H has a track record of lying about things and stealing peoples vapes etc. But It doesn’t even matter who initiated it. I cheated and fuckinh I would do anything to undo that. I take full accountability

BP is surrounded by all our mutual friends and I have not many people to get advice from so this is why I’m doing a redditi post ig. I want to reconcile and they wants to reconcile. Im prioritising their feelings, not talking about how I feel unless they ask and listening to whatever they say. I’m also helping in any way I can. We were meant to hang out today but theypushed it back because they’re not ready which is okay with me I’m not tryna put pressure on they. They are surrounded by friends which is the best thing for them. They all despise me and think BP should leave me.

This is so weird because I can’t fucking believe I cheated. They are the best person and partner I’ve ever met and we gel so well like theyre my person I would have never seen myself doing this I would never ever do anything like this but I still did. I just cannot fuxking believe myself. I’ve been as depressed as ever in the past week. And I have no friends to talk about it with because they all hate me because of last Saturday.