Relationships
5 Women Reveal How They Told Their Friend Their Partner Was Cheating & It's Brave
by Candice Jalili
In my opinion, sometimes being the bearer of bad news can be even worse than being the recipient. For example, when you find out that your friend is being cheated on, you suddenly are burdened with having to relay this unfortunate news to them. You're not only risking your friendship, but you're also saddled with having to say something to your friend that you know will likely hurt them. Obviously, knowing how to tell your friend their partner is cheating isn't something that necessarily comes naturally to all of us.
That being said, a bunch of women who have done it before just shared their experiences in a recent Reddit AskWomen thread, and I think we can all learn a lot from them. Read along and take note!
Screenshot everything.
Didn't believe me at first. Thankfully I screenshot everything. Was able to find multiple texts with time stamps that he was making plans with me when he told her he was at work or with friends. He promised her he would stop hanging out with me (he convinced me they broke up and stayed broken up and would lie his a** off to me). I had no idea this was going on.
Found the text the day after. It was nothing explicit. But clear what we were talking about.
She was rightly heartbroken and I got to hear the details about it. He denied it up until she had proof that she showed him. He cried and said he wants to start a family with her (this was a large point of contention because she was 18 and didn't know if she even wanted kids and he kept hounding her about this. Dude was 21 or 22 and obsessed with starting a family). All this BS about how he loves her.
Dumped the guy. Told me her plans of going to college for animation. We don't talk (I don't fault her), but I hope she's living her best life.
Make sure you have a firsthand account.
She ignored it 100%. It was a secondhand account of her BF at a restaurant where we know a lot of people and he'd been seen cuddling/getting fairly physical with a woman. She didn't acknowledge it until a few weeks later, when someone else saw him at another restaurant actually kissing the same girl. He's an idiot, my friend works in restaurants and so do all of her closest friends, and we're in a small city. She later told me she ignored my text because she didn't want to believe it was anything, but later couldn't deny he was cheating if he was seen actually kissing someone.
Let them work through their emotions.
I was convinced that my friend was actually the person her bf was cheating with (everything her bf did was a red flag to everyone except her) and it turned out to be true.She was upset with me and her other friends who warned her, followed by embarrassment and anger when she found out. Not enough to not keep sleeping with him until the actual live-in long term gf confronted her in person.It was a painful process for her and we let her work through the emotions even when it meant giving her some hard truths about what the gf was probably experiencing.
Once you know for sure, don't keep it a secret.
He took some girl to his car when we were all at a club one night. His girlfriend and I weren’t super close, but we had a lot of friends. I saw him with her. I knew that they were talking about marriage and about to move in together. It was well known in our friend group that he cheated all the time, but I never had first hand knowledge. I told him that I wouldn’t keep his secret and he needed to tell her. Of course, he tried to convince her that I was just starting drama and trying to break them up. She called me a few days later. I told her that it was killing me to do it, but I felt like she needed to know what kind of a guy he was. Luckily, she knew me well enough to know that I am not a fan of drama. She was heartbroken, but believed me. She broke up with him and ended up marrying the guy that I was dating during this whole ordeal! No hard feelings, we had been broken up for a while before they started dating. We never became close friends, but she always appreciated that I told her.
If you can get the cheater to admit it, that's the best route.
My friends boyfriend called me and started confessing to cheating. He was trying to convince me that she was super awful because he wanted to break up with her and wanted me to support him in doing so and it slipped out that he’d been unfaithful many times. I called her and put her on the call without him knowing so when he met up with her later to try to break up with her she already knew it was coming and was able to confront him. He tried to deny the cheating because he didn’t know that she’d heard him confess to me on the phone.
Now, obviously, telling your friend is never going to be easy. But it's the right thing to do and you are extremely brave for going ahead and doing it.
