Betrayal and trying to regain trust

[Minty80]

This is sort of a convuluted story, but I'll try and make it as short, straightforward, and clear as possible.

 

I'm 25, have two kids, and am separated from my partner/husband of 7 years. A bit after ex-husband and I separated I started dating one of my closest and oldest friends, we had first met when he was 13 and I was 15. That relationship has been going amazingly, there's something to be said for dating the person you have always felt closest too (up till this point in time we had never been single at the same time).

 

Well, I got a bit of a bombshell dropped on me last night. Since my boyfriend and I see that this could be a very long-term thing (we are taking it slowly) he decided that he should be completely honest with me. That meant admitting that he, along with several other of my friends, knew that when ex and I were together, ex had cheated on me. He not only cheated on me but did so with my bestfriend, whom I've known since KINDERGARTEN, and another close friend of mine.

 

I've always been the type of person who had a small circle of friends but thought I could trust my life with the ones I did have. Apparently for YEARS I have been wrong about this. It's not so much that ex cheated on me that I care about, it's that I put my trust into all these people, which includes my current boyfriend, and that was betrayed. I honestly would have never in a million years thought my ex would cheat on me. He's a musician so we spent a lot of time apart and that trust was such a major part of our relationship. As far as anyone knows he never did sleep around with any random girls while he was away, no he just slept with my closest friends!

 

My boyfriend picked not the greatest time to tell me, being a thursday night and a bit before some friends were coming over to my house to meet us to go get coffee. Still he did call me later that night and when he found out I couldn't sleep came over at midnight and stayed up with me until 3am, even though he had to get up for work at 6am. Heh, poor guy had to sleep on the couch cause we are keeping our relationship off my kiddos radar (friend crashing on my couch is a regular occurrence, so that's not odd to them).

 

Dealing with my other friends is something I still need to figure out, there are a couple who I think I'll end up confronting this weekend. I need to let them know how much this hurt and that yes, it would have been better had they said something. My main concern is the relationship with my boyfriend though.

 

I'm horrible about opening up to people, my boyfriend is the single person in my life I have trusted with everything. That is absolutely huge for me and I don't want to lose that, but at the same time I feel I've lost a lot of the trust I had in him. I want to be able to work on regaining that but I'm not sure how to go about it. I don't want to clam up with him and keep everything inside like I do with most people, but at the same time I don't feel as safe trusting him as I once did. I keep worrying that something else is going to come out and I'm not sure there is anything else I can handle. My boyfriend has been trying to reassure me that this is everything, but it's a bit hard to believe right now.

 

So I guess all this leads to my major question, how do I rebuild my trust in my boyfriend? Is it something that will just take time or is there anything I can actively do to get there? And what happens in the meantime?

[kenneth05]

no offense here, and i do feel horrible for you.. betrayal is aweful, but you're a bit confused. your ex cheated on you and your galpals cheated on you and lied to you. your current BF had the guts to tell you, and now you are blaming him? he hasn't betrayed you. and he probably felt that he couldn't tell you while you were married to ex. also, yeah, it was probably a bad time that he told you all this, but is there ever a good time? nope. you should forgive him. and ditch your dishonest "friends", and get a whole new set. best of luck.

[marriedmom]

Hi Minty

Wow--that is alot. One thing I would be careful about is your children and how they can get potentially mixed up in this web of deciet. Are your children close to the people that have betrayed you; i.e. your best friend who slept with their father!

WIll their father (your ex) Start dating your best friend? That would be odd.

If It were me, I would disassociate myself and my children from this entire group of people.

Truly, Minty, why didnt your current boyfriend speak up to you when your husband was cheating and he AND all your other friends all knew it? You mentioned that he is one of your closest and oldest friends---and yet he knew that your husband was sleeping with your best friend and never said anything until now?

Hmmm...I dont know about that. Do they support that kind of behavior?

You have children. First and Foremost.

And regardless of where this current relationship takes you, it WILL impact them.

The rebuilding of trust takes one thing and one thing only. TIME.

However, your situation seems very invovled in other facets of your personal life, not just your intimate life with your current boyfriend.

Again, if it were me, I would look at ALL OF THEM, and say, "Are they worth it???"

Any man who cheats on his wife and children is yucky in my book----and to do it within your circle of friends---super yucky x 1000!

 

And all these "so called close friends" ---UhUh! They are not loyal!

[DN]

I think you may have over-reacted about your friends. No one likes to interfere in a marriage and although many people will say they should have told you it is not easy when faced with that decision.

 

Your boyfriend did not betray you - he may have made the wrong decision but that is a very different thing from a conscious decision to hurt you. And to leap from that to not trusting him is not very logical. Just because he did not tell you of your husband's cheating does not mean that he would cheat on you himself.

 

I think that part of the problem may be that you got together with him too quickly after the break from your husband - the wound from that is still hurting - be careful you don't allow that to damage what may be a good relationship now.

[Minty80]

Eek, should probably clarify a bit, the reason I felt some loss of trust with my boyfriend is that all the cheating happened 2+ years ago and it took until now for him to tell me. In truth though I do respect him for finally telling me, but it doesn't mean that my trust wasn't hurt a bit as well.

 

As far as the kiddos go, ex and I go to joint counseling once a week to work on our co-parenting relationship with the goal of making sure everything stays as easy as possible on them. I'm still not sure whether to bring this up or not, I'm actually leaning much more towards not because you are right, I don't want the kids caught up in this, and since we are already separated I don't see what good could come out of confronting him at this point. Yes it hurts to find out he betrayed our trust while we were together, but emotionally I am no longer invested in the relationship we had so it actually hurts much less to find out he cheated than finding out who it was with and that my "friends" covered it up.

 

As far as the kids being attached to people involved in the whole betrayal and coverup, luckily besides my boyfriend and one other guy it's no one that they are close with. My bestfriend (well, former bestfriend now I guess) lives a couple of hours away so the kids rarely ever see her to begin with, we usually just IM and talk on the phone.

 

My boyfriend said the reason that no one told me is because of the kids being involved. Personally I think it was just an easy out to avoid a messy situation. It wasn't up to them to decide it was better for the kids if I didn't know. I should have been given the information and then I could have dealt with it the way I thought best. I did have one friend who disappeared around that time and I never knew why. Apparently he did want to tell me but got into a rather big argument with a couple other "friends" who basically told him he better keep his mouth shut and that it would be best for the kids and guilted him into not saying anything.

 

What I really don't get is that it does seem out of the ordinary behaviour for most of my friends and not something they would put up with. This was also a couple of years back though, so maybe I'm looking at a more mature version of them now then how they were then. The ones who were involved and I am closest with are going to get a chance to explain themselves, but I think they will become more accquantinces then friends. On the plus side I've been making a couple of new friends recently, maybe they are people I can rely on.

 

I guess my biggest thing is that if I was so off on these other people I'm not sure I trust MYSELF to choose good people to put my trust in.

[Minty80]

 

Your boyfriend did not betray you - he may have made the wrong decision but that is a very different thing from a conscious decision to hurt you. And to leap from that to not trusting him is not very logical. Just because he did not tell you of your husband's cheating does not mean that he would cheat on you himself.

 

I think that part of the problem may be that you got together with him too quickly after the break from your husband - the wound from that is still hurting - be careful you don't allow that to damage what may be a good relationship now.

 

Well part of the issue is that my bestfriend was dating my boyfriend's bestfriend when the cheating occurred. My boyfriend told his bestfriend but didn't say a word to me. That kinda hurts since over the 10 years we have known each other we've been through a lot together and I would have thought previously that we could always go to each other with everything.

 

Also, at the time ex and I were not yet married, we lived together for quite a few years before there was any decision to make it legal. I wish one of them would have opened their mouths sometime before the wedding happened, it would have saved a time and money if nothing else.

 

I am trying hard not to project any feelings onto my boyfriend. I don't think I'm doing so bad considering I do want things to work out with him and I WANT to be able to trust him again, and I think eventually I will, I'm just confused about how to get there. If it's just a matter of time then I'll work on being patient. As far as the other friends who are involved, well, them I don't have as much patience for. They heard for years me talk about how much I trusted ex and that he would never cheat on me, they were around the entire year where we were planning the wedding, they were in the freaking ceremony and not one of them had the courage to say a word.

 

They saw me blindly making a huge mistake and not one had the courage to open their mouth, that hurts when it comes from people who are supposed to be your closest friends.