How to Confront Your Partner About Cheating

You’re in a tough spot.

You discovered your partner has been cheating on you. Maybe you looked at their phone not even intending to search for anything and came across some incriminating messages or an unknown name or phone number.

Maybe you spotted something on their Facebook account, or found a receipt. Maybe someone else called you up and told you.

And your partner doesn’t know you know yet.

Now what?

If you have just found this out and are freaking out (understandably), please first check out the post first on What to Do If Your Spouse Cheats on You. Then you can come back here and figure out how to confront your partner about cheating and deal with this.

When You’re Planning to End the Relationship

Let’s address the easier situation first. If you are certain that you want to divorce/break up because of your partner’s infidelity (which is of course your prerogative), then you don’t need to be quite as careful about this. You’re not in the very challenging position of trying to deal with a super difficult situation while simultaneously trying to preserve the relationship.

At the same time, I urge you to take some time to prepare yourself to approach this with composure and dignity. People are happier when they are able to live up to their best selves. If you use this opportunity to completely tear down and unleash on your (ex-)partner, you probably won’t be achieving that.

What this means is that yelling, cursing out, and demeaning your partner for their behavior (even if it’s deserved) isn’t what’s best for you.

There are all kinds of ways you can make this situation worse for everyone involved, such as:

• showing up at their workplace to embarrass them

• packing up their stuff and leaving it outside without telling them (and changing the locks)

• sharing the situation on social media, with everyone you know, and/or with your children to as to maximize your partner’s shame

All of these are bad ways to handle the situation.

Of course, they are very tempting, and I am not saying that your partner doesn’t deserve such treatment. Maybe they do. I am merely suggesting that you and the people you care about will suffer more this way.

It is hard to take the high road. But I submit that you will be better off in the long run if you do.

So what can you do?

Let your partner know you want to speak to them. Do it in a private place. (Humiliating them in public is a bad strategy for long-term gain.) Tell them calmly and firmly what you know; show them the evidence you have (since they are likely to deny it); then let them know what your plan is (i.e., I am moving out, I called a lawyer, I expect you to move out, etc.).

Note that if you don’t have 100% evidence of cheating, you may yet want to remain open to hearing what they have to say in case you’re wrong. That said, if things just don’t add up, trusting your gut is often a wise course of action. (The question of how to know whether your spouse is cheating is a different post.)

A clear, calm, and firm stance will leave you in the best position to take the next steps without causing more trouble for yourself as you move forward with the dissolution of the relationship.

When Your Partner Cheated and You Don’t Want to End the Relationship

But what if you want to keep your relationship, or aren’t sure if you do or not? Then it becomes much more challenging, because you can’t just lay down the line (and there is much more at risk if you lose your cool and behave terribly).

Again, start by making sure you’re composed enough to have this conversation. Expect there to be tears and anger, of course; but if you feel like you want to go on a rampage and smash something, if you aren’t in control of yourself to be able to get through a conversation without attacking your partner (verbally or physically), you are best off waiting a bit more until you get there.

Plan for a suitable time and place. This means not in the morning as you’re both running out to work, and not at midnight when one or both of you are falling asleep. If you’re usually busy with children, find a babysitter to take care of them for the night.

I know that waiting any length of time right now can be grueling; but if you can push to set up your circumstances well it will turn out much better. Caving to your feelings of urgency and blowing things open just before you or your partner goes off to give a major presentation or talk to a parent about their last will and testament is disastrous for both of you.

Place-wise, it must be somewhere private. Don’t do this at Thanksgiving dinner, at a bar night with friends, or out in public. The internet is full of clever “I know you cheated” video reveals. I would bet a lot of money that the majority of people who make those do not go on to happy resolutions of their situation.

What to Say to the Unfaithful Partner

Again, I urge you to bring your best self to this conversation. It might help to write down all the nasty things you want to say and names you want to call them to get it out of your system, then tuck that paper away somewhere or toss it out.

When you come to this conversation, you do not want to be mean or cruel. You should be respectful as much as possible, even though your partner has obviously not been respectful to you in doing what they did.

Start by letting them know you’d like to share something with them and ask that they allow you to finish speaking before jumping in. (If they attempt to interrupt you anyway, you can politely and firmly insist that they let you finish speaking before you will listen to them.)

Lay out the evidence you have. Tell them what you know and show them what you’ve seen. If your evidence isn’t incontrovertible, you can simply ask them, “are you cheating on me?”

If there’s really no way it can be anything else – if you have screenshots of text messages where your partner said, to someone who is not you, something along the lines of, “Hey, I’m glad we had sex last night, hope my spouse doesn’t find out!” – then there’s no point in asking; just say, “I know you are cheating.”

Let them know how bad you’re feeling: “I am so hurt. I am devastated. I can’t believe you would do this...” and so on. (Reminder: don’t tear them to shreds. Not generally helpful for getting a good result out of this conversation. Insults and threats will be counterproductive.) Then let them know you’d like to hear what they have to say.

Then expect denial.

Handling Denial of the Infidelity

Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, people who have been unfaithful often start by denying it. In fact, most people when suddenly cornered turn immediately to denial while their brain searches for options. (I would guess that you’ve done this too sometime in your lifetime, although perhaps not with something as serious as infidelity.)

And besides the massive consequences looming over their heads, often the shame someone feels in the wake of having made a bad choice like this can be overwhelming. (Important note: it is entirely possible that your partner cheated on you and still loves you.)

I am not excusing their lies (on top of whatever previous deception has been going on); I am just letting you know what to expect.

If you have 100% certainty, try to remain calm through their denial, then just point back to the evidence, say you don’t believe them, and wait. You can go through that a couple of times like a broken record if need be. Odds are they will come clean after a few rounds; or they will break off the conversation and come back to confess a bit later.

I can’t tell you exactly how that will look; but the point here is, if you expect the denial you will be less unnerved and infuriated by it, and can wait it out less uncomfortably.

On the other hand, if you aren’t 100% sure that there’s been cheating, it’s not a bad idea to hear your partner out. One unexpected hotel receipt may be a bad sign, but maybe there is actually a reasonable explanation. (If the explanation doesn’t sound reasonable to you, your gut might be telling you something, and again, this might be worth paying attention to.)

Of course, there are situations that look bad but have good explanations, and situations that look not so bad that have weak ones.

The possibilities are endless, and I can’t offer a guide to how to know for sure whether your partner is lying. (Talking to a therapist experienced in these matters can help you deal with this difficult situation, but even then, if you’ve got a few clues and no certainty, nobody is going to be able to tell you for sure. That can be one of the hardest parts of this experience, unfortunately.)

Get Help If You Need to Confront Your Partner About Cheating

Whether before or after you confront your partner, getting professional support can be a lifesaver. It’s going to be a hard time any which way. But you can come out of this in one piece, and so can your marriage/relationship. An individual therapist or coach can help you keep your sanity during a trying time, and a couples counselor can be there to patch up the relationship, if and when the time comes for that.

There’s no need to go this alone. Definitely reach out to us or someone else in your neighborhood to be a shoulder to lean on as you try to scale this mountain.

It’s not an easy path, but it’s a well-trodden one. Many have made it up to and over the summit. You can too.