Cheating On Your Fiancé
The wedding date is approaching. You’re panicking. But you still have choices.
If you’re supposed to be getting married, and you and your fiancé are supposedly in a monogamous relationship, and you theoretically WANT to be in a monogamous relationship, but you happen to be secretly involved with someone else, you may be a little stressed out.
Or totally, completely freaking out.
Especially if your wedding date is swiftly approaching.
It may seem like you’re caught in an impossible situation. You may think that you HAVE to get married, and that’s just all there is to it. Because… the wedding is happening SOON.
The invitations have been sent out, and the RSVPs are coming in. The non-refundable deposits have been put down on just about everything. The custom-made wedding rings cost a small fortune. Your fiancé would be devastated if you broke things off at this point. Your family would be shocked. Your fiancé’s family would probably want to murder you.
So it may well seem like the only real option you have is to go through with the wedding… and hope that once you survive that ordeal, SOMETHING will change.
When you’re stuck in what seems like an impossible situation, it’s fair enough to hope that “Everything Will Somehow Work Out Okay” if you just go through with your wedding, without really pausing to think about what you really want to do about the fact that you’re cheating on the person you’re supposed to marry.
But the problem, of course, hoping that “Everything Will Somehow Work Out Okay” is not a great strategy for anything much.
The clients I’ve worked with who were cheating on their fiancés and chose to get married without pausing to think hard about what they REALLY wanted to do about their whole situation tell me they wish they’d taken a clear-eyed look at their infidelity situation before going through with getting married.
Some say they really shouldn’t have gone through with their wedding but were just too chicken shit to call it off, and some say they’re not sure they what they would have chosen to do, but they wish they’d at least given themselves the opportunity to thoroughly consider their options.
And all of them kept cheating after they got married. Some hoped that by getting married, they’d stop wanting to be involved with their affair partner, but it didn’t work out that way.
(Please note that I am sharing these trends in my clients’ experiences for anecdotal purposes. It is not the case that EVERYONE who is cheating on their fiancé and chooses to go through with marrying them has the kind of experience I’m describing here. But some people do — and that’s important to be aware of!)
I’ve also worked with clients who were cheating on their fiances, and still had some time before their wedding to think seriously about what they wanted to do. Some of them decided to call off their weddings. And every one of them who did said it was one of the hardest things they’d ever done, and the best decision they’d ever made.
Now, the point here is NOT that if you are cheating on your fiancé, you should obviously call off the wedding.
Rather, the points I want to stress are as follows:
1) If you are cheating on your fiancé, and hoping that going through with your wedding will magically resolve your infidelity situation and end up being a choice you feel great about, that may not happen.
2) It may be hard to carve out the time, space, and bandwidth to seriously consider what you want to do about your infidelity situation and your upcoming wedding. It may be scary to consider calling off a wedding. But giving yourself the opportunity to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you want to do about your whole situation is so important because doing that gives you the chance to make choices that you actually feel great about… instead of doing things you aren’t sure you want to do, and hoping that things will somehow turn out okay.
3) If you do decide to call off your wedding, it may be mighty uncomfortable. It may end up being one of the hardest things you’ve ever done. AND it might be worth it. It might end up being the best choice you ever make.
