Hi everyone. English is not my first language and my heart is breaking as I type this, so I’m sorry if this comes across as messy. I feel like my entire life just collapsed and I truly don't know what to do besides crying.
My fiancé and I have been together for 9 years. We met during school, became friends, and eventually fell in love. He was my first kiss, my first everything. I came from an abusive household and previously identified as asexual so I never thought I could feel this way about anyone. I thought what we had was rare and special. I truly believed he was my soulmate.
We’ve traveled the world together. We did everything together because we couldn’t get enough of each other. Earlier this year he proposed, and I thought it was the happiest day of my life. Our wedding is scheduled for February. Everything is already paid for, including the honeymoon. I have my dress right here with me.
Today, while using his phone to download an app, I noticed Tinder had a cloud icon with an arrow next to it. I’m an Android user, so it stood out to me. After Googling, I saw that this icon appears when an app was previously downloaded but isn’t currently installed. I checked his purchase history and saw that he downloaded Tinder in 2022, and then Pure (never heard of this one, but it looks like another dating app) one week after that.
I confronted him, and at first he denied everything. He said he must've downloaded it when he was 16, before we met. Then that he had no idea how it ended up there, then that he was hacked, then that we were going through a rough patch and this is why he did it (honestly I have no idea if we were or weren't going through a rough patch in 2022). His story kept changing and I was extremely taken aback because I never thought he could be someone who lied to me like that.
After a while, he said he was ready to tell me the truth. He dropped the bomb that yes, he indeed downloaded Tinder, but that was because he was feeling suicidal (something he never told me, ever) and wanted reaffirmation that people still found him attractive. He said that he also deleted Tinder soon afterwards (before even creating an account), and that he has no recollection of downloading Pure but that he must've done it if it's in his history.
He confessed that he also has (and alwahs had) a porn addiction. Porn is something we discussed in the past and he said multiple times, apparently lying to my face, that he had no interest in porn.
I have no idea how to proceed. I feel so, so, so betrayed. This happened three years ago. He still proposed to me, planned a wedding, and let me walk into a marriage without ever telling me the truth. He used to be extremely judgmental of cheaters, and now I feel like I don’t even know who he is. I keep thinking about how easily he lied and hid this from me for years.
I moved across the world to be with him. I have a job here, but I’m on his visa and legally can’t stay in this country without him. Our finances are fully joined. The wedding is in two months.
I’ve never felt pain like this before. I feel like I wasted almost 10 years on someone who could lie to me repeatedly and so convincingly.
I’ve tried looking through his phone to see if he physically cheated, and I can’t find anything, but I still feel completely shattered and lost.
I don’t know what to do. Do I quit my job and go back to my home country? Do we seek counseling? Is this something that can even be forgiven? Right now all I feel is disgust and that I'll never be able to trust him again.
TL;DR: Found out my fiancé downloaded dating apps during our relationship and lied about it for years. Wedding is in 2 months, I moved countries for him, and I don’t know whether to stay or leave.
21 comments
it was a wobble, most guys are gonna wobble at some point in 9 years hun
I’m so sorry. If it were me, I’d always wonder forever after if he’d do something similar (or worse) anytime he needed an ego boost.
And pulling out never-before-mentioned suicidal thoughts to justify it just feels manipulative.
This is your life, so you get to decide.
I think you do need to either do therapy or walk away from this.
A wedding may feel monumental to walk away from but imagine he lies to you about stuff or does cheat on you after marriage and kids? Way worse imo.
Hi. You’re valid for feeling the way you feel and also, you’ve been together for such a long time and through so may phases as youth and now adults, this behavior is completely normal. Being curious, unsure, insecure, needing novelty, etc. is part of being in a long-term relationship. I think, personally, we are all better off just recognizing the humanness that’s bound to expose itself when we are with someone for long periods of time, especially at young ages.
Ultimately, it’s up to you on whether or not you think this act is so deceitful it’s worth leaving and that you can’t ever trust him again or choosing him, choosing trust and choosing forgiveness, and turning this into a moment to connect.
I know this is hard and it feels like your world’s collapsing but it isn’t and I think you can both recover and grow from this.
Man this sucks.
I know this will sound kind of pathetic but this is what I think his thought process is.
A lot of guys get validation from feeling desired by women. Multiple if possible. When some dudes are in a long term relationship this can affect their self esteem if they’ve become used to be being validated by female attention.
What likely happened here is that he downloaded just to see if he was still desired. A self esteem boost before committing long term to marriage etc.
It’s still a betrayal and it’s still wrong but I would t jump to the ‘he’s cheating physically’ part just yet.
I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past. I downloaded tinder just to see if people matched me when me and my gf moved to a new city.
It was dumb and stupid but it just wanted the ego boost. Never intended on actually doing anything.
Just for information: Pure is a hook up app which inclines towards kink (not necessarily, but that’s where a lot of the user base is). The focus is not dating – it’s quick and casual hook ups.
If you want to validate what he is saying is true (that he downloaded and did not describe) – as to see his subscription history (under “My Account”). That will probably expose whether he has subscribed through Apple.
Go back into your banking apps from that time and check for cash withdrawals or hotel stays that don’t add up. Liars are gonna lie.
If he never cheated you could maybe solve this with therapy. But do your due diligence.
Red flags all around (especially the changing stories) but to play Devil’s Advocate, many people just download Tinder for curiosity, to reaffirm their attractiveness or just the basic small dopamine burst of attention.
That being said, I do think it’s weird his story keeps changing but I do think that perhaps, he’s just looking for an excuse that satisfies you because (perhaps) you’re also somewhat insecure and he may be mentally tired at dealing with it.
We don’t know you so ultimately don’t know the full context but I’d say, without real evidence either way, go with your gut instincts.
Alright, there’s a lot to process here. Y’all have been together for 9 years, and over that span of time, he went through a really dark period in his life where he felt suicidal and downloaded dating apps for an ego boost because being with you wasn’t enough validation for him, and he didn’t have the maturity, healing or wherewithal to tell you at the time.
That being said he didn’t stay on Tinder, he uninstalled it because ultimately, he knew that he wanted to choose you, and that the fleeting validation of an app wasn’t going to solve the bigger problem that was plaguing him. He also has issues with porn addiction; has he talked about seeking therapy to help with that? Is he attempting to quit it cold turkey?
I completely understand where you’re coming from in feeling betrayed because he wasn’t honest or transparent about this, and that he’s changed his story so many times has lead you down a spiral where you now can’t fully trust anything he’s told you, including him being suicidal.
That being said, let’s review what you know to be true: you’re with a human being, with flaws, imperfections and a history that you haven’t yet fully gotten to know or explore. This man, for all of his shortcomings, has chosen you, proposed, and moved his life forward knowing that come hell or highwater, he wants to work with you to make it work.
You’re feeling unsure, which is understandable, so my questions for you are these:
– what is it he can do to repair the damage?
– are you willing to give him the time and opportunity to commit to that repair and show up?
– do you think he has the capacity to make such a commitment and show up for you?
If you answer any of those 3 questions with “there’s nothing he can do”, “I don’t think I can, nor do I want to give him another chance” or “No, I don’t think he has the capacity” then there’s a serious level of reconsidering you have to do.
Also, you said that there’s no evidence of infidelity or cheating in the form of flirting or entertaining other women. So I’d implore you to take a step back and look at the reality of what happened rather than allowing your feelings to distort it into something more than what it was. He hit a vulnerable spot, and for reasons you still don’t know, he didn’t trust you enough to come to you to talk about it, confide in you and allow you to support him in his time of weakness. Maybe he felt like you would berate him, demean him or look at him differently if he showed you that vulnerability 3 years ago. Have you asked him why he felt like he couldn’t come to you? If so, what did he say?
9 years is a lot of time to have invested in someone, so it’s difficult to know what’s the right thing for yourself to do in this situation. Wishing you all the best.
At the very least I think you should postpone the wedding until you figure out what you want to do long term. Even if you do end up staying together there is no way you will have your feelings about this sorted out enough to marry him in under two months, and you wouldn’t want your wedding day to be tainted by having all of this hanging over it
He trickle-truthed you. Meaning instead of making a mistake (actually, a bad CHOICE) and then realizing it was a mistake and coming clean shortly after, he lied to you – every single day for YEARS – and then when you found out, he STILL didn’t come clean. He created and fed you different lies, again and again, trickling out a little bit of the actual truth each time, until he finally confessed the whole truth.
And only because he was forced to, not because he WANTED to. This is damning and unforgivable without him taking serious actions to make MAJOR changes to his communication and patterns of behavior.
He wanted to keep lying to you by omission. He wanted you to never find out, and possibly to do the same thing again without your knowledge or any consequences the next time he felt the relationship was “rough.”
This is not a person who is ready to be married to anyone, and certainly you deserve to not be married to someone who lies to you.
The betrayal of lying is all that is touched on above. That’s already enough to cancel a wedding and consider breaking up in my opinion. Now we come to the next part – he made a choice to download apps that would allow him to find options to betray your relationship. He wanted to date or have sex with other people, or at the very least have an emotional affair of flirting so he could feel good about himself, rather than be honest with you that he wasn’t doing well mentally and getting support from you as he worked to get better. He wanted an easy lay (emotionally or physically) to make him feel good instead of a romantic partnership.
Even if he only planned to get emotional validation from randoms on these apps, his INTENT was to betray you, in secret, without you ever finding out.
And you don’t have the chat history of these apps, so for all you know, he did chat with others or possibly meet up with them.
And you might never find out for sure, because now you know he is not a man who will acknowledge his failures and make them right by coming clean and apologizing. Instead you know he is absolutely a man who will lie and lie and lie until he can’t anymore, and trickle truth you until you’re exhausted.
You will always be wondering at what point he told the *actual* truth – or if the last thing he said was just another lie that he thought you wouldn’t figure out.
Never marry someone you can’t or don’t trust completely, with your mental, emotional, and physical health and safety. This dude will ruin you emotionally and mentally by making you second guess every thing he says to you – for the rest of your lives together. You will always be unsure of him.
Unless he sees this as a major problem in himself and HE takes initiative and action to get professional help so he never does this or lies to you like this again, he isn’t worth your forgiveness. He needs to make the change happen in himself and take accountability – you can’t and shouldn’t do it for him. If he’s not extremely eager to try changing his lying behaviors then he’s not interested in being a good partner to you.
We are here for u❤️❤️❤️
You don’t move forward with the marriage. Thank god you found this out now and not in three months. I suspect that he wonders what dating other people would be like. It is hard to marry the person you meet as a teenager and never know what dating would be like as an adult. It can be hard to know whether it’s the right thing, or if you just never experienced anything different.
I suspect things haven’t been as perfect for him as they have been for you. That he has doubts. Instead of coming to you with them, he hides and lies.
That is the part that will kill a marriage. Things have been perfect for you because he just hides problems and don’t tell you about them. That won’t change. That’s just how he’s learned to live his life.
I would be more inclined to try to forgive if he’d come to you and told you 3yrs ago, rather than you finding out and getting more story variations than taylor swift albums. I’ve been in a similar situation and in my experience, the story kept evolving with each new detail I found. He’s broken your trust and instead of being truthful from the get go, he’s continued to lie, so what makes you think he’ll be honest now? I don’t know your partner, so perhaps this isn’t the case, but trustworthy people in committed relationships don’t download dating apps for validation. If he’s weak enough to do so, what’s stopping him from acting on it when he got attention? Where is the line drawn?
The way I see it is, you get into a relationship with someone who presents themselves a certain way, and the moment they’re no longer who they seemed to be, why would you want to stay and accept this different version who doesn’t respect your relationship? I hated wasting 4yrs of my life in my situation, but I would’ve hated wasting even more by staying with someone who continuously lied and cheated.
For a 9 year commitment, I might forgive it if he owned up to it AS SOON as you confronted him. The fact that his immediate reaction was to cover it up and lie is the bigger problem. Now you’ll never know what else he’s lied about, as it’s clear he’s a trickle truther and had no intentions of you ever finding anything out. This just destroyed the foundation of trust you two had, and you’ll have to determine whether that’s reparable.
I’m sorry this is so horrible. You should definitely leave him – he’s a liar. It’s disgusting that he’s also trying to put him cheating on you like “we were going through a rough patch” so what?!? I bet you don’t even have the full truth.
Since you mentioned you, you need to expand. Do you still consider yourself asexual? Is your sex life satisfying to both of you. Being together since you were 18 and 17 means there was very little sexual experimentation.
Has he confessed about how long he’s been into porn. And how is your sex life because a porn addiction usually gets in the way of healthy sex with a long-term partner.
Oh my god, this situation happened to me almost exactly. Two weeks before my wedding, I caught my fiance talking to girls on reddit. He literally told me the exact same thing your fiance told you: that he was feeling neglected in the relationship and wanted to see if people still found him attractive. In the messages I saw, he didn’t tell people any real information about himself. I went through with the wedding because everything was already paid for and my family had plane tickets and everything. Not only that, but I did not tell a single person in my family what he did because I wanted to protect him.
We agreed on a clean slate after we got married and he promised he would never do it again. During our marriage, I started to really resent him for what he did and I wasn’t allowed to talk to him about it and couldn’t talk to anyone else about it either. So we would argue a lot. Six years after we got married, I discovered a Tinder profile that he had just created. After that, he confessed that he’d had a porn addiction for our entire relationship. I was actually relieved to learn that there was a “reason” he did this to me and thought, you know, it’s just porn- we can work through it.
It turns out that porn addiction is basically cancer for a relationship. I mean it just destroys everything. Trust. Sex. Love. Your self esteem. His self esteem. Everything. What I didn’t know at the time is that there’s truly no way to have a healthy relationship or marriage with someone who has a porn addiction. This will happen again and again and again. He will also get more comfortable lying to you. The guilt and shame became too much for my ex to carry and he left me after 6 years of marriage. Right before I turned 30. After I’d stuck by him through it all.
I know that you’ll probably stay with him because you’re about to get married and everything is already paid for. Just like I did. He will convince you that he’s dedicated to change. And he may be. Two months (until your wedding) isn’t a long time for him to be on his best behavior. But he will start to slip eventually. They usually do, that’s what I’ve learned since I joined support groups for partners of porn addicts. I regret staying with and marrying him immensely. I remarried 3 years after my divorce and finally understand that what I experienced in my first marriage (which was also my first relationship) was NOT love. I’m so much happier now.
>After a while, he said he was ready to tell me the truth. He dropped the bomb that yes, he indeed downloaded Tinder, but that was because he was feeling suicidal (something he never told me, ever) and wanted reaffirmation that people still found him attractive
I’m sorry OP, but this is such a HUGE crock of shit he’s feeding you. He lied several times in an attempt to cover his tracks, probably spent the time in-between then and when he “confessed” deleting all evidence on his phone.
Your fiance is not a unique or special man. He is a liar, a manipulator and an extremely selfish person. I know this is so confusing and heartbreaking for you, but I encourage you to leave. Your relationship will never be the same. If you had this wonderful, beautiful soulmate connection that you truly believed you had, then he wouldn’t have been able to betray and lie to you like this.
Honestly. You’ve been together since school so someone downloading this app isn’t surprising, and every guy likes porn, it’s addictive and fulfils fetishes without the embarrassment.
Has he cheated? Then take the step back and cancel the wedding. When was the app last active? 3 years ago? No cheating? It’ll hurt because it’s fresh to you but to him it was a phase that’s been and gone a long time ago.
We are all human, feelings are weird no one knows how to feel or what to do. Talk about it, get confirmation of your love to eachother and make sure you want to move forward together.
Good luck.
Have a heart to heart talk at night.
Seek the deeper truth. Sometimes guys just want to play around and never did anything but had thoughts of.