Relationship Advice
Forgetting Details of Affairs – Does It Matter?
Why people forget affair details, whether it really matters, and how to move on.
Why do unfaithful men and women keep forgetting details of affairs?
If you’re going to cheat on your wife or husband, you’d think you’d remember important details – like how often the two of you met, where you went, what you did, and what you said.
However, time after time, unfaithful partners say ‘I don’t know’ or come up with such general answers that their partner gets exasperated and angry and starts to feel hopeless about the relationship’s future.
“My wife keeps asking me questions, she wants to see the whole picture so that she can understand what really happened. To me however, it feels as if someone took a pair of scissors and cut parts of my memory away. Often there is only a “black hole” in my memory. I did things that are in total contrast to what I would have done normally, I lied to nearly everybody I love, and acted completely against my own nature and values. Now, more and more often, I just don’t remember doing these things I did. And it is getting worse.”
(Philip, via my website comments)
In this updated post for 2024, I am going to examine:
- WHY people like Philip forget details of their affairs
- WHETHER it really matters, and
- WHAT the two of you need to do to move forward.
- By Andrew G. Marshall
- Relationship Advice
Why Do Unfaithful Partners Forget?
1. Compartmentalisation
To be able to have an affair, most people have to tell themselves that what happens over there (in “affair land”) has no impact on life over here (with their partner and kids). In this way, it almost feels like they’re another person, doing things they would usually condemn.
Sometimes the unfaithful partner tells me that they did indeed feel like they were acting a part in a play. They would type out messages like “I’ve never felt this way before”, knowing in some part of themselves that this was deeply untrue. Yet the momentum of the drama carried them onward.
This process of dissociation and minimization is helped by eliminating details – the psyche of the unfaithful spouse does not want to hang on to all the lies they’ve told, or keep an extensive mental file of all the different ways they’ve betrayed their partner and family.
The betrayed partner inevitably struggles to understand this process of compartmentalising. They’ll tend to think that such extreme risk-taking must have meant overwhelming love and passion. And if you’re in love, don’t you remember and cherish every look, gesture and memory?
“He is very remorseful and has asked for forgiveness hundreds of times, crying and begging on his knees. He’s even reached the point of having severe depression, but I still can’t move on. I’m so confused, sometimes I feel I have forgiven him but a lot of times my anger and pain overshadows my love and the hatred I feel for him takes over.”
(Evelyn, via my website comments)
2. Shame
This is most toxic of all feelings and we will do ANYTHING to avoid it – because shame is the opposite of love. It also makes us feel like a bad person and from a very early age we are told explicitly by our parents: bad things happen to bad children. It is further reinforced by movies and popular culture, in which bad people are punished and good people live happily ever after.
So, to avoid facing our shameful behaviour, we simply block out all those terrible details of how much we paid for that candlelight dinner, what we ate and what we talked about.
Shame and the Betrayed Partner
The betrayed partner usually thinks, “I’m glad you feel shame because perhaps you won’t do it again”. Sometimes they will use shame to punish their partner and make them feel as bad as they do.
This can easily backfire, because most people will do anything to avoid shame and feel better again. Sadly, this often includes the unfaithful person contacting their affair partner again (as they are seen as someone who will understand, confirm the unfaithful partner is ‘not a bad person’ and give a feel-good boost of more cheap sex).
If you are the unfaithful partner, try my book Why Did I Cheat? Help Your Partner (And Yourself) Recover From Your Affair.
3. Self-medicating
People have affairs because they can’t communicate their unhappiness or a feeling of unfairness about their lot. They think there are only two options: put up and shut up, or leave the relationship.
So they opt for the first, and everything gets worse and worse until it comes to a head, and then they metaphorically leave the relationship by having an affair.
Other self-medicating behaviours – which block out pain – include drinking too much, street drugs and immersing yourself in porn. People who engage in these behaviours literally go into a trance where nothing can touch them (at the time). As with the unfaithful partner, they will often repress and forget details of what they do when they’re caught up in their addiction.
“The first two months after the affair were like hell for me, because my husband acted like he was on drugs, and was not at all himself. Nearly everything he told me was a lie or an illusion, or else he said he could not remember. My husband talked to me like an outsider who wouldn’t care if he had an affair with another woman.”
(Gina, via website comments)
Cheap sex and fantasy ‘love’ is just as powerful as alcohol, and like drinking too much, you certainly can’t remember all the details the next morning.
4. Once bitten, twice shy
Some unfaithful partners are greeted with such an explosion of anger, bitterness and betrayal during the first few conversations about the affair that they develop a deep fear of going there again.
They tell themselves ‘more details will set us back’ and deliberately shut up – to ‘protect’ themselves and, they try hard to believe, their marriage too.
Often they are also genuinely confused about details – because like the police, their partner goes over their story time after time and points out inconsistencies, like ‘but you said you met in the bar’. After a while, the unfaithful partner is no longer sure what happened and what didn’t.
Sometimes, out of desperation, they will agree to a detail suggested by their partner – ‘you must have fancied her for months beforehand’ – because it sounds likely, may have happened, and mostly because it might get their partner off their back. Not surprisingly, they become more and more uncertain about the truth.
“I’ve told my boyfriend all the details that I remember of my infidelity. He insists on sticking to the parts that I DON’T remember. In all the years after the cheating, I really struggled to recall what I had done, and felt like it never happened. I have lost the feeling of things and only remember moments mechanically, and sometimes I end up saying I did something just because he wants an answer, and it logically fits. My boyfriend says he needs to ask me again and again about the details. I feel like every time he does, I lose touch with what really happened and remember even less.”
(Emmie, via website comments)
Often, the betrayed partner becomes more and more convinced that their partner is holding back details of the affair because it meant more to them than they’re willing to admit. They perceive their partner as adding more and more lies into the mix, and becoming evermore untrustworthy.
If you are struggling to recover from a partner’s infidelity then consider my book I Can’t Get Over My Partner’s Affair
When Should We Move On from the Details?
Ultimately, I would say very few people who’ve been unfaithful can produce the level of detail their partner thinks they require. Eventually, you will need to let things rest.
At the same time, there is certainly a period where the unfaithful partner needs to face up to the pain and confusion they have caused.
“I honestly believe that knowing details help the betrayed partner realise that, yes, this really happened and, yes again, my husband really did have an affair with someone who replaced me as the special person in his life for the duration of the affair. This realisation helped me to “normalize” the affair. It wasn’t the absolute worst thing that ever happened to me, even though for a long time it seemed to be just that”.
(Alice, via my Website Comments)“I think I needed to hear the details. These two months (of my husband having an affair) were kept secret from me. In order to start rebuilding trust, I needed to know what had been going on”.
(Mara, via my Website Comments).
Why Remembering Detail IS Important
- It builds up trust: the more open and honest you can be, the easier the recovery.
- Penance: facing up to the enormity of your betrayal is the least that you can do.
- You can learn important lessons: for example, how to deal with unpleasant feelings – like happiness – rather than suppressing them or self-medicating. (I always stress the importance of assertiveness and good communication in rebuilding relationships after infidelity. If everything is too easy, you won’t have the impetus to change and learn these new skills).
- Moving on too quickly is dangerous: when we’re in pain, we want to feel better quickly, but that can include pushing everything under the carpet. I think it takes at least a year to recover from a serious case of infidelity (and I’m only concerned if people are still struggling two years after discovery). Otherwise, you risk getting stuck in attempted normality: where on the surface your relationship is OK but the pain and resentment remains under the surface.
When the unfaithful partner should be allowed to forget
“I find that without details recovery is difficult but in some perverse way it is also easier at the same time because it gives me a chance to focus on us rather than the other guy”.
(Peter, via my Website Comments)
It was a shallow fantasy: if it really was cheap sex and fantasy, the unfaithful partner is actually in many cases incapable of remembering everything – rather like waking up after a nightmare.
The secret test: sometimes the betrayed partner is administering a hidden test. In their mind, “‘if you loved me you would remember”. No wonder, then, that they are plugging away for details and giving you chance after chance to pass (or fail).
In counselling, I stress ‘accept the feelings and challenge the thoughts’. In other words, it’s fine to be angry, upset and betrayed but does the thought really stack up:
- Is this test fair?
- Does it ignore all the other things the discovered partner is doing to show their love?
- Is it possible to love your partner and still want to draw a line under the truth and reconciliation phase of recovery?
The meanings we ascribe to details can be wrong: in the mind of the betrayed partner, for example, their spouse going to a favourite restaurant that they shared together is proof of ‘not caring about me’ or ‘you must have really loved her to take her there!’ Meanwhile, in the mind of the unfaithful partner it was convenient and they didn’t know other restaurants in the area. Who is right? Who is wrong? How much does it matter?
Understanding why doesn’t take the pain away: Sometimes even when I have spent several sessions on why an affair happened, couples are no further forward. The betrayed partner says ‘yes but I wouldn’t have done that under these circumstances’ and they still can’t get their head round it.
I think that usually ‘why’ is NOT the key question. A much better one is ‘how can we make certain it doesn’t happen again?’ or ‘how do we move forward?’ or ‘what do we need to change?’.
Seven Frequently Asked Questions About Forgetting Details of Affairs
Q. What if I have to keep asking questions because he keeps telling more and more lies, so I never get to the truth? (Maggie, via my website comments).
A. Here is a helpful exercise – it should allow you to concentrate your mind rather than letting everything spin out of control.
Imagine three boxes. Inside the first is your partner’s “stuff”: for example, depression, poor coping strategies, childhood issues. The second box is your relationship: ask yourself, what might need to be changed here? The third box is YOUR box. For example, your insecurities from the past or your feeling of purposelessness. You can work on your box but you cannot empty his box; only he can do that.
You’ll probably need some help to unpack the relationship box, so think about seeking some counselling.
Q. What if I’ve asked many questions, but my husband has told me close to absolutely nothing? (Marie, via my website comments).
A. If everything is brushed under the carpet – like your partner is trying to do – you risk experiencing only the first stages of recovery (shock, intense questioning, decision making about staying or going, hope) and getting stuck in attempted normality – where everything is going along all right on the surface but underneath everything is murky.
One approach to try would be experimenting with better questions. Rather than asking “why are you so unhappy?”, you could try “what’s stopping you from telling me about your unhappiness?”, and then follow up with ‘how do you think I’ll react?’
At times it might seem safer to be in attempted normality – because you’re frightened of what you’ll find – but this can raise the chances of all of this happening again.
Q. I’ve messed up – I haven’t always told my wife the truth about my affair, but I think I have got to the point where I am doing so now. I love her, she’s my soulmate, and I know I want to repair the marriage. She has lost all trust in me, though, and I don’t know what to do (Nathan, via my website comments).
A. Owning up to the truth is the first step, so congratulations. Next, it sounds like you need to work much more on your own understanding of why you were unfaithful. My guess is this will be tied up with some of the myths about love: which tell us relationships should be straightforward (as long as we love someone) and if we have “feelings” for someone else than it must be love (and therefore it’s sort of OK to be unfaithful). I recommend my book, Why Did I Cheat?
Q. My husband had an affair nine years ago, and we discussed many of the details. I stopped asking questions a while back, but there was a child born from the affair, and I feel that there are unresolved issues I would still like to know more about (Debra, via my website comments).
A. I think you’re right to want to know more, Debra. There are details of an affair that are ultimately unimportant (like which hotel they used) but others that still need to be discussed even nine years later (like the child that was born out of the affair).
Q. My husband says he can’t remember any more of the details I want, but I feel like I can’t make my decision about whether to stay or go without knowing them (Sharon, via my website comments).
A. You are probably right that knowing more could help you make a decision, but it is not the ONLY way. I would be focusing more on WHY, rather than what happened. For example:
- How does he feel about your sex life together?
- What would he like to change?
- What has he been unhappy about?
- What has he learned about himself?
Q. My husband has told me many details of his 5-year affair with a good friend of mine, which lasted through two of my pregnancies. However, he keeps insisting that it all meant nothing and was “just sex”, so I am finding it hard to move on as you advise here (Lindsay, via my website comments).
A. Sadly lots of people who have affairs try to downplay the seriousness of what happened. If I am being generous, I would say that it is because they hope it will lessen the pain for their partner.
However, it is probably much more about easing his guilt and shame. In his mind: “it didn’t mean anything, so the transgression was smaller and therefore I’m not such a terrible person, and perhaps I can look at myself in the mirror”.
He is most likely afraid that REALLY examining his motivations, or going into counselling to explore what happened, would destroy him.
Enough about him, though, what about you? No wonder you feel lost, your safety in the marriage has been destroyed and a friendship has been betrayed. Your feelings are entirely normal and understandable. I advise you to get some individual counselling, and hopefully reach a stronger place where you can decide if your marriage has been too profoundly hurt or whether the two of you can find a way back to each other.
Q. Isn’t all this “forgetting”, and even having an affair in itself, just a sign of massive immaturity?! And if it is, then how can you ever move forward with a partner who is less emotionally mature than yourself? (Syd, via my website comments).
A. It does seem very teenage to imagine that you can do something this dramatic in one corner of your life and not have it ripple out and affect every other part (as well as the lives of those around you). It might be useful to look at Transactional Analysis – it’s discussed in my book How Can I Ever Trust You Again? – because while he is acting as an “adapted child”, you are likely showing up as a “critical parent”.
What next?
As you might be starting to realise, if you’re still bogged down in the details a long time after the affair happened, you may well need to get some professional help to move forward with your lives, together or separately.
Take a look at marriage counselling options with my team, or browse through my bookstore.
Seven Things You Want To Say To Your Partner
How to tell your partner difficult things without ruining your day. Here are my seven things that you’re tempted to say, the underlying problems and the most constructive way to approach your partner with them.
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