What type of person would date someone they knew had cheated in the past?
Following up on what @gmc94 said.
My ex-WW: she cheated on me (in HIGH school!) by kissing another boy. We were teenagers. It was awful, soul-crushing, etc., but I was just a kid, didn't have the language or skills to deal well. I ended it, in a high-schooly kid way, went off to college. We re-connected a few years later, and then she was my wife of 10 years. Pushed boundaries with other men at least 3-4 times that I can recall in retrospect, and then ultimately had a full-blown affair to ride out our marriage. I ignored, missed it, minimized, whatever you want to say. I was hurting inside, but couldn't make sense of it.
So yeah, I dated and then married a cheater who had cheated on *me* previously (though in high school) and crossed my undefined boundaries a lot.
At any one of those moments, in my teens, 20s, or 30s, I could have/should have had the strength and ability to walk away forever and never look back. Why didn't I? I'd imagine a huuuuge combination of my own self-esteem, immaturity, lack of experience, lack of clear (even to myself) boundaries, fear of being alone, codependency (learning about that)...that, and confusion/lying/trickery on the part of ex-WW.
Also notable that my own father had several affairs while I was in my teens (and probably beforehand), many of which included traumatic events/episodes for me (walking in on him having sex with someone who wasn't my mom, e.g.).
Fast forward to the last couple years: I believe I have dated and fallen in love (and since broken it off with) someone who cheats on some level. Her pattern, from what I can tell, is to begin a new relationship for a period of weeks or months, laying the groundwork in secret and under the guise of "innocence," before feeling empowered to end the previous relationship.
In retrospect, these red flags were in front of me from the beginning, and I either missed them or ignored them. She was sleeping with another man while separated but living in the same house with her ex-husband (so she told me), she was clearly still receiving frantic/desperate texts from that man when she began seeing me (HUGE red flag; in retrospect, they weren't *done* enough for me to be in the picture, obviously! She literally must have "ended" it with him after meeting and sleeping with me). She would later go on to repeat this same pattern with me; keep me on the hook, explore and eventually begin seeing another man (happened twice; we got back together once).
ON THE CONTRARY:
I've also had many opportunities to date other women since my divorce. One recently divorced woman, on a first date, explicitly told me that she had cheated on (she actually used that term, didn't whitewash it at all) her husband twice in the course of their relationship. Guess what? I chose not to see her again for that reason.
~
So I know I have it in me to see a boundary and exercise it. However, that last woman was the only person I've ever met in real life who explicitly told me they cheated. Everyone else, it's an investigative game we have to play.
I wrote a lot here, and I'm not sure what I'm saying other than there seem to be many, many reasons I (and probably others like me) have ended up in relationships with people who, in retrospect, gave signals that they were unsafe partners.
Recap: self-esteem, unclear boundaries, codependency, lack of experience, fear, fuzzy info/lying/half-truths from partner(s), being a bad "investigator" all seem to play a part.
[This message edited by Okokok at 8:30 AM, March 15th (Sunday)]
