The moment I found out my partner was cheating on me.

There’s no good way to find out the person that you love has been cheating on you.

But these stories from Reddit users and women in the Mamamia office are heart-wrenching. Think ‘about-to-buy-a-house-together-and-infected-with-an-STI’ type of heart-wrenching. Or finding out at a friend’s wedding? Or sitting next to her on a plane? Brutal. 

Yep, things are about to get ugly. Prepare yourself:

A forgotten wallet

“I never do this but I forgot my wallet and realised just before I was about to grab some lunch,” says Kristy, 27. “I live close to work and a colleague had to pick something up and was kind enough to drive me home.” Kristy says she didn’t notice anything unusual when she walked in the front door because she was talking with her colleague. Then she went into her bedroom and her fiance was in the bed and she still didn’t think anything was wrong.

“I thought he must have come home sick. I started asking if he was okay.”

Then she saw a pair of women’s shoes on the floor and heard a noise in the ensuite.  “It was like a scene in a low rent movie: I opened the ensuite door and there was a naked woman standing in my shower.”

“It was all terrible, made worse because my colleague was standing not far from me in the hallway listening to everything. I insisted we go back to work for some reason and cried and cried in the car. It didn’t take long for everyone to know. It was all so humiliating.”

Christmas surprise

“Was the night of her company Christmas party. I had to stay home and babysit our five year old son (Grandma was supposed to, but she fell and was in the hospital with a broken hip.) I figured my wife would go and then come home early,” wrote JimmyTheTemp.

“Turns out, she was planning to stay the night at a hotel so ‘she could drink and not worry about driving.’ I woke up about three am just knowing something was wrong (never happened before) and checked ‘Find My Phone’ to see where she was. She was with her boss at his apartment. Pretty much sucked.”

Watch: the moment people knew their relationship was over. Post continues after gallery.

The phone always gives the game away

It is the age of digital communication with text messages, photo messages, Snapchats, Facebook chats. It’s also the age of digital cheating. Here are the most heart wrenching stories of discovering a cheater though texts:

He was using my phone to call and text her, thought he was smart by deleting them, but when the bill came there it was in black and white. – Reddit profile has since been deleted

He left his Facebook open and I had that gut feeling to check his messages. – Kate, 27.

He thought I was sleeping, but I was watching him talk to people on a dating app. – James, 29.

My ex-fiancee had both an iPhone and a Macbook. If you know anything about iMessage, this means that he can send and receive texts from his laptop. I was using his laptop for homework (with his permission) while he was at work. He got a text message from his ex, who he talked with on a regular basis. I was uncomfortable with her since she was ‘the one that got away’, but she was married and he insisted he just thought of her as a good friend and I chose to believe and trust my then-fiancee. But the text she sent him that day seemed strange, just randomly saying ‘Just textin’ to say I love you’ or something like that, and it just popped up in the corner for me to read. Then I opened the messages. I found hours of sexting messages. Hours. He’d been sexting her that morning even, when I had slept next to him all night and we’d cuddled and kissed goodbye when he went to work. I wasn’t home when he returned. – Chetanzi via Reddit.

An Instagram picture of her kissing another guy. She obviously didn’t really think that one through. – said Kelmar101.

Alarm (wedding) bells

You’d think a wedding would be a happy occasion to celebrate love – not for Flowerbright.

“His mistress told me at the wedding of a mutual friend so that was nice. I held my cool until we left, I wasn’t giving either of them the satisfaction of seeing me look like the crazy person or ruining someone’s big day,” she wrote.

Esther Perel tells Mia Freedman why happy people cheat…(Post continues after audio.)

It’s all in the name

“I was seeing this guy who had a really distinct name… ‘exotic’ right?” Hayley said. “When I caught up with a friend and mentioned that I had been seeing him, he (the friend) put two and two together and realised that the guy had been seeing me at the same time as he was dating my friend’s roommate. The roommate confronted him about it in a text and got the reply: ‘oh’.”

Not so happy holidays

A long distance flight turned out to be a long distance nightmare for one anonymous contributor.

“Just got on a flight in London headed to Vegas. Sitting next to my girlfriend and she wants to show me something she has planned for the trip so gets out her phone. It opens to the messages and shows a chat with a guy (I know him) saying how much she is going to miss him and how she doesn’t want to go away with me anyway. The doors close on the plane and that was a really fucking fun 10-11hrs…”

Detective work

Turns out you can tell a lot by the state of the bathroom when it comes to your relationship.

“Came home from working a double shift and found the toilet seat up. Either my wife didn’t take a piss for 20 hours straight or there had been another man in my house. Suspected it was her “gay” friend from work. I also knew that said friend was trying to sell his house, so I called the real estate agent and asked the see his place,” wrote signalthree.

“Right inside the front door, I recognised one of her jackets hanging in the mud room. Proceeded to the living room and bam… right on the fucking mantel was a picture of my wife and this guy. We divorced shortly after. She ended up marrying this guy, then cheated on him and now they are divorced. Didn’t feel bad for him at all.” (Post continues after gallery.)

 Even more detective work

“My girlfriend told me she was heading out for a girls night and staying at a friend’s afterwards,” Reddit user Swim76 said. “Her phone accidentally dialled mine from her handbag, just after I spoke to her. It left a message on my phone and I heard her talking to someone about a $19.50 charge that can be paid in the morning. After a bit of confusion it came to me and I Googled $19.50 and valet and it came up with one hotel in our city. I called the reception and asked to be put through to my ex-partner’s name’s room and they put me through – she then admitted she was cheating.”

About to buy a house

“It was the week of my 27th birthday, and we were about a week away from closing on a house that I’d saved around 12k for a down-payment on,” GinGimlet wrote on Reddit. “I started to feel a burning sensation when I peed. I hadn’t had sex with anyone but him for more than two years. He eventually confessed.”

Terrible timing

“I was driving across country to move. He had moved ahead of us and he chose to wait until we were 600 miles from home, about halfway there,” wrote Iheartorange.

“This was after I had resigned my job, given up our apartment, packed a pick up truck (that my mum and dad were driving), and become certified to teach in another state. I had the dog, cat, two mice and my child in my car. We turned around and went back after he told me. He left me with an incredible amount of debt and a great deal of heartache.”

Straight to the point.

Nothing can prepare you for the shock of seeing the betrayal in action, as one woman unfortunately found out.

“Walked in on them in bed together about three weeks ago. She was also a close friend. They work together and I’ve since found out they were carrying on for weeks before I found them. It has destroyed me,” she wrote. (Post continues after gallery.)

Facebook error

“She had a number of alternate Facebook pages under pseudonyms. One day, one of them showed up on my ‘suggested friends’ and I said ‘Hey, this girl looks a lot like SO.’ So, I looked at it. Sure enough, it was her, and she had an active relationship going on with someone else. I later found two more of these pages.” shared Primeechoes.

Dreams can be a giveaway

Don’t discount your nightmares, they might be more accurate than you think:

I dreamt my friend and boyfriend they were cheating on me. All I had to do was ask my ex the next day and he was too guilty to lie. My subconscious knows shit. – Mary, 32.

I had a dream about her cheating and then I lied about having to work late. So I come home early and she is not home from work yet, so I call her. She says she is at home too thinking I’m at work. Then I hear a mans voice in the background… moved out before she came home. – ChrisHernandez on Reddit

Oversharing

Hot tip: if you’re doing some bad, probably best not to share it with the world.

“One of my best friends was bragging in the lunch room that he’d been sexting my girlfriend thinking it wouldn’t get back to me. Fun fact: it did. I called her out on it and she tried to deny it at first. She eventually conceded,” wrote EnterTheDibble.

Do the maths

Beware the tagged photos.

“Found out via Facebook a few months after I had broken up with him. I was still friends with his siblings and parents and they were tagged in some photos of him. Holding his clearly to term newborn son. Less than nine months after I broke up with him,” wrote Mllexspookiness.

How did you find out a partner was cheating?