How to Handle a Serial Cheating Father?
He’s wondering how to navigate a relationship (or not) with his serial cheating father. His mother passed away and his surviving parent is a FW.
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Hi Chump Lady,
Your writing has been a stabilizing and clarifying force in my life — thank you.
I’m a man in my thirties, in a stable long-term relationship. My question concerns my parents.
Twelve years ago, my mother took her own life. She and my father were together for 37 years, during which he cheated on her constantly. While raising four kids, she managed to hide from the truth of who he really was.
I maintained a relationship with my father after her death — painful beneath the surface, but a relationship nonetheless — until two years ago, when I finally went no-contact. The reason is simple, if devastating:
He is constitutionally incapable of remorse.
His neglect left me with lasting health consequences, and I have struggled with my mental health for a long time because of it.
Still, the pull of family loyalty runs deep, and cutting him off has brought its own grief — a confusing, disorienting kind, because there’s no clean loss to mourn. Your writing has helped me better understand what my mother was up against, and for that I’m grateful.
I’m trying to build my own life, but some degree of contact seems unavoidable — family gatherings, that sort of thing. Even now, being in the same room with him leaves me overwhelmed with an extraordinary mix of sadness, shame, and rage. The knowledge that he will never offer validation or remorse — not for what he did to my mother, not for what he did to us — doesn’t seem to get easier. I’m not sure it ever will. It’s all the more lonely since my three siblings seem to tolerate him on some level.
When we all found out about the cheating, he found a way to make us feel somewhat sorry for him.
He was “trying to feel like a young cool guy”, that whole story. And said things like “I know I’m the one who has to wear the Scarlett letter.”
I never revisited things with him after my mom’s suicide, as he really had us all feeling sorry for him for a bit. If I had brought it up with him, I’m afraid of what the escalation might have brought out in me. At that point, I just wasn’t ready to lose a second parent.
I’ve confronted him on small things unrelated, and he always deflects, is completely remorseless, or at best does some performative apology and then finds a way to make himself the victim.
On some level he scares me.
He’s never been physically dangerous, but his rage and agitation can be disturbing.
I’ve been in therapy for a long time and it has helped enormously. But I’ll be honest: my happiest fantasies are still the ones where he’s simply no longer in the world. And that feels awful.
Thank you.
Son of a Chump
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Dear Son of a Chump,
There’s nothing wrong with you for feeling relief at the thought of your father’s permanent absence. Death is the ultimate no contact. The sort that requires zero effort from you and is socially acceptable. Why don’t you talk? He’s 6 feet under.
Right now you have to navigate every family interaction, invitation, holiday, and social obligation to avoid him. That takes continual mental labor to enforce those boundaries.
Here’s the thing about boundaries — you don’t have to defend them. Their yours. You don’t have to marshal a defense to your siblings, nosy strangers, forgiveness trolls, or anyone else. Actually, that’s the easy part. Often the harder person to convince is yourself. That you matter. And you’re allowed to have boundaries. That you CAN decide this relationship is NOT acceptable and you WILL NOT continue it.
You might be stuck in a bargaining stage of grief loop.
Still, the pull of family loyalty runs deep, and cutting him off has brought its own grief — a confusing, disorienting kind, because there’s no clean loss to mourn.
Family loyalty is an interesting word choice. Your father is a serial cheater, which means he has no family loyalty. So, just like a chump in reconciliation, I’d ask: why are you trying to maintain a broken contract?
I get that our connection to our parents is primal. It’s not a connection I would sever lightly. After all, this person raised you, financially provided for you. The bar, IMO, has to be pretty high. But your father pole vaults right over it. From what you’ve shared, he’s scary, shows no contrition for the grief he’s caused and pivots immediately to self pity.
You don’t have the raw materials for a relationship.
Or at least not a healthy one. And because you ARE a healthy person with a stable loving relationship, any contact with this guy is going to be painful. Some people can exist on a superficial plane. That’s one approach to dealing with a narcissistic parent. Find some nonthreatening common ground, like say, baseball, and avoid every conversation that isn’t baseball.
Essentially, it’s cool, bummer, wow for FWs. The FW gets the veneer of family bonhomie and everyone else gets a stomach ache. #winning
But you’re not wired for fraudulence, Son. And you have a healthy sense of self-preservation. Being around the injustice of this FW enrages you, naturally you’d prefer to not stroke out.
Twelve years ago, my mother took her own life. She and my father were together for 37 years, during which he cheated on her constantly. While raising four kids, she managed to hide from the truth of who he really was.
A bazillion chumps are going to read that and feel like your father is a murderer. Those are feelings. It’s more accurate to say your father is an abuser. His serial cheating must have been destabilizing to your mother. The trauma of D-Days makes many, many chumps consider un-aliving themselves (I’m writing around the AI censor bots here). Some succeed. We are not a neutral audience on this topic.
The grief makes you crazy.
I thought about driving into highway medians. My first D-Day was spent talking to someone all night on one of those mental health hotlines. They let me blather. I was numb, disassociated, then sick with stress illnesses. I cannot overstate how traumatic it is to discover your partner’s double life. To be continually devalued, gaslit, threatened — and then have deep sunk costs and societal pressure to stay with your abuser.
Your mother had four children with this scary man. She did not grow up in an enlightened age of “You go, Girl” TikTok reels, or online support groups for single moms. She grew up in an age where you were a freak if you weren’t partnered and straight. Where your whole worth — and economic livelihood — was tied up in being attractive to a man. Keeping him was your JOB. Failing to keep him was your failure.
I can only imagine her grief. I can also imagine wanting to nail that grief to your father’s door, or wadding it into a ball and choking him with it.
LOOK WHAT YOU DID.
But he can’t look at it. Because he’s a FW. He doesn’t have the raw materials to look at it. Now, you can go untangle that skein if it helps you. Read up on personality disorders. Outofthefog.net is a good online resource. Also Dr. George Simon, Sandra Brown, and Dr. Peter Salerno. You will understand that some people don’t bond and connect. They’re transactional and manipulative. Some might be dazzlingly talented and charming, but inside they’re barbed wire monkeys. Best to keep your distance.
Some people aren’t available for relationships for other reasons beyond personality disorders, some people have addictions or mental illness. Sometimes people are a combo plate of all three. My point is, it’s not YOU, it’s your father. You don’t have a failure to connect — he lacks an outlet. There’s no one there to plug-in to.
He was “trying to feel like a young cool guy”, that whole story. And said things like “I know I’m the one who has to wear the Scarlett letter.”
What letter is your dead mother wearing? Seriously f*ck that guy.
On some level he scares me.
I believe you.
Now believe yourself. It’s okay if he’s dead to you. He’s probably dead inside anyway.
Son of a Chump,
I am so sorry this happened to your family, the pain of it all echos in every paragraph. Your mother’s loss but also her visceral act of leaving, your Father’s inability to engage with you on a level that you wish he could. How as children, we want to be able to rage, scream and cry at our Parents and still know they love us and might try to fix it. Your Father barely sits in the room for polite conversation. It’s a big snarl that isn’t your fault, but it’s still a messy, sad emotional inheritance you got left to clean up. Kind of like a horde in a garage.
With your therapist, perhaps spell out what reconnecting with your father in a perfect world would look like. What you’d want from him, to hear from him, what he’d be like.
Then, look at how he really is, and if you think he’s capable of being that person even if he wanted to be. Would that person let his Son, who had lost his mother, drift away so easily?
Think through what a safe, superficial relationship with him would be and what it would look like. Is it making small talk at family gatherings but that’s all? Whatever form feels realistic to you, it likely requires you to fully grieve and accept that he’s not the Father you deserved or needed him to be.
Maybe it’s finding ways to see the family members you do care about on your own terms. A bbq you host at a local park. An event where you control the list. Maybe it’s getting involved in your community with older men who you can look up to and respect.
As an adult, you can build a family around your character. You can remember your Mother and tell her stories. Grief is big, and we carry it always. But we can grow a life that is big enough to hold the grief and more. Whatever you decide about your Father, the grief is there, but so is the rest of your life and what you decide to do with it.
Wow your father sounds like a stone cold sociopath. He abused your mom to the point of suic*de and yet HE is the one deserving sympathy?
Maybe your siblings should read this blog.
MY exFIL is a serial cheating FW who finally abandoned his family for one of the affair partners. A grandiose narcissist without true remorse.
So the irony is exH narcopath had a distant uneasy relationship with FW FIL for decades. However now they’re “closer” than before because exH turned out to be a serial cheater narcissistic sociopath himself! Decade of secret double life. Theft of 7 figure sum. Lies, abandonment, post divorce abuse. They are finally getting along better because the son turned out to as hideous as the father!
Be supremely glad you’re nothing like that scumbag of a sperm donor society calls your “father”. That’s why you can’t stand him. You see the monster behind the mask.
Archer your story is mine! One of the reasons I started to suspect cheating is that all of a sudden FW’s father became a hero.
I ended my relationship with my mother in 2003. Lots of details and reasons but I know she had affairs.
It was painful to do so. But it was far far far LESS painful than attempting to maintain the relationship.
There was never any trust or safety and there was never going to be any trust or safety.
I am not required to lie down in front of a freight train as a condition of staying in contact with anyone, even if it’s a parent.
If you don’t have trust and safety, you don’t have a relationship. You have an entanglement. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a parent, a relative, a friend, a romantic partner. That’s why it feels like being snared. No trust no safety = no relationship. This is the number one reason for ending any kind of relationship with anybody.
She died in 2021. It’s complicated grief. Grief about was wasn’t is just as real as grief about what was.
It’s been my experience that ending a familial relationship is akin to managing chronic pain or a chronic illness. It’s a very big deal.
There was a man who had to cut his arm off to free himself when he got caught by a boulder. If he didn’t cut his arm off he would die. I felt like that. It was LESS PAINFUL to stay
I have had the assistance of two very good therapists since 1985. (I have a doctor for my body and one for my mind…)
I would never consider navigating big things like this without one, just like I would never do surgery on myself.
♥️
TYPO….”it was LESS PAINFUL to stay away than to stay in it”
(Editing window closed!)
Ending my relationship with my mother was not painless. It was about choosing LESS PAIN. If that makes sense….
PS….cheaters and side pieces do not have trust and safety in their relationship with each other. They maintain denial.
Son of a Chump, are you a friend of Bill Wilson? Sounds like you might be in recovery….
♥️
I have to wonder just how complicit dear old Dad was in Mom’s un-aliving. Because guess what guys like him do when you tell them that’s what you feel like? Nothing. They don’t insist you see a therapist, they don’t beg you to call a hotline, they don’t haul you to the hospital. They shrug and make sure the life insurance is up to date.
And sometimes they give fate a helping hand.
You will likely never know just what conversations took place between your parents. But your FW father doesn’t deserve or need your sympathy.
I cut off a FW parent. It is painful and scary at first, but it gets much better as time goes on. If you’re going to relate to him, you have to set the rules and enforce them (exhausting) and don’t fall for the manipulation. Learning those skills is a good exercise – there are people like this all around us, at work, in our kids’ schools. It’s impossible to never deal with them.
No law says you have to deal with the one who contributed half your genes, though.
Peace.
My mother was an addict and violent towards me until I got big enough to be a threat. For that reason, I withdrew and pretty much went my own way in adulthood. Despite living in the same town, I only visited once a month at most. My father was still alive, and I cared about him too. He had always been very passive around her, so my feelings toward him were mixed.
I moved away, and they aged. My mother developed dementia, but from a distance, I monitored the situation and did what I could to make sure they were taken care of. I still had an aunt there (Mom’s sister), so that helped. After my father died, my sibling was in charge legally and frankly did a very poor job. But I continued to do what I could. When she died, I cried at the graveside, and that was it for heavy feelings of grief. I grieved for years over the situation with my parents prior to their passing.
There was no real closure with either of my parents, so I got it when my divorce attorney commented that I might not get closure with my ex either. With my ex, I was polite during closeout and got things done, but I stopped initiating contact once the legal obligations were over. And I didn’t reveal anything substantive about myself or our college kids then. He raged and threatened legal action periodically for a while, and then gave up.
In each case, I was a decent person about it, though, and that counted.
Son of a Chump,
Your father is clearly not a safe or healthy person for you to be around. That is the “be all and end all” of this … it’s not just that he doesn’t “spark joy,” he sparks a traumatic response from you. Not only do you have every right put whatever boundary in place you see fit, including going no contact with him, I’d argue that you have a duty to yourself to do just that.
The only person who needs to give you permission to do this is you; the fact that some elements of wider society would want us to forgive any harm perpetrated upon us by those that we share a genetic link with is BS,
LFTT
Dear SoC,
I send love. And thank you for sharing your story and reminding me I must stay alive on this planet to continue the relationship with my children. The theft of reality, time,safety and money that the cheater justifies affects the children, not just the chump parent.
My suggestion: nurture the relationships with your siblings. Are you close now or estranged? Please, spend the time and money you would on therapy—figuring out the relationship with your dad and trying to come to peace—to focus on your siblings who shared your childhood, share your reality and can be with you for another 50 years. And as adults, we can create our own families! With friends, cousins, mentors, make strong connections with people you can trust. Build something new and beautiful to fill that void. You are resilient! Humans rebuild after fire, flood, all sorts of devastation. You have the tools and the strength to rebuild a trusting and loving family of choice.
I have faith in you!