The Midults

Annabel Rivkin and Emilie Mcmeekan

Q:Dear A&E, last summer I had a drunken one-night stand with a man I met in a pub garden. I’ve told no one, but it’s all I can think about, especially when I’m in bed with my boyfriend. At first I decided to try to forget about it, but now, as our relationship gets stronger, the guilt’s getting worse. We’d been together three months when it happened and things still felt fairly new. I don’t know whether to tell my boyfriend – he has strong feelings about fidelity having been cheated on by an ex. I’m terrified of losing him, but it feels wrong to build a relationship on a lie — Ashamed

Dear Ashamed, we have talked ourselves round in circles over this. And we keep disagreeing with our own conclusions. There are ‘shoulds’ and there is ‘right’, but what is best?

We are all for honesty and open lines of communication within every flavour of relationship, but this is a tricky one. ‘Oh, no it isn’t!’ howl the morality police. Oh, yes it is, guys. Let’s unpack it.

The past year has played all kinds of funny tricks on us. You had a moment of madness in the maddest year in mad memory. And, last summer, when we suddenly found ourselves vaguely out and about again after the first lockdown, it activated all kinds of chemical reactions within us…

In an ideal world, you wouldn’t walk into the future with a man you had secretly cheated on early in the proceedings. But this is far from an ideal world and last year was far from an ideal year. They say, don’t they, that if you want to get laid on a date, see a horror film rather than a romcom because then you will want to seize life. Well, we have been living in a horror film for pretty much the past 10 months and you did what you did. We have all done stupid things. So what now?

We are concerned that if you tell your boyfriend, you may end up breaking your own heart. Who knows what his reaction will be? He might leave. He might punish you for ever or never trust you again. He might forgive you. But this is a huge risk. Many people would write this off as an early and meaningless indiscretion. They would say that it is, in the end, irrelevant. They would say that you feel too guilty to ever do something like this again; that you have learnt your lesson. And we were tempted to say all these things to you, but we chickened out.

Because lies are beasts. They squirm and they grow and they rattle the door of their cage and they have a nasty habit of escaping and developing a life of their own. This particular lie is already influencing your behaviour and none of us have any idea how you will feel about the deception or your boyfriend as time goes on. We don’t know if he is the One and we don’t know if you will be able to live with yourself. Unspoken guilt and shame tend to worry their way into our souls in the most unhelpful way. And if it gets bad enough then we often find that, after enough of this corrosion, we are no longer... us. And that is no way to look after yourself; no way to form a wholehearted relationship.

So this is crunch time. And, although we would in no way judge you if you kept your secret, we think that you will have to tell him because you are feeling so compromised. But tell him for you, not for him. Tell him because of the life you want to live and the person you want to be. Tell him that it happened before things got serious and that you love him and that you understand that you are taking a huge risk but that you believe it’s the only way you can build on what you have with him. Tell him you want a future with him. And if he leaves, he leaves. You will survive. You will suffer and you will grow. We understand if you choose to keep your mouth shut and see where things go but, in the end, we believe that to be the more dangerous choice.

Lies are beasts. They have a nasty habit of escaping and developing a life of their own

Do you have a dilemma that you’re grappling with? Email Annabel and Emilie on themidults@telegraph.co.uk. All questions are kept anonymous. They are unable to reply to emails personally