@arg092000 - Hello.
Yes, I could tell that it mattered to you. If I were dating I would not want to be in a relationship with anyone who did not gladly agree with me that cheating is 100% a deal breaker.
So, we both agree that faithfulness is 100% important.
What I am saying is that if it actually did not happen then it would be like being worried that Abraham Lincoln really wasn't ever president of the USA: it might have important consequences for history but it DEFINITELY is false.
There is not a reason to worry about something that isn't true.
However, you are worried because of uncertainty about it.
I would mention to your therapist about this (I am sure that you have already) about what exposure means for this. I myself would not feel comfortable about exposure because I would be very anxious thinking that I had cheated and threw away everything I had built with this person.
Instead I will just talk about it from my perspective. You specifically mention that you are concerned that if your fiance asks you if you cheated then you cannot tell them 100% that you cheated. I will focus on thinking through this hypothetical conversation.
I will assume that your fiance knows you are struggling with anxiety / OCD and is understanding. I also assume that they are not possessive or suspicious that you are an unfaithful kind of person, but know the kind of person that you are.
My suggestion for you to imagine is this: you can tell them that as far as you know (based on memories and based on evidence) there is no objective reason that you have to believe that you cheated. Then you say that the only reason that you cannot say for 100% certain that you DID NOT cheat is that you want to be honest with your fiance since you love them and want to be faithful to them but that you have anxiety that you might have cheated, against all evidence.
I then imagine that your fiance understands how you are and interprets it (based on not having anxiety and knowing that you want to tell them honestly the truth about the matter which is that you do not know that you did not cheat. Then as a normal person, they interpret what you said to actually mean that you did not cheat.)
The take away is that I am saying that you are concerned that your fiance will ask if you cheated and you won't be able to give the answer "I did not cheat" because you want to be honest with your fiance (otherwise you could just lie, which I don't recommend) and because you are not confident that you did not cheat.
However, as a neutral observer I don't see any reason to believe that you cheated and because we are talking on this website I have every reason to believe that it did not happen.
If you went to a night club, got drunk, and woke up somewhere you did not recognize then maybe you could have real concerns about having cheated.
However, if you have been sober [or only not sober when away from people you could cheat with] and you have no evidence that you cheated then I think that you might want to consider my suggestion.
No one can know anything with 100% certainty as far as being unable to imagine the opposite. I don't want to put any ideas in your head, but for me I could imagine that I am actually an alien that was formed in a lab on Mars and was swapped out with a real human child at the hospital where my mother thinks she gave birth to me. Then I shouldn't ever marry a real human because that would be wrong.
However, the thought does not make it true. I can worry about this imagination but before I thought of it it had maybe 0.00000000000000000000001% chance to be true and after I started worrying about it, the change remained the same. I can't change the past by worrying about it, which means that I have just as much a reason to worry about it now than I did long before I even started worrying about it.
Suppose the following: I am actually a human born normally but I somehow am worried about being an alien. Me being more and more worried about being an alien does not make me any more an alien than me being worried about not being an alien. It just makes me a worrying human.
Nothing about me being human is changed by me worrying about it, except that it makes me a more miserable human.
Back to the relationship talk, I wonder what you would tell me if I had similar concerns. Let me tell you a fictitious story.
I am dating a girl. We both highly value faithfulness in a marriage and in dating because we both want to have a happy marriage. (We can even raise the stakes by saying that I believe that God will punish me if I am unfaithful.)
I love her and I want to hold onto her and care for her forever. I also don't ever want to lie to her because dishonesty is disgusting and because I love her. I don't want to be a fake and make things up. I also don't want to break her trust and be unworthy of her love.
Being a liar is me taking advantage of her. She might even find out that I had lied, so I won't anyway. I want to have a completely trusting relationship and I want her to similarly be honest with me and to love me.
(This is all actually true. I don't like lying at all and really hate how people are ok with bending the truth.)
Now, we continue the story. We both are talking about getting married. I am not the kind of person that wants to "pop the question" (even if it is romantic) because we both want to honestly talk about the relationship and whether we both are good fits and all that.
Because we talked about being faithful when we started dating, the topic comes up. She tells me that she has only thought romantically about me and that she loves me. She says that she has not met her exes in person and has not interacted with them at all except, one time she ran into one of them at a grocery store. She said hello because he asked how she was doing but that was it. Because I have gotten to know her and I know how she is and the person that she is, I trust her.
She might not have even had the need to mention that she ran into her ex. I trust her and she only had to say she had been faithful.
After she said all that, I tell her about me now. I tell her that because I am concerned about being faithful to her and I love her, I am kind of getting anxious about having cheated but without concrete reason. I don't hang around girls casually at all and only speak to women at work as part of being friendly because I don't want to be rude.
I am looking forward to my relationship with my girlfriend developing and being even better in the future and am not interested in flirting with women at work.
This is all normal for me and how I normally act. My family and coworkers know how I am and attest to this.
I also don't have any emails between me and my high school sweet-heart because I cut ties a long time ago. As for another girl I had liked previously, I have to drive nearby her home on my way to work but have not stopped by to try to rekindle an old flame because I am faithful to my girlfriend.
However, I am feeling anxiety because I am scared that I might have thought about cheating. I am not sure that I did think about cheating but I might have thought about cheating and forgot. I am also scared that I might have even done something to act on the cheating because if I forgot about thinking about it, I might have forgotten about acting on it.
I might have actually stopped by that girl's house and tried to flirt with her. If I were to ask this girl if I did, she might tell me that I did not but if we had cheated together then should I trust her? or myself?
I don't have to tell my girlfriend about all these random fears (though I might if necessary or if we were in premarital counseling and the counselor thought that it was a good idea).
So, I tell my girlfriend that I am having anxiety because although there is absolutely no reason for me to believe that I cheated and every reason to believe that I did not cheat (which is all that I can really ask for), I am scared that I might have but am blocking it out of my memory.
I tell her I hope I love her but am very scared that I don't actually love her and actually am a liar who wants to trick her into marrying a cheater who is going to take advantage of her.
She understands what I am going through because I have told her that I sometimes have anxiety due to OCD of having done something that could cause harm to other people but do not know if I actually did it or not because it probably did not happen and I am imagining it.
She knows that this is my way of being honest with her but I am just having trouble right now saying what I really want to say because I want to be honest with her but am having some deep fears because I cherish our relationship and don't want to have ruined it.
That is the end of the story.
I recommend also to listen to some OCD stories from people who have fears about causing harm in a way that is different than what you suffer with.
Then when listening to them and knowing that they are afraid of things that they did not do, try to imagine switching shoes and feeling how other people feel when listening to your fears.
I myself haven't had the kind of fear you describe, but I understand how I might come to that kind of fear. I know that many of the people on this website have different anxieties and that sometimes when listening to them I can imagine being them and being scared.
However, it is not so easy to imagine being them when I am having anxiety because it feels weird. I myself am having anxiety but it feels weird to imagine being someone else that is completely unaffected by the thing that I think is messing with me because they think that it either does not exist or is just not something to be afraid of.
Sometimes I ask for confirmation that things are actually ok because I want reassurance that I am actually imaging things. If I don't have that, I might be basically gaslighting myself.
However, it is sometimes hard to admit to myself that I am imagining my problems.
In conclusion, I certainly do think that the things you are concerned about would be something to be concerned about if they were plausible.
However, if you are being honest with yourself and ask if normal good people are concerned about things that they have no evidence for, then I think you will have to at least think about the idea that this might be just an OCD anxiety flare up.
I myself can't confirm the evidence that you have, but if you looked at it and tried being honest about how you looked at it then there is not anything more you can do.
Worrying about it isn't going to make the fear go away (it will only make it worse) and it will not make the evidence better or worse. It might even make you think that the evidence is more compelling when it is really not compelling at all.
It will wear on you and maybe even on your relationship. Because your relationship obviously matters to you (otherwise we would not be talking about it), which is worse:
worrying about something that you cannot prove to a 100% confidence because you won't accept any amount of evidence and so you wear at your sanity and relationship because you are taking evidence that is objectively 99.999% and by worrying are trying to imagine that it is actually much less?
or accepting that 99.999% is actually a good confidence percent and that even though you could worry that the 0.001% could be so terrible you choose to move on and accept the risk because it would be foolish to waste a beautiful relationship over such bad odds?
It is kind of a lottery ticket. Don't play the lottery because the people who run lotteries know that they are making a killing off people who bet they will win but 99.999% of people who play are essentially flushing their hard-earned money down the toilet. (And those who win end up ruining their lives because they don't know how to manage large sums of money.)
I apologize for this long rambly comment. I really understand that this matters to you and feel that it is a product of anxiety, not reality and would hate to see someone not be happy with their relationship because of fears of something that likely does not exist.
So, when you say that you feel that everyone is lying to you but you don't know why, I instead feel that you are tricking yourself into believing that everyone is lying and that deep down you DO know why (OCD and anxiety), otherwise you would not be posting about it here. If you actually deep down knew that you cheated, you would not be here telling people on THIS forum about this. I think you know that you didn't cheat but are just scared.
Here are more things to consider:
Why would everyone want to lie to you? Why is it that when you looked into the evidence for yourself you saw no evidence? Why is it that you do not remember any of the evidence when you are the primary witness?
What is the chance that you are just imagining this rather than somehow all the evidence miraculously disappearing?
What if a close friend of yours that tends to have anxiety told you exactly what you said here? Would you think they were imagining it?
If I was a judge in your case, I would throw this case out of court.
No one has any evidence and the eye-witnesses don't remember seeing anything. This means that there isn't ANY evidence that there was even a crime but the prosecutor (you) are suspicious and want to prosecute the defendant (yourself) because the defendant (yourself) MIGHT have done it, even without any good reason to think that anything actually happened.
This would be a terrible abuse of justice if I allowed this case to go to trial and to let the prosecutor try to destroy the life of the defendant without any evidence that a crime was even committed.
The investigators (you) even took the defendant (you) into questioning and grilled the defendant for hours and hours, trying to question everything that the defendant said or might have said and subjecting them to extreme stress hoping to get a confession (even if it is a false confession). The defendant did not confess and still does not think they did it, however the investigators know deep down that they don't really have a case because there is no evidence and the defendant keeps denying it. The investigators seem not concerned about locking up an innocent person.
This is a huge abuse of justice if I as a judge allow such things to continue.
It would also be an injustice to your loved ones (your family and your fiance) if I let the prosecutor be an accuser without any evidence of anything, knowing that the investigators looked into it very carefully and still did not produce any evidence.
They only could come up with conjectures and speculations that MAYBE could have been evidence. There isn't any good evidence for me to even consider this case.
However, I am not the judge in this case nor have I seen the evidence. In my perspective, you are the judge and I hope you see the facts of the case as they are and judge rightly as a fair steward of your responsibility on the bench.
I wish that your anxiety relents and you feel better soon. :-)
[On a side note, I recommend premarital counseling / reading books together about relationships and your shared values and life goals. This is my advice as a non-married individual without any relationship experience, but I can't see why it would hurt, for all people interested in getting married.]
