I Refused to Talk to My Brother After He Got With My Cheating Ex and Now Everything Is a Mess
Imagine your marriage collapses because your spouse confesses to cheating, and then, years later, the person you looked to as your ride-or-die just… starts seeing that same person. That’s exactly the explosive, private grief laid bare in a Reddit post that asked: AITAH for refusing to talk to my brother after he got with my cheating ex?
The original poster, u/Few_Advantage_8087, a 43-year-old man, said his world fell apart when his then-wife of four years told him she had been unfaithful and wanted him to attend therapy with her. What followed was a mess of divorce, betrayal, family pressure and a threat over inheritance, and he cut his brother out for nearly five years. The post got 389 upvotes and 60 comments because the situation is equal parts painful, awkward and morally thorny.
How the betrayal started: a confession that upended everything
According to the poster, his wife, a nurse, asked him to join her in therapy. He went thinking it was about work stress, but she confessed she had been sleeping with a co-worker and was seeing a therapist because of guilt and conflicting feelings. She suggested couple counseling; his reaction was immediate and raw.
The OP wrote he told her, “go ** yourself” and divorced her. He says the split was a mess and he lost a few friends over it. That initial wound is important: it wasn’t a distant, abstract cheating rumor. It was an intimate, brutal rupture, acknowledged by the spouse herself in a therapy setting, which makes the betrayal explicit and impossible to soften.
Finding out his brother was involved: stunned, then cut off
Two years after the divorce, the poster learned through gossip that his brother, someone he describes as “like my twin” who is two years younger, had not only hooked up with the ex but was actively dating her. He says he couldn’t believe it at first, but the reports turned out to be true. The emotional tone in his post is icy and absolute: he blocked his brother on everything, told him to “go to hell,” and effectively disowned him. He even told his parents he would cut them off if they tried to force reconciliation. The brother is now getting married in October, not to the ex, the OP clarifies, but the wedding invitation would not be accepted. For the OP, the brother “might as well be dead” to him.
Family pressure and the will: money and manipulation enter the picture
What turned the situation from private grief into a family-wide eruption was the reaction from their parents. The OP says his parents weren’t happy about the cut-off, and that his father called and threatened to take him out of the will. The poster wrote he doesn’t necessarily care about being excluded financially, but he’s “so confused why everyone wants me to suck up my feelings and forgive a guy that needed an ultimatum to realize he shouldn’t be smashing his brother’s ex.” That line exposes the heart of his anger: it’s not just the sex or the dating, it’s the sense that his brother ignored a basic sibling boundary and then expects everybody to act like nothing happened.
How Reddit reacted: sympathy, practical advice and righteous anger
Commenters mostly sided with the OP and echoed the sense that his brother crossed a red line. Top comments pointed out the cruelty of the father’s will threat and the importance of personal autonomy. u/MoomahTheQueen wrote, “A wedding invitation is just that, not a royal decree. You have complete autonomy over your own life. Threatening to leave you out of a will is both pathetic and manipulative.” Others were blunt in their moral judgments: u/Broken_Truck said, “He slept with your ex wife. Good reason to disown your brother.” Several commenters highlighted the family dynamics and emotional invalidation: u/Lianamara said they would write the sibling off too and criticized the parents for trying to force forgiveness, calling out how that makes the OP feel “invalidated.” Another commenter, u/Worldly_Shirt_2278, wondered whether the parents knew the full truth and suggested that some families prioritize the appearance of unity over reality.
The most painful part: betrayal from both directions
Many commenters also acknowledged how layered this pain must be. u/Solid-Community-4016 wrote, “That’s rough… definitely NTA here. Feeling cheated on by both your ex wife and brother must be painful.” Another user, u/juzme99, even suggested a possible motive: that the ex might have been trying to punish the OP for divorcing her and destroy his relationship with his brother. Whether or not that was true, it helped explain why this felt like a coordinated, doubled betrayal, not two isolated bad choices. The OP’s insistence that his brother needed an “ultimatum to realize he shouldn’t be smash his brother’s ex” underscores the way loyalty expectations differ between families, and why perceived hypocrisy or cowardice in a sibling can be intolerable.
Why etiquette, loyalty and money make this messier than it looks
On the surface this is about sex and dating, but under the surface it’s about family rules, trust and consequences. The OP set a boundary, cut off contact, and is being pressured to reverse it. The father’s will threat makes the stakes explicit: love and money are being used as pressure points. That will strike a nerve for anyone who’s had to pick between emotional integrity and family peace. The Reddit conversation shows many people support boundaries, calling the will threat manipulative, while others hinted at complex motives and the possibility that the ex engineered the situation. Still, most responses land with a common theme: you don’t have to accept reconciliation just because it’s easier for the family to present a happy front.
What To Take From This
This story is a reminder that family loyalty is complicated and that boundaries are valid. If someone has betrayed you in a way that violates your core values, especially when someone close like a sibling crosses a line you thought was inviolable, you are allowed to grieve, to set distance, and to insist on respect before reopening contact. It’s also worth being practical: decide whether you want any relationship with the brother in the future and what would need to happen for trust to be rebuilt. If money is used as leverage against you, document conversations and consider whether reaching out to a neutral mediator or therapist could protect your mental health and clarify next steps. Ultimately, you don’t owe anyone a quick forgiveness; you owe yourself clarity, safety and a timeline that feels honest. Families will pressure you to “move on” for the sake of appearances, that pressure says more about them than it does about you.
