I actually prefer this response when it’s honest vs. a lie made up to make me feel better. I don’t believe a cheater can forget how he felt during different points in the affair, but when asking for details irrelevant to them I can see how they’d not remember. For example "what was she wearing that night?"🤷♀️, "did you take her to this restaurant before or after you went here with her?"🤷♀️ "what did she say when you said XYZ?" 🤷♀️…. These answers would be hard to remember to those who don’t find them not worthy. However, questions like "how did you feel coming home after f’ing them the first time?" "Did the guilt get easier" , How did you justify your cheating?" . These answers you don’t forget.
I really don't know how to describe my memory, I usually tend to say it is very contextual. I had an EA and not a PA, but your example really landed with me as to how there are many irrelevant details that never get recorded. I remember the first time that my EA AP sent me a nude photo and I can give an approximate timeline based off context, but it's been over 6 years now and all correspondence long since deleted. The reason I can give an approximate timeline is because when that message came through with an unsolicited nude pic, I was at work. I was in a colleague's office talking with him about a couple of things I needed his help with. This colleague left the company in the summer of 2018, so it happened sometime between 2017 and him leaving the company in 2018. So, through context I have a sense of kind of when that event happened, as it was of course a significant milestone in the boundary crossing that lead to my EA...I remember the sense that it was really an escalation of what had not been that sexually charged up to that point as we were friends for a number of years before that point.
I'm not proud of that moment, in fact, that is a day I look back at now and say, I could've stopped it there. I remember that I was a mess that day mentally and emotionally and I know in the timeline about where it fits, but at this moment I couldn't tell you a more precise date because I know events that bounded it on either side such as my colleague leaving, since the message came through while I was sitting in his office and then his departure feels like it happened a few months later.
If there are waywards out there who are/were like me and they are struggling with the timeline, try to think of events in context. Maybe there was a birthday, holiday, or other special day that is memorable because of how bad you felt or how much the guilt was getting to you and you remember it ruining Thanksgiving or something along those lines. Well, thankfully, Thanksgiving happens every year in November and if you remember it was 2017 (Nov 23, 2017), well you can Google the date and line up your timeline around that date. Like maybe you and AP had sex for the first time on the day before Thanksgiving in 2017 but you don't know the date, well now with Google you can tell your BS that Wed was Nov 22, 2017 and you can piece together a timeline like that.
Myself - BH & WH - Born 1985 Her - BW & WW - Born 1986
D-Day for WW's EA - October 2017D-Day no it turned PA - February 01, 2020