After a lifetime without any romance, my Sim met someone and started a relationship. While looking through his memories, I saw that he regarded this romance as "cheating." So I looked through his relationship panel and found him "engaged" to a Sim he barely knows, even though she is married to someone else! He had no memories of any romance with her or engagement.

I had him talk to the fake fiancee (easy because they live in the same apartment building). The break up option was available (no wonder, they have a low relationship score because they barely know each other), so he used it. She cried etc. and that was that. Everything seems fine now.

I later played the fake fiancee's household and she had the memory of the breakup but no memories of getting engaged to him in the first place or cheating on her husband. She is still married to her husband with no apparent issues. Obviously the false engagement was a glitch, but one I've never heard of before. Is it caused by Apartment Life, and do I need to worry about it?

"Engaged" is a flag in the relationships panel, and it's a fairly common glitch for flags to get unchecked - a wife may suddenly not know her own husband and child, while their relationships to her are fine. I have also, once or twice, found sims with one-sided relationships to people who have barely interacted with them, which is presumably a variant on the same glitch. There's no reason for any flag to be treated differently by the game than any other flag. In SimPE, they all appear as tickboxes, which are marked either "on" or "off." So it's reasonable to assume that this is what happened here.

As to what causes that glitch, I have no idea. It appears to happen randomly and is almost impossible to catch in the act, so I for one don't even have a guess as to what triggers it. A random power surge, a game crash while that bit of data was being saved, playing under a full moon before the stars are out, who knows? The place I've seen it most often is my huge sprawling corrupted-to-heck custom hood; but I've seen it in smaller hoods I have no reason to think are corrupted, too, so as long as you're maintaining good game hygiene generally I say, shrug and call it "just one of those things."

I do know that it's easy to fix with an editing tool, so you don't have to go through superfluous breakups. If you want to be able to do it on the fly, and have OFB and above, you can use SimBlender. If you want to be able to look at the whole picture and analyze it outside the game before making changes, SimPE is the way. If you already have a favorite editing tool, it will certainly have an easy way to set the flags correctly.

If you don't already have a favorite editing tool, this is as good a time as any to get one. Everyone here will be eager to sell you on their own personal favorite - SimPE and SimBlender are only the most popular, but InSim and SimManipulator have their own devotees.

Do you use mods that can change flags or relationship score? Like Insim, maybe Simblender, idk. Maybe you changed something without paying attention? It has happened to me before

I use mods, but none that I think affects relationship scores, and so far I haven't used anything really advanced like SimBlender or SimPE. I'm a little afraid of those, but I'm getting so into this game now that it's probably only a matter of time. Thank you, Peni Griffin, for the info.

I did once have a teenager supposedly engaged to someone. I never did find out who, as it was a fortnight before I moved computers and decided to strategically restart my game.

You can sometimes generate some backstory out of this. The first time it happened to me, a sim was suddenly not married to his wife, even though she was still marked as married to him. I didn't find out until she tried to make out with him and he pushed her away. As it happened, he was in the Military career and had recently drawn the UFO Encounter chance card. So maybe some alien transmission scrambled his memory. Or maybe it was the subsequent debriefing - what else did the Military make him forget?

The same thing happened to another sim of mine, he was no longer married to his wife. He, however, was a Celebrity Chef, and I rationalised his predicament simply as a stroke. Another sim no longer recognised her son as a relative, and what's more she double-bolted with him (but not he with her, of course, for he still acknowledged her as his mother). Again, a stroke. The poor woman had somehow got him confused with her late husband, whom he closely resembled.

These are the only three times this has happened to me, and all fairly early on in my hood's history. Nothing like it has happened again (that I've noticed, anyway) in the past two years of playing the game.

I noticed in past times playing that placing occupied lots in a neighborhood would sometimes generate "hidden" relationships between various occupied characters. by "hidden" I mean that they do not appear in the relationship panel.

by the way, I have always made sure that occupied lots have no connections (memories, memory markers, relationships, family tree) with other characters before packaging.

Some of those are hidden, though, mdsb. The only way to be (reasonably) certain of it is to make the lot and sims in a completely empty hood. If the packaged lot existed in a neighborhood, odds are good that some stray relationship got made, even while they were sitting in a bin; plus they leave behind bits of themselves.

This is very much a "do at your own risk" procedure. And though the odd changing of a flag could conceivably be one of the consequences, it's a comparatively mild one; and the flag thing happens in neighborhoods in which no one has been deleted/brought in from outside. So we can't cite that as a known, or even probable, cause.

Unless you know what you are doing in SimPE it is risky to use an occupied lot. Please don't upload it here.

This glitch is continuing to turn up from time to time in my game, with random Sims (even some already married) seemingly marked as engaged to unknown people, but I've found an advantage to it. You can use it to repeatedly throw wedding parties, meaning all the guests turn up in formal wear. The parties end badly, I suppose because no one gets married at them, but I still like giving my wealthy Sims the option to throw formal parties.

Do you have the ACR mod? That has an option that allows autonomous engagements, I think. It can be quite disconcerting after a wild party to discover that Beau Broke is now engaged to Dustin. How's that for an awkward conversation the next morning?!

No, I've never tried that mod, too afraid of the havoc it could wreak!

Have you deleted any sims from your neighbourhood or done any VBTs ? One of the major signs that an old neighbourhood of mine was corrupt was when memories started to get weird. Sims remembering getting married to their neighbours or family because I had corrupted the hood by deleting a few tombstones here and there.

Simlogical's formal sign will make everyone wear formal wear to a party.

I presume that once the dodgy flags are taken care of then it's safe to delete the cheating memory?

Yes, you can delete the cheating memory.

Not just ACR. Party snacks like the ones from SimSlice and the beer too can cause impromptu proposals.

Somehow that fits!

Its on there but it has never been active and most if not all of that part was removed by twojeffs because he never got it to work.

Ahh, I see - like Charity mentioned, I also have Simslice's party treats and beer, so it must've been those that have caused all my unorthodox engagements at parties! I just assumed it was ACR's doing. Thanks for clearing that up, marka!

Peni, do you think this random glitch is what happened to me? I had a sim who recently got married but its showing up as different sims in other people's memories. The game did crash while playing her lot but I figured when I go and replay the lot, it overrides that sort of thing?

No, I've been careful not to delete Sims or lots, not to move occupied lots, restrict spawning of Sims, etc. I haven't been playing the neighborhood too long and it mostly seems OK. I do use the boolprop cheats, mostly to change lifetime wants. Probably the most unusual cheat-y thing I've done is aging down a couple of Sims from adult to teen so I could send them to college. One of those showed up later as "engaged" but I don't know if there's a connection.

The false engagement doesn't show in their memories, which is what makes it so difficult to track down. Sometimes they are engaged to a Sim they literally have never met, so I only finally figure out who the fiancee is when they have the "break up" option on first meeting. Fortunately this has only happened to a handful of Sims and I'm able to play around it so far.

Thank you @Charity for mentioning that formal sign. I'll try to find it!

I normally use the Batbox to change LTWs, but the SimBlender also has that option.

I've had the false engagement bug a few times in my old neighborhoods. I was pretty panicked about the hood being corrupted, but aside from that one blip it was otherwise all clean.
Oddly enough, one of my sims got flagged as engaged to his sister.

I have had that glitch happen. My minister was married with twins, but ended up engaged (I think) to a military sim who was also married with 3 kids.

What was funny about that glitch? My minister 'broke' the engagement and his family was all like 'aw too bad' that the 'glitched relationship ended'.

The military sim did regularly walk by and kick over his trash can though. I think he took the breakup a bit harder....

Doesn't the other Sim always say no, though?