Can you Stay With Someone After They Cheated on you?
Thinking so hard about if you can, you forgot to think if you should.
“My boyfriend cheated on me not physically, but through online dating and chatting with other girls. I stayed with him after and it has been a week today. It was hard at first but it seems to be getting better and he’s very apologetic. Can it work?”
It differs from relationship to relationship and person to person. Cheating is seen to some as the worst thing you can possibly do in a relationship with the consequence of it being a direct breakup and probably a lot of name-calling.
To others, cheating is a gateway for the cheated to also cheat. Cheating is a valid reason to hurt because you’ve been hurt. To be angry and act with anger and feel validated. To some, cheating is like a mini-purge — Everything becomes legal and nobody can stop you.
Lastly, cheating can also be not such a bad thing to some people. This depends on the person’s feelings towards the cheater, the person’s definition of cheating, and what the person’s wants and needs are in the relationship.
When you ask if it can work, you’re asking if what you’re doing is right — Sure enough, if you look around the web a little you’ll find reassurance. However, by asking if it can work you’re also having second thoughts. Why? Only you can know the full reason.
Fear of having to start all over with a whole new person seems less painful than to try to make it work with someone that, if given the chance, would cheat on you again. The mentality of some is that it is easier to repair than to rebuild.
Remember, insecurity and infidelity are really good friends.
Let’s say it’s not insecurity but trust that allows you to stay with someone that, for a moment, a day, week or month, thought of you second to someone else — Did you trust you’d never get cheated on?
Say it’s communication and understanding that allowed you to stick together and made it easy to reconcile with someone that completely disregarded your existence for brief pleasure with someone else, if everything is dandy and better a week later, how much more can you take before you break if cheating alone did nothing?
Unlike mistakes and relationship issues where you can listen to apologies, possibly work things out and come to a mutual agreement, cheating is incredibly difficult to manage because it’s neither a mistake or an issue, it’s a voluntary act.
As the person that was cheated on, even if you do forgive, you know you won’t forget. The same as the person that cheated on you — They won’t forget the pass you gave them.
You see, what people forget about forgiveness is that it is also incredibly powerful not to the person giving, but to the one receiving forgiveness. Not because it’s a wake up call and a second chance, but because it’s informational — Depending on what you forgive, you’re allowing the chance of something happening again. When you lower your forgiveness standard as low as cheating you’re pretty much the easiest going person to step over.
At what point are you worse to yourself than the person that cheated on you?
It’s not that relationships can’t work after cheating, it’s that they shouldn’t. For most people, cheating is the only line you cross and cannot come back from because most people have a healthy mental standard about this topic.
The few that make it back and somehow truly bring their relationship to health from a rocky moment where cheating was involved are a rare select few. Those same few couples live with the cloud of what happened in the past. You risk anything becoming a risk. You build a firewall in between you two for anything with remotely any chance to hurt you and you’ll call that happiness.
The relationship can work, it shouldn’t, but it if does… It won’t be forever.
