What I Learned From Being Cheated On
5 truths I’m passing on to you, dear reader
It’s hard to describe the horror felt in the moment you realize you’re being cheated on. Is it better to be told or to find out? I don’t know, but my money is on being told. A clean disclosure.
We’d just gotten back from a picnic with friends. It’d been a perfect afternoon, sitting under cherry blossom trees in full bloom. We talked about wanting to live abroad, the two of us, for a year sometime in the next decade. We drank the green tea I’d made from the cups I’d specially bought and ate the sandwiches we’d made together. We told friends from out of town the story of how we met, and afterward we went back to the apartment we shared. Does that sound like the prelude to being cheated on? It didn’t to me either.
I opened his phone to send myself the pictures from the day — my thumb print was in his phone — and there was his phone menu, helpful as ever: “Recommended app based on your usage at this time and this place.” It was Grindr. At this time and this place? At 4 PM on a Friday in our apartment?
He denied it at first. In the whole, awful experience, that was the second worst moment. I opened the app on his phone and showed him the messages. Then he was quiet. I asked if he’d sent nudes. He said he hadn’t. I showed him what had been recently deleted, and he was quiet again. He said, “I wanted it so badly not to be true.”
I went on three long walks. I’d only meant to go on the first, but when I got back to that apartment, to him and the dog, I had to leave again. I came back, and still couldn’t see him, couldn’t yet stand to see the shattered remains of two years. After the third walk, enough tears had been shed, making the reality of the situation a little closer to digestible. We sat down, and we talked about it for days, and after realizing how badly he wanted to try to fix the relationship and how badly I wanted to be the kind of person who could forgive this, who could grow past this, we agreed to try.
It was a week later when I found the photos in cloud storage that proved it hadn’t been the first occasion of cheating. In that moment more than any other, I realized how badly I had been lied to for two years, by someone I slept with every night, and how completely unaware I had been of it all; that I had no clue who exactly the person was that I kept calling my boyfriend. That was the worst moment.
While that reads like a horror story — some moments certainly were — I’d be lying if I said it was all bad, that I hadn’t learned something from it. Otto von Bismarck said, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” I hope that for someone this will be the wiser opportunity.
1. It’s often not the cheating itself that destroys a relationship.
It’s the lying. In What Makes Love Last? (WMLL), Gottman says that trust isn’t just a quality of a good relationship, it’s the foundation. Lying doesn’t just alienate the person who’s been lied to from the relationship, it alienates both parties from the relationship.
If you’re reading this and you’ve cheated, maybe you’re thinking about whether or not to come clean. Some opinions on the net hold that there are times when it’s better not to tell a partner that you’ve cheated. It’s up to you to decide. But if you do decide to come clean, or if the cheating comes out otherwise, you have to commit to full honesty and full transparency — no lying by omission. That’s the only thing that’s going to save your relationship. Give your partner the respect of the truth. You have to rebuild trust to overcome cheating, and your commitment to honesty is the best way to rebuild it.
It’s also the negative comparisons, what Gottman calls negative COMPs, that one or both of you has been accumulating for the other that destroy a relationship. How often are you comparing your partner to someone else, and how often has your partner been coming up short? Comparison to some idealized relationship, whether that’s one you’ve read about, one you’ve seen in movies, or even your parents’ relationship, erodes any relationship long before the cheating itself happens.
2. Good people cheat. Happy people cheat.
As we sat there looking at each other, the reality of the situation settling in, it must have been the second or third thing out of my mouth.
“Was it something I did? Something I said?”
“No. You’re perfect. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
As we started working through the exercises in WMLL, it was becoming increasingly apparent that we had a good relationship. We scored high on trust, we scored highly on the “story of us” (a metric for determining how invested in and happy you are with the narrative of the relationship). By every single metric Gottman threw at us, we were in the green. That made it all the more baffling.
Were there things he wasn’t happy about with the relationship? Sure. For whom isn’t that true? But the reality is, for every relationship that someone cheats in, there’s a worse one that no one cheats in. The problem isn’t necessarily the relationship — and don’t get me wrong, almost every relationship can be made stronger, healthier, happier — but the way one or both of you is coping with friction in the relationship: by turning away from the other and seeking some sort of validation or thrill outside the relationship.
And I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think he’s a person who made a mistake, and like all the rest of us he’s on the journey of growing up and become a better person every day. One analogy he came up with was the warning of a hot stove. You tell kids not to touch a hot stove, that it will burn them, and at some intellectual level they understand that, and yet some of them are going to touch the stove. It takes being burned to really get it.
No, not a bad person. He took full responsibility, didn’t blame me for anything, sat with me while I cried, let me say everything I needed to, respected every boundary and goal I set for us, and tried his very, very hardest to be honest. It just wasn’t all there yet.
3. There’s a decent chance at least one of you doesn’t have a mature understanding of love
This comes at the very end of WMLL, and you can see it echoed in so many quotes around the web.
The first step toward nurturing true love is to recognize what it looks like, with all of its imperfections and complications. The second is to honor it. Over the years I have seen too many people turn away from their partner and toss out a good relationship. I have come to believe that the greatest obstacle to love may be a sense of entitlement that leads people to exit a marriage because they “deserve” the “perfect” one. It’s got to be out there, somewhere. Right? To be blunt: it is not. No long-term love affair can be a photocopy of an idealized one — whether our image of perfection is our parents’ marriage, a celebrity’s, or one we conjure. Consider it excellent news that someone else’s love story is never going to be yours. True love is woven out of honoring and understanding each other’s unique gifts, vulnerabilities, and eccentricities. Your journey is not going to be like any other couple’s, and that’s how it should be. Being in love isn’t static. It deepens over time. Louise Erdrich wrote in her novel Shadow Tag, “Why can’t I recover the feelings I had at the beginning? Infatuation, sudden attraction, is partly a fever of surfaces, and absence of knowledge. Falling in love is also falling into knowledge. Enduring love comes when we love most of what we learn about the other person and can tolerate the faults they cannot change.” A long-term, committed relationship will hit bad patches. We are going to have to accept the detritus of mistakes and regrettable incidents we create. But a loving partnership gives us wonderful gifts that make life worth living: a sense of purpose, greater health and wealth, and, of course, loving care and nurturance. Learning to cherish another person and allowing that person to cherish you is the greatest blessing of life. Love is the most sacred experience we can have. Remember that you build trust by being there for one another, and strengthen loyalty through gratitude, cherishing and honoring what you create together. To paraphrase Proverbs 31, an excellent partner is a jewel more precious than rubies. With a love that you can believe in, you will experience good and not evil all the days of your life.
— John Gottman, What Makes Love Last?, page 238
What is love? Is it a feeling, or an action? What does a relationship need to be successful in the long term?
The answers to these questions, among others, can help you gauge another person’s maturity in how they think about love and relationships (as can their actions). You get to decide what a mature answer is, but I think the answer from Gottman above provides a good study guide.
4. You can be the type of person who forgives cheating…
“Once a cheater, always a cheater.” For some it’s true, for some it’s not. Good people make this mistake, learn from it, realize the depth of the consequences, and never do it again. Cheating (for some) is a mistake, a profound one, and one that can be learned from and never repeated.
If the person who cheated takes all the responsibility for their cheating, acknowledges that it was wrong, acknowledges that it was bad for everyone involved, and commits to new boundaries and a long road to healing, most couples can heal their relationship from cheating. In fact, some 70% of couples stay together after an affair is found out.
If you can find the evidence for and internalize that — that your partner is just a person, and that cheating was a mistake, not a character flaw—then you can move past this. It will take a long time to regain trust, but it can be done, if both partners are willing.
You aren’t weak for trying to save your relationship with someone who cheated and is doing everything right to fix it. You are brave. At least in American society, we have this cultural dialogue going on that staying with a cheater is weak, that it means not recognizing your own worth.
If you find the motivation and evidence necessary to try to save your relationship, you are showing profound maturity. It means you’ve seen the humanity in your partner, you know that everyone makes mistakes, even terrible ones, your partner has given you some evidence of the necessary character traits for growing, and you are making a serious effort at working with uncertainty, at patience, at empathy. It’s not weak. It’s strong. It’s mature. It’s brave.
5. …But you don’t have to be.
Even if your partner does everything right to try to fix things, and even if you know that they’re just a human being who’s doing their best, you still have a choice.
Early in couple’s therapy, something our counselor said stuck with me. “You get to choose whether or not you want to trust him again.”
You get to choose. There’s not a right answer. It doesn’t make you heartless to choose to leave. It doesn’t make you weak to choose to stay. You get to choose. Let that be part of your new strength.
What to do next
Whether you decide to try to fix the relationship, or whether you decide to go separate ways, my advice is the same: read What Makes Love Last? and The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, both by Gottman (I’m not being paid); set boundaries and get some space from each other, spend time with family and friends if you can; go to therapy (couple’s, individual, both). You can work through this from a place of strength, and for some relationships it’s worth it. Remember that you don’t have to, and that that can come from strength too.
He and I? Well, we didn’t make it. He did so much right to try to fix it, but perhaps the most important thing to me — a commitment to 100% honesty — still wasn’t coming through. It took a month of badgering to get the full truth out (it felt like pulling teeth), and ultimately I chose to part ways while he worked through the things he needed to. I decided that to stay with him while he tried to figure honesty out was a position more vulnerable than I wanted to put myself in.
But I don’t hate him. If nothing else, he proved how deeply he understands the mistake of his actions, and I believe in him, am rooting for him, to make the positive changes in his life that will let him one day enter a relationship faithfully, honestly, lovingly. Today, I find myself grateful for every day we had together. Some we got wrong, but there was a lot we got right.
And maybe, with a little luck, we can be friends again one day.
