Cheating on My Ex Saved My Life

Seeing a glimpse of love outside my abusive marriage gave me the courage to leave

I’m a proponent of open and honest communication and I don’t promote cheating. Besides, I’m a terrible liar with a conscience that would eat me alive if I did something bad and didn’t come clean about it immediately.

The fact that many have ongoing affairs, and come home to their partners pretending like everything’s fine, is beyond me. I wouldn’t be able to look them in the eyes—the thought alone makes me cringe.

But, then again, there are all kinds of circumstances and reasons why people cheat, so who am I to judge? After all, I did it myself, and I don’t regret it. In fact, if I could take back time, I’d probably do it all over again.

Almost three years ago, I cheated on my husband, and partner of eleven years; the father of our, then toddler — with a woman. A few months later, my entire life got flipped on its head and I moved out on my own, for the first time in over a decade.

The night it began

I was out for drinks with a couple of friends, when I noticed her sitting at the bar by herself. I’d met her once before and knew we shared common friends, so I invited her to join our table.

Something was going on between us immediately. What started as innocent flirting and seductive looks, quickly turned to a forceful attraction that kept pulling us closer. It really was magnetic: A touch turned to a kiss, which turned into more kisses—sneakily in dark corners of the bar.

Later, I biked home; mind spinning, stomach-churning. What had just happened? What was this? Why was I feeling mental?

…

It was more than innocent kisses

Had it just been a silly occurrence in a bar, I could have come home and told my husband about it immediately. I’ve always been attracted to women as well, but hadn’t taken it much further than boozed-up smooching. My husband knew, and never felt threatened by it—in fact, he liked watching.

Had it just been a silly occurrence in a bar, we could have giggled about it. But this was more than that. I knew that selling it as less would have been lying—to everyone involved—so I kept it a secret until I could make sense of it.

She wasn’t like the girls I’d kissed in the past

She wasn’t a femme like myself; not the type my ex would have enjoyed watching me with. She was butch, with full sleeve tattoos, a buzzcut, men’s jeans, sneakers, and a loose t-shirt—attempting to disguise her perky breasts. She was divine to me.

She wasn’t wearing make-up but had naturally rosy cheeks and large doe-eyes that pierced all the way into my soul. The way she looked at me made me feel things I’d long forgotten about.

My mind and body kept spinning. I couldn’t get her out of my head!

Her pull persisted

We met up a few days later to talk. The intense attraction was still there. It was overpowering.

At the time I thought I loved my husband, and I was terrified of breaking up our little family. Yet, I felt powerless against her pull. Why couldn’t I just drop this, if what I wanted was to be with my husband?

It turned out, I didn’t. I just didn’t know it myself yet.

The experience took me on a wild journey that eventually preyed my eyes open. Losing weight in parallel with sleep, I ransacked my heart for answers.

First, I researched polyamory

I began by thinking we could open our marriage, allowing me to have my cake and eat it too. It seemed safer and more reasonable than leaving. After all, this was just a crush.

My husband and I had never been the conventional types, so I convinced myself that if I told him how I felt, he’d understand.

Back then I didn’t know what I know now; that I was married to an abusive narcissist. I simply believed he was a battered soul with some rather extreme communication- and rage issues. I was still in the process of healing his childhood wounds and saving him from the depressive storm clouds that followed him wherever he went.

I’ve later heard emotional abuse compared to slow-boiling a frog alive: Supposedly, if you throw it in boiling water, it will jump out, but if you place the frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it will stay put until it eventually dies.

I’d simply been sitting in the water since before it got hot. Now it was scalding, and I was too numb to notice.

I told him everything

When I came clean after about a month, there was no understanding to be had. I was called a deceiving, lying fraud and was served an ultimatum: him or her.

Fair enough, the majority aren’t into open relationships, and I sort of came at it from the wrong end.

Still, I was shocked by his complete void of empathy. I’d put up with so much from him over the years. And while he hadn’t cheated (that I know of), I’d forgiven myriads of lies and deceits in other areas.

Having waited up countless hours to the soundtrack of his answering machine while he was out dancing with his mistresses—an excessive concoction of drugs and alcohol—I felt entitled to at least some level of understanding.

I had swallowed a lot

When I say that I waited up, I’m not talking about waiting until he came home tipsy at 3 am—more like shitfaced, at 3 pm the next day…or the day after that.

I’m talking about when he came home, so inebriated that I feared for his life and spent hours monitoring his heart rate and breathing. I’m talking about when he came crawling up the stairs, clothes ripped, unable to walk or talk, covered in dirt, or blood from a fight.

The time he came home like that and threw up all over my pregnant-self in bed, I was so disgusted, and angry, that the thought of leaving entered my mind for a few moments. I excused it on him being nervous about becoming a father and forgave him.

I forgave everything because there was always a good reason, and if he didn’t give me one himself, I made one up: I always found something from his past to pin it on, and proceeded to figure out how to heal that particular wound instead.

I was also worried that he’d accidentally kill himself without me.

I’m not trying to justify my cheating

I’m not saying that it was a nice or decent thing to do—or even the right thing to do.

But, I’d been so forgiving of the fact that he always did exactly what he wanted, regardless of how much it worried or hurt me. I was mad that I’d let him do all of those things.

I refused to accept that the first time I seriously misstepped in our relationship, I was shown the door.

I realized that while he’d been roaming free throughout our entire relationship, I’d been on a tight leash.

I discovered codependency

Researching every symptom I was experiencing at the time, I picked apart my feelings, our relationship, and our past. I searched all over for answers and reasons for his behaviors, as well as my own.

When I found an article about codependency, a lot of pieces fell into place: We were in a co-dependent relationship and I was enabling him while undermining myself and my own needs.

I took us to therapy

Still set on fixing our marriage, yet unable to let go of her, I found us a counselor.

My husband cried to our therapist in despair—the first time I saw him cry…ever. She sympathized with his position, as the grieving victim of a post-partum wife gone astray and insisted that she could only work with us if I cut all contact with my affair.

—We can work on the issues in your relationship later, but first, we must take care of this, because your cheating is the most pressing issue here.

I shrugged. Now, I had a double-ultimatum at my throat: Him or her!

I tried to end it, but I simply couldn’t. Besides my daughter, she was my only source of joy—and my refuge from a marriage that had turned into a full-time battleground. Crossing over our doorstep felt like lining up for the firing squad.

Then, I learned about narcissism

When my research took me from co-dependency to verbal abuse, I found myself glued to the screen with tears pouring down my cheeks. I was reading each one of my experiences, written out by others, sometimes down to the exact words and phrases.

All of the things I’d been struggling to understand was written out, clear as day: My loneliness and deep confusion, the obscure fights filled with twisted logic and word salads, my resulting inability to form sentences, and my fear of speaking them out loud; it was all there.

The blanket of eggshells covering each square inch of our home, my inability to get it right, and the feeling that no matter what I said, or how, we ended in the same loop; it was all real, and it even had a name—narcissism.

Most importantly, I finally knew that I wasn’t going crazy!

She showed me a clear mirror

When I read that dating a narcissist is like looking into a reflectionless mirror—that you’re little more than a tool to the narcissist, while you yourself keep fading to the background, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place:

My flame was holding up a mirror, and through it, I saw my long-forgotten reflection in the midst of the full picture. I saw how lost I’d become; a strong and fierce woman who was turning into a shadow of herself. She showed me that I was lovable and deserving of love. She said, ‘the magic is in you’—and showed me that I wasn’t lost without him, but whole in myself.

The final leap

Starting out thinking that I wanted to save my marriage, I ended up seeing that I needed to save myself. The scorching water I was sitting in suddenly felt unbearable, so I gathered every ounce of strength I had and jumped.

My big leap also, sadly, led to the end of my affair. I was simply not meant to start another relationship until I had mended the one with myself. Regardless, she remains one of my most significant love-affairs, and perhaps the one I owe the most to.

Without her, who knows where I’d be today?—Who knows if I’d seen the truth on my own, or dared to jump out without a security net? Perhaps I’d be a perfectly poached frog by now?

What I do know, is that it’s very likely that I would not be the woman that I am today, had I not gone to that bar, a snowy December evening; had I not met you, my darling, with your sleeve tattoos, rosy-cheeks, and doe-eyes that pierced all the way to my soul. This story is my way of saying thank you.

Cheating is never a virtue, but it isn’t always wrong either. To me, cheating on him was my redemption.