Dealing With Infidelity and Its Emotional Fallout
Understanding the emotional struggles caused by cheating.
After I took back my cheating ex-boyfriend, he ghosted me two weeks later.
That was almost two years ago, however, there is an underlying truth with infidelities that needs to be discussed: The pain you go through is unspeakable, and although it seems neverending, it eventually dissipates.
This is the truth about getting cheated on.
Do you know what sucked? It wasn’t that he disappeared, and I never got the closure I needed. It wasn’t even that I was stupid to take him back immediately after I found out he cheated. It was the fact that for the longest time, I blamed myself for everything that happened.
It is easy to blame ourselves.
Discovering an affair causes you to reevaluate yourself.
It was so easy to believe that it was my fault I got cheated on simply because I was the only one hurting.
I thought to myself that maybe I wasn’t good enough or that I was too much, hence I got discarded without so much as an explanation, or even a goodbye.
The shame that came along with it was unbearable too. Everyone reminded me that it was unfair what he did and that he didn’t deserve me, but I couldn’t even bring myself to look at them in the eye because I was ashamed.
The pain is seemingly omnipresent.
The pain was unmistakable. I spiraled into an uncontrollable fit of self-doubt and anxiety. Over time, it only grew and swallowed me whole. No matter where I was, or what I did, it was with me. After a while, it got too familiar.
I asked myself, why was I paying for the actions of someone else?
Time heals all wounds, sure, but you don’t need an unforeseeable future when you are hurting now. You need the pain to go away as soon as possible. However, life doesn’t work that way.
It spills over into other relationships.
I jumped from one man to another, hoping they could help take away my pain. Every relationship after that was a complete disaster. I wandered and dove into uncertainty with fear and false confidence.
I pined over every man who showed me the slightest attention. I searched for answers at the bottom of every bottle.
I yearned for a touch, a hello, a compliment — anything to help me escape from my reality. But all I ever received were massive hangovers, nameless numbers on my phone, and irreparable self-esteem.
This is the takeaway.
Ultimately, I realized that I lost so much of myself because I initially gave too much of myself away. I attached much of my self-worth to my relationships. I thought I can only be defined by how others loved me.
I became self-sabotaging. And every relationship thereafter failed because I put my partners on a pedestal and set them with unrealistic expectations.
You get busy looking for someone else to save you, failing to remember that you are your savior. And as much as you need others, you are the only one who can truly help yourself.
You have loved and lost. That much is true.
“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
— Alfred Lord Tennyson
You cannot take back what happened, however, you can reclaim the narrative by deciding how to move forward. By deciding to stop letting your experience and your pain control you, you begin your journey to healing.
The healing journey is imperfect.
To forgive and to forget — they say that is the best way to heal.
However, I believe you can heal without forgiving, and forgetting. You owe your growth and strength from your experience.
Alternatively, I believe that the best way to heal is to love yourself again. That much I am slowly learning every day.
Hopefully, you do the same.
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