It has been over a year since I found out my long-term partner — the person I thought I was preparing to marry — was cheating on me, and I still can’t wrap my mind around all the steps that led to deciding to cheat and then, crucially, following through.
The texts, arrangements, phone calls, video chats, the decision to board a flight, the decision to actually see that person, the lies, the gaslighting on your partner — it boggles the mind.
Still, I chose to forgive them.
Finding out was devastating
I entered into this relationship a relative newbie in terms of love; I was one of those people who married young and divorced in their 40s. I didn’t spend my 20s and 30s dating around or in multiple relationships, and after my divorce, I wasn’t interested in doing much of that, either. I made it clear early that I was looking for hopefully long-term, committed love.
I believed we were aligned in this way, partly due to naivete and partly because I was willing to ignore the red flags staring me in the face.
Finding out about the infidelity was tough; finding out it was with multiple people was devastating. I spent months disassociating, and there are stretches of time I don’t remember at all. I lost weight that I didn’t have to lose, and my hair fell out. I cried and screamed and hit and lashed out and pleaded: why?
But throughout all of that, I didn’t leave, and I didn’t want them to leave, either.
I felt like a failure for not wanting to leave
I felt like a failure in a lot of ways. What kind of person stays with someone who has cheated so badly? I never thought I would be that person. I asked myself a lot of tough questions: was I staying out of fear or because I thought there was hope? Could I trust this person again?
I can’t truthfully say that I know everything I felt during those first few months. In some ways, there was a profound sense of reassurance: it felt good on some level to finally have the answer to the questions I had asked for so long. All the lies and gaslighting suddenly made sense. But that was more or less the only positive part of any of this, at least at first.
After several months of wild ups and downs, fights and tears, and really awful questions and answers, I realized that if I was going to move forward in any way, I had to work toward forgiveness — I had to forgive both of us. I also began to understand that for me, maybe because I had so little relationship history or maybe because of my own wiring, I needed to work toward forgiveness in the same relationship where I had been hurt.
I don’t do well with unanswered questions, and this kind of betrayal left a lot of them. I also needed to understand my partner’s traumas and history to understand why this pattern of cheating — one that predated me by at least 20 years and had persisted throughout all of their relationships — existed in the first place. I needed to know where I had failed myself, where I had not realized the ways I was being taken advantage of, where I had not remained true to the person I am and want to be by allowing someone to lie to me even when I didn’t yet have proof that they were, besides the feeling inside the pit of my stomach. So, I stayed.
I needed to forgive myself
The months that followed were, at times, exhilarating and, at times, excruciating. I went through all the typical patterns of someone who has been cheated on: I wanted to control my partner’s actions, where they went, and who they spoke to. Their phone was a major source of anxiety and a trigger for me. We had exhausting fights, and I doubted my decision a lot.
Things changed when I began to reframe the goal of forgiveness as exclusively something for me to give myself. For too long, forgiveness was sought after by both my partner and me as a kind of way to redeem them — once I realized that forgiveness was internal, that allowing myself to be soft and understand that trusting someone I loved wasn’t something I did wrong, my heart began to open to other ways forgiveness could be extended to my partner.
I have a strong connection to myself these days, and it’s something that has carried me even when small arguments pop off or something reminds me of what happened. Triggers are significantly more rare. I realized through this process that at my most fundamental level, I am someone who believes in redemption — crucially, I’d like to note, only once — and that isn’t something that I want to lose.
I am now in this relationship with my eyes wide open and knowing what my partner is capable of, and if the same red flags show up, if something doesn’t feel right again, I could now walk away — but I am choosing to trust, and choosing to stay close to the person I am.
