If Every Cheater Did This, the World Would Be a Better Place

Finding out you have been cheated on is terrible. Nobody can argue that the shock alone is enough to knock the wind right out of you.

To get a clearer picture, just imagine one day you are living your life, making plans, paying the bills, and arguing whose turn it is to do the dishes, and then you wake up the next day to find out your partner has been cheating on you all along.

Naturally, your heart shatters, but then comes the second blow, the one that actually hurts the worst.

When you confront them, they don’t just admit they made a mistake; they look you in the eye and say something like:

“Well, we’ve basically just been roommates for years anyway,”

“You haven’t really loved me in a long time.”

You would expect excuses or tears, but what you get is them talking about your relationship as if it was already dead and you had no idea. Naturally, this makes you look back at all those memories you believed were real with the person who was laughing with you now acting like they were serving one long miserable prison sentence all along.

This is one of the ugliest parts of infidelity: the rewriting of history.

It is really a second betrayal. The affair causes one kind of damage; now this rewriting is causing another.

If cheaters would simply stop going this extra mile, I know the world would be a much better place where partners, unfortunate enough to be betrayed, would get to heal much easier.

“One destroys your future together, while the other tries to poison the memory you have of the relationship.”

Why the second betrayal?

I am convinced they do this to answer a single question:
How could a good person do such a bad thing?

You see, most people want to see themselves as fundamentally good and reasonable human beings, but, unfortunately, the infidelity creates a problem, because it is difficult to see yourself as good while actively deceiving someone who trusts you.

So, the mind starts looking for a fix, and it settles on simply rewriting the history, because the other solution is accountability.

To the cheater, if the relationship was already terrible, then the affair becomes understandable. Therefore, the thing to do is to quickly change the narrative of the relationship backward. For that, they will take a normal, happy timeline and paint over it with really dark colors, highlighting every minor argument from five years ago and use it as proof that the relationship was always doomed.

I mean, if the relationship was already dead, then maybe the betrayal wasn’t really a betrayal.

“The infidelity creates a problem, because it is difficult to see yourself as good while actively deceiving someone who trusts you.”

The true damage of this form of gaslighting

Think about this for a moment: a person can betray you today and still leave your past intact.

However, when they begin rewriting the relationship, they attempt to take away memories that were supposed to belong to you forever. Now, every family photo feels contaminated.

This change in the narrative causes deep psychological trauma that lasts long after the affair ends, leaving a betrayed partner sorting through the wreckage. The resulting confusion, the direct result of a cheater trying to drastically change the narrative after the fact, leaves scars that last much longer than the affair itself.

“You look at old photos and wonder: ‘Was I completely blind? Did they ever actually love me?’”

The one thing that would make healing easier

Can you imagine how much faster healing would happen if a straying partner simply said the truth? If they simply admitted that yes, they had problems as every relationship does, but they also had a lot of good years, and they chose to betray the trust?

Of course, this kind of honesty wouldn’t magically repair the relationship, but it would allow the betrayed partner to hold on to something important: their reality. The affair had already taken the future the betrayed thought they were building. It shouldn’t be allowed to steal the past as well.

So, if you are going through this right now, please hear this: The rewrite is a lie!

It is no more than their devious attempt to change the past, which is actually a reflection of their inability to handle their own shame. It has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of the love and effort you poured into the relationship. And know also that even though they are trying to erase the history, they don’t get to define your truth.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.