I read a lot of articles about cheating, especially the ones about how to spot a cheat (and if you’re in a relationship with one). I read them because I still can’t believe it happened to me.
It was then, and is now, a terrible blow to my ego.
I thought I knew the tell-tale traits. And I held him apart: I thought we understood each other, I thought we were in it together, I thought we were a team.
It was a devastation so traumatic it caused me a breakdown.
I didn’t feel full of anger and resentment — if only I had. There is after all power in anger, if you know how to channel it. But what I felt was completely destroyed. It was beyond devastation. It was him stabbing me through the heart and, at the time, I sort of wish he had.
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When He Revealed What He Had Done, He Was Defiant
And I was disgusted by him. Though not at first. At first, I thought he would come back, that he was — joking. It was behaviour so out of character that I could not process the idea that this was who he was as well as all the other things I knew him to be.
It wasn’t about giving someone the benefit of the doubt. He never gave me the chance. He admitted it of his own volition and informed me he was leaving that night to be with his new boyfriend. We had been together for five years.
Even as he said the words, I couldn’t believe — based on what I knew of him, based on everything I valued in him — that he had it in him to treat me so poorly, with an almost casual disregard.
I used to think people who checked their partner’s phone were bona fide nuts. What a breach of trust! Now, I’m not so sure. Perhaps the occasional surreptitious check is prudent, like due diligence on an investment asset.
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A Tragedy of the Human Condition
Still now, when I replay in my mind a condensed version of that aborted relationship, I’m not sure there were all that many signs he had a series of boys on the side. And if there were signs, I don’t think they were all that obvious.
We see what we want to see, of course, and there’s a reason some people think love is blind. But here’s the thing. I did have my eyes open — it’s just we were on totally different pages.
It is a tragedy of the human condition, that we can co-exist quite happily without understanding each other at all.
That was the worst part of it: coming to terms I was in love with someone who didn’t really exist. He had never offered me his whole self. What he gave me was — well, not very much at all as it turned out.
We’re all capable of shameless, ruthless behaviour. But some of us are better at keeping it in check. And those that don’t are a high risk relationship proposition. Unfortunately, they can be hard to resist, because of the way they look and because of what they say and how they say it.
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Secrets and Lies — Some Clues
Here they are, for what it’s worth. My top seven clues there are secrets and lies in your relationship. But of course, it’s not that simple. If only it were! So, where appropriate, I’m also including why those same clues could easily be a red herring.
Forgive me — no one said relationships are straightforward.
- He leads a heavily compartmentalised life, in order to “zone” their knowledge and to control who knows what. But, don’t we all lead lives of compartmentalisation to some degree? The professional/personal segregation is especially pronounced these days; in fact, we’re told it’s good practice. Little wonder so many affairs start in the office.
- You’ve never met his friends. But I had met his mum and his step-dad and his brother. And isn’t it healthy to maintain some degree of independence? Living in each other’s pockets is a pretty myopic existence. And maybe you don’t like his friends, or barely have time to see your own.
- All his social media accounts are locked. But maybe he’s just private, or a bit shy. Maybe he’s a teacher and doesn’t want his pupils knowing anything about him outside of the classroom.
- He is socially extremely capable.
- You feel resistance when you talk about taking a “next step” in the relationship. Yet, our response to change is complex. My husband is a case in point. Whenever there is significant change — like when we moved in together, like when I proposed — he goes very, very quiet. Then he gets excited.
- They’ve previously slept with someone else during your relationship. Hook-ups happen: monogamy is not the default human state, which is why historically so many cultures — ours included — valorise the sacrifice to forsake all others. But if you’re young and horny, you also have to be realistic. I’ve advised people to hook-up with a random if that’s what it takes to maintain the family unit. Many marriages survive because of such behaviour, not in spite of it. But there’s a big difference between sex with a random or a casual acquaintance and candle-lit dinners talking about your hopes and dreams and what you might call your kids.
- You never fight. Maybe they just suppress all their anger (in which case, you’ve got a whole other, potentially quite dangerous, relationship problem on your hands). Or maybe they don’t fight with you because they have already checked out. To fight, you first have to care.
One of the reasons all this is such difficult territory is because cheating doesn’t of itself make someone a bad person. They’ve just done a bad thing, or they’ve gotten carried away. But it does take a certain type of person. Curiously, not all of them feel genuine remorse — I was never convinced the cheater in my life was all that sorry, he certainly didn’t say he was sorry — but the majority surely feel bad about what they have done, at least on some level.
And most people, thankfully, aren’t bare-faced liars. It’s just that some people have a greater capacity to lean into a lie.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that what eventually becomes manipulative conduct (as they prepare their departure for pastures new) started out as contortions of half-truths and carefully constructed omissions when telling you about their day. They don’t want to hurt us and — eventually — they can’t find a way out that doesn’t involve causing someone they once loved pain.
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It’s a Cheater’s Paradise Out There
That’s one of the pitfalls of online dating, incidentally, or meeting people on Grindr, or whatever — they *literally* could be anyone.
We’ve turned dating into a performance art. Be who you want to be for the night, see how it goes.
There’s no point trying to impose a Code of Conduct on people — as a society, that boat sailed a long time ago — so instead we rely on so-called “common sense” principles like: treat others as you wish to be treated. But even that doesn’t offer a cast iron guarantee. There’s a surprisingly large number of hard-nosed people out there. They don’t expect others to treat them well — that is their view of the human condition — and they proceed accordingly.
In any event, people are fickle. And there is a land of milk and honey out there, with all its beautiful temptation. And we no longer as a society prioritise longevity. Even marriage vows these days, void of all religious meaning (and I say that as a religious sceptic) are heavily conditional. It is, bluntly, a cheater’s paradise.
Which means, alongside looking for clues and maintaining a healthy realism about the nature of the human condition and modern day relationships, what we really need to know is what it looks like when our partner stops loving us. It is a very specific proposition, and case/character specific, but it’s worth reflecting on occasionally. Because once that has happened, the sacred bond is broken and all bets are off the table. And that’s when people start doing moral gymnastics in order to justify behaviour they know can only cause hurt to someone they once professed to love.
The One For Whom He Left Me
Iwonder what he told the other guy. Did he even know I existed? (In which case, he deserves my pity, because he had no idea what he was taking on, although I suspect it became apparent to him eventually.)
Maybe it was a great love affair. Maybe they’re married now. Or maybe it lasted three months before he cheated again.
Did he say I was terrible? Was I terrible? Did he give him all the facts and it didn’t matter all that much (“That was last time, this is this time”). There are plenty of people like that, too.
All of us, in some shape or form, like to think of ourselves as the exception to the rule.
Call me bitter, but if you knowingly take on a cheat — that is to say, if your relationship started as an affair — you deserve what’s coming to you. Eventually you end up with the same calibre of person, and it’s a race to the bottom. It’s not a race I would want to run.
Maybe in that viewpoint there is bitterness. Maybe it forms part of an understandable — and very powerful — inclination to demonise a person who betrayed us. Whenever I’ve tried that approach, it has tended to backfire on me and I’ve spoken with others who say it didn’t work for them either. They were an enormous part of your life for a significant period, so they’re not wholly bad. They were someone who let us down. They changed, or maybe we did.
The injustice, of course, is they carry on living the life they’ve diligently been creating in the background of their relationship with you. Meanwhile: they render you incapable of holding down solids.
And what of my first love, the only boy ever to break my heart? Well — the answer is I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I don’t know if he’s even alive. I can still recite his phone number by heart, but I’ve never once called it or messaged it or done anything with it other than file it away in some unused recess of my mind. And I’ve never succumbed to the temptation to Google his name. Why? Because I don’t place a value on the man he is, or at least the man he turned out to be. The man he became the moment he left severed my perception of him. The person I thought he was? Well, it turns out he wasn’t that person, not really. And these things work both ways, of course. I never heard from him again. At the time, he claimed the immaturity card — and, in some ways, fair enough (he was twenty-three) — but eventually he did mature and, had I entered his thoughts, might he not have written to me? People do that; they want to make amens, or to explain themselves. Maybe there is no explanation, or at least no satisfactory explanation. Is he embarrassed? Or has he just wiped it from his mind, a pivotal period of my life basically nothing to him in the scheme of things?
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The World Doesn’t Change, But We Get Better at Navigating It
People have always done terrible things to each other. But as we accumulate experience, we get better at anticipating what might be lurking round the corner. At least, that’s the way it’s meant to work. And in the context of relationships, there is something to be said for getting your first love over and done with as quickly as possible. Because I don’t think we’re ever in awe of someone in quite the same way we are in awe of our first love. It is the awe and the infatuation and the conviction that the sun shines out of them which puts us in danger.
Even in the most intimate relationships — especially these days — we have to protect our core self. It is ultimately all we have and we take it with us to the grave. And we must be true to it. Which is why, as much as I love my husband, and whilst we have been together for coming up ten years, there is a small part of me which he will never access because it is mine alone, and vice versa.
That, to me, is the truest expression of my love for him and also the love I have for myself.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Ian Schneider on Unsplash