When you cheat on your partner, it means that you’re actually betraying their trust. When you cheat on your partner, it means that you are consciously letting that person down even when they were so willing to just give you the world. When you cheat on your partner, you have to know that you are cheating on someone who planned to spend the rest of their life with you. And that’s not an easy thing to recover from.
Cheating on someone isn’t just about the sex. It’s about the sheer magnitude of the betrayal. This is a person who trusted you. This is a person who believed you to be so much better than all the rest. This is a person who gave you chances that you never deserved to be given. This is a person who opened up their chest and handed you their heart on a silver platter – all in the hopes that you would never hurt them for it. And yet you did. You cheated on them and you crushed your partner’s soul.
When you cheat on your partner, it means that you are forcing someone to rethink everything they believe about you, life, and love. You are forcing this person to go back on everything they once thought about your relationships. It means that you are going to force them to obsess over where they went wrong in the relationship and how they could have made things better. You’re going to force this person to think that they made a mistake; that maybe somehow, they could have done things differently to keep you loyal and faithful. And that’s wrong. It was all your fault. You were the one who made the mistake. YOU were the one who cheated. YOU were the one who was unfaithful. You were the one who made all the wrong decisions here. And yet, your partner has had to pay for it. Your partner is the one who has to deal with issues of insecurity and vulnerability. Your partner is the one who thinks that they screwed things up. Your partner believes that they are unlovable purely because you refused to stay loyal; purely because you don’t seem to grasp the concept of committing to another person.
When you cheat on your partner, you make that individual feel completely self-conscious. Remember that this is a person who you were supposed to make happy and comfortable. Instead of doing that, you brought a lot of uncertainty and insecurity into their lives. You made your partner doubt themselves. They know think less of themselves just because you made a mistake. They are somehow convinced that they lacked in the effort because you chose the wrong path. Your partner believes that they are completely unlovable all because you chose to throw all of that love away by cheating on them.
When you cheat on your partner, you aren’t just breaking a person’s spirit. You are severing a bond that was supposedly built to last. You are destroying a connection that might have taken months or maybe even years to build. When you cheat on your partner, you are essentially dooming whatever chances you have at a healthy and happy relationship in the future. Because trust, like glass, once broken, can never ever be the same again. Things are never going to go back to the way that they were in your relationship before you cheated. You would even be lucky to still have a shot at keeping this person in your life after you’ve betrayed them. This person will never be able to regain the same level of trust for you – certainly not in the same manner that they used to. Forgiveness will not come cheap. In fact, there is a likely chance that it will never come at all.
When you cheat on your partner, you are essentially passing all of your emotional baggage and insecurities unto them. You are placing a target on that person’s back even when they didn’t ask for it; even when they haven’t done anything to deserve it. You have to know that you are essentially scarring a person for the rest of eternity. An experience like this is not something that one can just simply recover from unscathed. This kind of betrayal is going to inflict wounds that your partner will carry for the rest of their life. Your selfishness is going to cause someone else a lifetime of suffering and trauma.
Cheating on your partner means that you were never really in it for real. It means that you were only ever really looking out for yourself the whole time. You were always so willing to place your own needs above those of the relationship’s. And that’s what makes it hurt even more – knowing that the love wasn’t even real, to begin with.