It is tough to recover from a cheater because whenever you leave the connection, there are two people it’s essential to mourn. One is the asshole who cheated on you, in all their flawed, unfaithful glory. This is the person it is straightforward to get mad at, the person it is straightforward to chop off contact with, the person it is straightforward to speak shit about whilst you’re out for cocktails along with your girlfriends at night. It’s the person you’re glad to be leaving because you already know that you simply don’t deserve their bullshit in your life.
The other person it’s essential to recover from is the person you thought they were. The relationship you thought you had. The trust you so fastidiously built, not knowing that the muse was made up of quicksand. It’s not the cheater you’re mourning at 4am whenever you come home from the bar alone and need to call them up to inform them they’re forgiven; it’s their intangibly perfect alter-ego. The one you built a life with. The one you poured your trust into. The one you thought was at all times going to be there, until they weren’t. You hate the person they changed into, but love the person they were. Love the best way things were. Love the memory of every blissfully ignorant day with them, so fiercely that it tears you to pieces.
It is tough to recover from a cheater since you never get the closure you wish. You cannot reason your method to the explanation for the cheating — and I strongly encourage you to not try. The back of your mind will only make up reasons that scathe you: you weren’t funny enough or sexy enough or enticing enough. You didn’t pay enough attention. You didn’t make enough time. With every magazine title screaming “Ways to please your lover!” and “How to not scare the good ones away,” you start to suspect that it was your fault they cheated, not theirs. You know logically this just isn’t true, nevertheless it feels true. The harder you seek for a reason, the more the reality evades you. An easy lapse in judgment doesn’t look like an adequate explanation for the hell that you simply’ve been put through. So you seek for an even bigger, higher reason that just isn’t there.
It’s hard to recover from a cheater since the only person you hate greater than them is yourself. You hate yourself for falling for them. For investing in them. For turning a blind eye to each red flag that was a clue along the best way. You scorn yourself for believing every lie they told, and letting all of it come to fruition. You hate yourself for not putting together the puzzle pieces that you simply were never actually holding.
It is tough to recover from a cheater because we’re seldom given the possibility to properly mourn them. We are encouraged to feel every scathing emotion we are able to muster toward our unfaithful lovers, but we’re told that we cannot still love them. Cannot miss them. Cannot mourn the lack of that love because we ought to be too offended to feel sadness. We aren’t given the possibility to undergo the regular technique of grieving anyone who was once a serious a part of our lives. And because we try to disclaim ourselves this process, we exemplify the pain. We feel ashamed for still loving them. Ashamed for still needing to grieve. Ashamed of not being ready to begin over instantly, despite the fact that we all know we deserve so significantly better. Ashamed since it must make us weak to feel anything apart from hatred.
It is tough to recover from a cheater because the true person now we have to forgive at the tip of the day is ourselves. We should forgive ourselves for missing the signs that we couldn’t possibly have seen. For losing a game we never signed as much as play. For having a superbly natural reference to a one who turned out to not be who they said they were. We don’t want to simply accept that bad things can occur to us without precedence. That we will be fooled and treated unfairly and still find yourself the loser ultimately. We wish to imagine within the everlasting balance of the Universe, which suggests that after we are in pain now we have done something flawed. It is tough to recover from a cheater since it means accepting the bizarre notion that life will be unfair within the harshest sense of the word.
It is tough to recover from a cheater because a betrayal of trust turns your world the other way up. And the one method to flip it right-side up again is to present ourselves permission to work through it. To accept what happened. To mourn someone we hate. To grieve a relationship we walked away from. To work through every paradoxical situation we encounter, until we come through on the opposite side. The side with a clean slate. The side where we don’t just suspect that we deserve higher — we know. And the side where we’re pleased with ourselves for never accepting any less.
