Here are 6 excruciating ways you suffer after your partner cheats (that no one talks about):
1. Your most intimate relationship is now the topic of public chatter.
The intimacy that was just between the two of you is now being talked about casually among friends, family and acquaintances. You feel naked, exposed, and humiliated. It feels as if everyone is evaluating YOU for flaws that likely “caused” the trouble in your relationship.
2. You feel like you can’t let your guard down.
When your partner betrays you, he or she makes a life-changing decision with no input from you. You think, “If the person I love most cheats on me, how can I trust anyone?”
3. You feel pressure to measure up to some vague, undefined ideal.
When your partner has an affair, you often feel like you’re not “enough” — not fun enough,sexy enough, smart enough, pretty enough, fit enough or whatever.
You start obsessing about bettering yourself, so you won’t be hurt or betrayed again. It’s an exhausting, stressful, insecure way to live. By constantly trying to prove yourself, you become an actor in your own life instead of freely being exactly who you are.
4. Your partner’s infidelity makes you the odd-person out.
Your partner and his or her lover know everything they shared between them. You know only what you’ve discovered or what they decided to tell you.
If your marriage survives, there will always be secret information only the two of them share. If you divorce, your partner and the lover feel better than ever about life, while you’re left picking up the pieces alone.
5. Infidelity disrupts your sense of your past.
Infidelity undermines the truth of your personal history. It corrupts your life story. You now question memories. You constantly review the past trying to piece together what you thought was happening with what was actually taking place.
You beat yourself up for being so naive, and you become bitter about others who knew the truth, but didn’t tell you.
6. Your partner violated your body by denying you sexual agency.
If your partner has sex with someone else (without your knowledge) and then has sex with you, not only was your health put at risk (because of STDs), but your partner also robbed you of your sexual agency — your ability to chose for yourself the terms in which you do and do not engage in sexual activity. After all, would you have had sex with your partner if you’d known he or she just slept with someone else? Your partner broke your shared sacred trust of sexual oneness and fidelity, and that is the most damaging violation of all, and often one of the hardest aspects of infidelity to “get over.”
