How To Know If Its Time To Dump The Person Who Cheated On You
One of the most difficult things anyone can endure is their partner's infidelity. It isn't just the act of cheating that hurts but also the fact that cheating is the ultimate betrayal from which many couples never recover. Whether it's a one-night stand or a long-term affair, trust — the most paramount component in a relationship — is broken. Once that's gone, it never fully comes back, if it ever comes back at all.
It doesn't matter if you're married, cohabitating, or in a serious relationship; if both partners promised to be monogamous, then any sort of physical contact can count as infidelity. Some even categorize emotional infidelity as cheating, too (via Verywell Mind). And what's worse, in addition to the betrayal, is the lying it involves.
"Spouses repeatedly tell me that what made them leave the relationship wasn't the affair — it was the drip, drip, drip of the truth that slowly leaked out over a long period of time," Caroline Madden, a marriage therapist and author of "Fool Me Once: Should I Take Back My Cheating Husband?," tells HuffPost. "They would just get used to the facts that had been revealed, start to adjust and trust again, and then boom — more information would surface."
Although some couples can survive cheating, others can't. Even if it only happened once, it's up to you to decide when it's time to dump your partner and move on — or stick it out and hope it doesn't happen again.
Your partner won't admit they were wrong
Cheating — if you're in a monogamous relationship with traditional parameters that define sexual acts outside the partnership as wrong — is, well, wrong. While there may be some gray areas for some couples, such as a kiss not counting as cheating, for the most part, by traditional relationship standards, infidelity is completely unacceptable. When people do something wrong, they should be able to admit to it if they want to salvage the relationship. But some people are incapable of this.
"Some people have such a fragile ego, such brittle self-esteem, such a weak 'psychological constitution,' that admitting they made a mistake or that they were wrong is fundamentally too threatening for their egos to tolerate," Guy Winch Ph.D., a licensed psychologist, writes for Psychology Today. "Accepting they were wrong, absorbing that reality, would be so psychologically shattering, their defense mechanisms do something remarkable to avoid doing so — they literally distort their perception of reality to make it (reality) less threatening."
The problem with not being able to admit you're wrong when it comes to cheating, means you can't admit the act was wrong, the lies were wrong, the betrayal was wrong — that every aspect was wrong. If your partner can't do that, then they can't get to a place that warrants your forgiveness. It also speaks volumes to their lack of respect for you and the relationship and could suggest that they might cheat again. Cheaters, for the most part, will cheat again, after all (via Men's Health).
Your partner won't take accountability
If you're fortunate enough to have a partner who can admit they were wrong in their cheating, then congratulations! Now comes the tricky part: getting them to take responsibility for their actions and hold themselves accountable. Some cheaters will blame their behavior on something else, like getting drunk with friends at a bar or because they were bored, or they put blame on their partner for their own doing (via Insider). These types of "excuses" are far from accountability.
According to Marriage Counseling Self-Help, if the partner who cheated can take responsibility for what they did, then there's a chance that the relationship can survive the betrayal. But if your partner can't even give you that — and they still can't admit they're wrong — then all bets are off.
When a partner cheats, the relationship you had before ceases to exist. With so much broken, repairing it, although possible, requires a lot of effort from both partners. But if your partner can't even get to a point where they own up to their wrongdoing and hold themselves accountable, then there's no point in trying to fix what's broken for both of you; it's a two-person job. It's not your responsibility to save something that you didn't even destroy in the first place. So, pack up your partner's things and toss on Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable," because everything they own is in a box to the left.