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Ask Roe: ‘I cannot stomach the sight of them, and it pains me that they seem so happy while I continue to relive the moment I found out about the cheating’
Dear Roe, A few years ago, I dated a former coworker for about four months. Despite it being a brief relationship, I left feeling entirely damaged, confused and worthless.
While we were together, he slept with and began a relationship with another one of our coworkers. Said coworker knew I was dating him and did not tell me she had also begun dating him. She even gossiped with me about how “terrible” he was , and when I found out she had been with him too, my trust in everyone was shattered.
They are still together and happy, three years later. Last year I even skipped a mutual friend’s wedding as I knew they were attending. I cannot stomach the sight of them, and it pains me that they seem so happy while I continue to relive the moment I found out about the cheating every day. I am ashamed I haven’t had a successful relationship in the meantime, and they seem blissfully happy.
We live in a similar part of town, and every time I walk outside I am nervous I’ll bump into them . How do I move on ? I’m really sorry you went through this.
Having a partner cheat on you is horrendous, and you also had layers of extra pain on top of it: a confidante also betraying your trust, having to see the people who hurt you at work and so never getting space to heal, and then having to see them in your town and shared social world. That’s really hard.
Cheating hurts so much because it feels like we don’t have any control over our most intimate life, and because the people who are meant to care for us become sources of pain. It breaks a social contract, and can erode our belief that we can trust people.
The hypervigilance you’re feeling – not being able to relax around them, thinking about the painful moment constantly, scanning your world for them – is the symptom of a body that still feels like it’s in danger and is trying desperately to keep itself safe. You keep looking out for this couple so you can avoid them, in order to avoid reliving the pain they’ve caused.
The problem is you’re stuck in that mode and are shrinking your life down and hurting yourself in other ways. The obsessive ruminating, constantly comparing your lives with this couple’s, organising your movements to avoid them, and missing out on events that would allow you to connect with your actual friends – you didn’t do anything wrong, yet you’re paying a very high cost.
Ironically, your world has become organised around the very event you want to leave behind, and I don’t think that’s what you want. You need to decide you no longer want your life to be tied to and defined by these people, and take back control. I want you to take a moment and think of all the millions – MILLIONS – of people throughout history who have been cheated on.
I want you to imagine your best friend came to you and told you they’d been cheated on. Are you sitting there thinking that all those people are pathetic, or that there’s something wrong with them, or that they’re less worthy of love or a beautiful life than anyone else? Or are you thinking “That’s awful, and so hurtful, and so unlucky, they deserve better”? That’s what you need to start thinking about yourself.
You deserve better. And until you start truly believing this, the more your world is going to continue folding in on itself – and it will be become a self-perpetuating cycle.
Because the smaller your life becomes, the more disconnected from your friends you feel, the more you let your inner monologue judge and criticise and blame yourself, the more you will believe that the world doesn’t have anything to offer you – because you won’t be letting yourself receive evidence it does. And trust me, it does. There is so much love and joy and happiness out there waiting for you. It’s been three years.
It’s time to get back out there and find it. I know if it were that easy, you would have done it already. The fact you’ve felt stuck for so long is a sign you need and deserve some help.
A good therapist will give you tools to help you reframe your thoughts, interrupt your ruminating, change your inner voice from one of self-judgment to one of compassion, and will teach you how to calm your body down so that you’re not stuck in such a state of panic and hypervigilance. Think of therapy as the first step back to your life, with a guide who will support you as you start walking forward.
You can also start taking some steps yourself. One thing you can do is interrupt yourself when you start comparing your life with theirs. You’ve created an internal scorecard that says these people hurt you and found love, and you got hurt and feel lonely. With that framing, of course it feels intolerably unfair.
But your relative relationship statuses are not the outcomes of a moral trial. Their happiness does not retroactively make the deception acceptable; and equally, their unhappiness would not automatically erase what they did. A reality of betrayal that feels unfair but is also necessary to accept is that the people who hurt us do not have to become unhappy for us to heal. Sometimes they thrive.
Sometimes they never understand what they did. Sometimes they tell themselves a completely different story – and sometimes, infuriatingly, they don’t think much about us at all. It’s unfair. But healing sometimes requires us to tolerate that injustice.
Sometimes after a betrayal, a trauma, an injustice, we can resist healing because it can somehow feel like conceding. We can think “If I’m happy again, does that mean they’ve got away with it? ” – but you don’t need to keep suffering to prove that what happened to you was wrong. It was wrong.
That will always be true, no matter what they do or what you do. So you might as well move towards happiness. You don’t need to forgive them, you don’t need to wish them well, you don’t even need to stop disliking them. You just need to stop letting them define the way you live your life.
Start reclaiming some of the parts of your life you’ve abandoned, in manageable ways. Find a cafe or walk-in that you like, reach out to some friends and organise a fun night out, go on a date in a great outfit with no expectations. When you start thinking about them, say to yourself: “My life belongs to me. My attention belongs to me.
My future belongs to me. ” This will remind you that you have power and agency, and your happiness is no longer tied to them – it’s entirely in your hands. And if you ever see them in the street or at a party and feel yourself shrinking, unbow your head. Stand up tall.
This is your life, and these people are merely background extras in it. Your life, all its great plot developments, twists, turns and your great love story all lie ahead of you. Look beyond them to the road ahead of you, and walk towards it.
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