What it really feels like when someone you love cheats on you.

Cheating on someone is one of the worst (I repeat – WORST) things you can ever do to someone. To you, it might have been all a game, but to them, it might have meant everything.

Whether or not you’re doing it to fill a void or just for the thrill of it, when you cheat on someone, you’re doing more than just hurting them. You might be unaware of the consequences of your actions, but let me tell you, for someone who has been cheated on, it will always be some sort of reminder to them – it will always haunt them. It is a concoction of heartbreak, anger, regret, anxiety, and shame all rolled into one.

When you cheat on someone, you’re telling them they’re not good enough for you. That you never loved them.

You may beg to differ, but how can you put someone you truly love in such a position? To make them doubt their self-worth? To make them question everything they thought they knew about you? To make them believe that their trust was completely misplaced?

“Did I do something wrong?”
“What could I have done to prevent it?”
“Why did this happen?”
“Am I not good enough?”
“Why did you do it?”

– are questions you’ll ask yourself over and over again when you’ve been cheated on.

You don’t cheat on someone you love. Period.

When you cheat on someone, they’ll always be emotionally scarred. They’ll have their walls up because they don’t want to ever be hurt that way again. To feel like your world is crumbling, to believe that things like that happened, but just not to you. You see it in movies all the time, but we all know what happens in the movies and what happens in real life are two completely different ball games altogether.

They won’t let just anyone in; and even when they do let someone in eventually, they’ll always be guarded.

They’ll be paranoid, and you can’t blame them for it. Even if they’re in a new happy relationship, they’ll carry the hurt and the emotional baggage from the previous relationship into their new relationship – whether it be conscious or not – and it can’t be helped. They’ll always be suspicious, but don’t blame them for it; they’re just afraid that the same thing will happen to them again, and they can’t go through something as painful as that ever again.

They’ll want to trust again, but it’ll be difficult for them. They would take forever to learn how to trust, and how to be okay. Even if they’ve come to the rational conclusion that their cheating ex is a horrible person, you’ll somehow still fear that every future partner has or is cheating on you. Congratulations, you’re now an emotional wreck and a mess inside, and you’re going to spend every waking moment trying not to imagine the worst because you believe you’re completely broken.

When you cheat on someone, what you really mean to tell them is this: “I don’t love you. I don’t respect you, and I don’t care for/about you. I didn’t think about us, and how this would affect us. I was only thinking about myself.”

Is just one person not enough for us anymore? Aren’t we supposed to just find one person whom we think is worth it, and always stick by them through the good, the bad and the ugly?

When you love your partner, it means you respect them. And when you cheat on them, you’re betraying all of that. Isn’t it absolutely apparent that loyalty is fundamental in any relationship? We don’t need a Guide Book for Dummies for that, do we?

So please, leave if you must, but don’t cheat on someone you love, because that is the worst kind of damage you can do to someone who loves you.

Written by: Vondra Tay

This article was published in thoughtcatalog.com