My previous post featured a letter from someone struggling to regain his partner’s trust and rebuild his relationship after he cheated.
My reply in a nutshell: If you’ve stepped out of your relationship, and want to do better going forward, the main person whose trust you need to earn is your own. Figure out what your standards are for yourself to be a boyfriend who deserves your partner’s trust, and live up to those standards. Strive to honor your partner’s requests to demonstrate your trustworthiness, but when doing so comes at too high a cost to your self-respect or your affection for your partner, you may need to set a boundary.
Now I’d like to address the other side of this dilemma. If you’ve been cheated on, what can you do to build a trusting and loving relationship with your partner, going forward?
Here is my reply to the partner.
For starters: You’re in a tough spot. It’s natural and understandable to be hurt, heartbroken, and furious with your partner. But if you want to have a loving relationship going forward, you are going to have to find a way to not let these feelings run your show for too long.
As is true for your partner, the person whose trust you most need to earn is yourself. Can you get better at paying attention, going forward, to any signs that your partner is stepping out of the relationship? Did you miss any hints that something was amiss? Were you ignoring data about his behavior and character?
You can’t go too far in either direction here. On the one hand, ignoring your “spidey sense” that something’s wrong is a terrible idea. On the other hand, ongoing scrutiny and interrogations create an imbalanced relationship and often lead to your partner wanting to get away with things. That’s just a natural consequence of being constantly watched.
A big part of your work is to determine if your partner is sincere in the desire to be honest going forward and devote himself to building the same kind of relationship that you want to build. This means assessing your partner’s character: Do you have a clear read on his values, and do you respect them? Can you get a good sense of whether he is just telling you what you want to hear in order to stay in the relationship, or giving you an honest representation of where he really stands?
You can never know for sure. You can only do your best to see your partner and your relationship accurately. One thing is certain, though. If you are going to be in a close relationship, you must accept that you are going to be vulnerable to heartbreak. In any long relationship, partners do at times hurt each other, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. There is no way around this.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you must stay with someone who cheated on you. You get to decide who you want to be with, what is not forgivable, and when you do not want to forgive.
If you decide that you have good reason to stay, you will have to develop your ability to quiet yourself down when it feels like something might be wrong and you are starting to freak out. Remember, your alarm system is likely on high alert after having been betrayed, which means you may easily panic when something might be amiss.
So when your partner doesn’t show up when he said he would, or doesn’t reply to a text or answer his phone, take a moment to quiet your mind—perhaps by taking some slow deep breaths, perhaps simply by reminding yourself that your judgment may be “off” right now—and not rush into accusations or a downward spiral.
Every time you are able to make this move, you will be strengthening your ability to remain calm and thoughtful under very tough circumstances. That is a great skill to have in all arenas of life.
One more point: If you want to be angry or walk around feeling like your partner owes you for the rest of your existence, you might as well end the relationship, because you’ll never have a loving relationship under those conditions. You cannot use your partner’s bad behavior to justify your own bad behavior. For a relationship to succeed, each partner must strive to be someone worth being in a relationship with.
If your partner stepped out of the relationship and you’re struggling with how you want to proceed, feel free to contact me. I’ll be glad to help you figure out a path that you respect.
