Should You Stay With Someone Who Cheated On You?

Should you stay with someone who cheated on you? Well, relationships are complicated, the dynamics of the day to day living in a relationship and that the ebbs and flows will always require work. Cheating is straightforward, your partner either broke your trust and displayed an act of betrayal or they didn’t. Even though the cheating occurred, it doesn’t mean you should not stay with someone who cheated on you and immediately throw away the relationship. Just like being in a relationship, processing infidelity is still going to require work. There are varying factors that will have some importance when deciding if you should stay with someone who cheated on you or not.

1. Are You In Love?

Someone who cheated on you may say that they love you, but love is an emotion that seems to come and go within relationships. Love experts have said that “people don’t just fall out of love, they stop working on the love”. If you are still in love then you have to really weigh out your options. Do they still love you and they made a terrible mistake? You might be in love and your heart is broken, thinking it would be easier to leave them than to stay is not true. Your heart will require just as much work to heal the heartbreak as it will to heal the relationship.

Some couples after cheating can have even stronger bonds so if you’re in love then repairing the relationship might just be worth it.

2.How Did The Cheating Happen?

Cheating is a break of trust and respect no matter how it happens. Should you stay with someone who cheated on you when they are extremely regrettable about the infidelity? Well, how did it happen? Did they go out for a coffee date then bring them back to your house when you were not there and then they chose to cheat in your own home? That would be a strong act of disrespect and trust and we would have to strongly lean towards leaving this person. However, where they blackout drunk and someone took advantage of them while they were not even present in their own mind? Maybe that’s up for discussion and you can both work through the cheating.

These would be two very different sides of cheating, how it happens can show the length of distrust your partner went through to cheat on you. The other side is the lack of maturity and mindfulness that shows that maybe you can work through what happened but your partner will need to learn a lot about themself.

3.Remorse?

Does your partner express any remorse? Does your partner blame you for their actions? Remorse and regret are a gauge that will show you if they truly felt bad for their actions. If they know they were in the wrong no matter what happened and they are willing to correct their actions then they will express remorse by first saying that they are sorry. Followed by an apology and a willingness to ensure that it won’t happen again. This could be as simple as your partner saying “What do I need to do to make this better?” If they focus on you being the problem it’s a red flag as they might even be manipulative.

4.How Did You Find Out?

Should you stay with someone who cheated on you for years without telling you? That might be obvious, no. However, how did you find out? Did they confess, did you stumble upon a text message? Are you married with kids? There are a lot of variables, the more variables that make it easier to trust again the better. Such as remorse, the willingness of correction, a short span of infidelity or one-time cheating, that you both still get along well and do care for each other. All of those add up to make a shift in how you process the cheating and ability to stay with your partner.

If they confessed to you what happened, they promise it won’t happen again and that it was a mistake then it is possible you should consider working it out. If your relationship, other than that moment of distrust has been successful, happy and there have been no other acts of mistrust then there is an opportunity to rebuild. At this point, a relationship counsellor is necessary along with a personal counsellor to help you through the process.

5.Willing To Get To The Root Of The Issue

Infidelity within a relationship is usually an expression of a bigger issue within the relationship. This expression shows that something is off, either intimacy, communication, shared values, beliefs and a host of other relationship ideals could be the problem. If your partner has cheated, and you are considering if you should stay with them or not, consider this. How far are they willing to go to get to the root of the problem? Are they suggesting therapy? Counselling? Are they asking you what ‘they’ need to do to correct it? Are they reaching out for help to keep the relationship alive? If your partner has cheated and is leaving it up to you to fix the relationship, then NO!

-Infidelity within relationships is at an all-time high, this could for two factors. Either people are less satisfied with monogamous relationships or more people are willing to confess to studies that they have not been faithful. With the ease of access to new people through social media, we need to continually work on our relationships and ourselves to ensure that our partner’s needs are met along with our own. This is the best way to ensure cheating does not happen, and that if it does then we have the tools to repair and heal the relationship without losing everything we have invested in it.