Dating & Love
6 Cheaters Tell Us How They Feel About Themselves
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Among the many turmoils a relationship goes through, cheating is considered the most devastating. And rightly so. The breach of trust, the disrespect that it embodies is nothing short of a cardinal sin. This understanding largely is molded by looking at infidelity from the perspective of the one who’s been cheated on. In the process, we often fail to see how do cheaters feel about themselves. But one thing is for sure. People who cheat do it for their selfish reasons.
In fact, it won’t be a stretch to say that the state of mind of a cheater has been incorrectly stereotyped. They’re often touted to be insensitive, unfeeling, and callous people who don’t flinch before exposing their relationships to the risk of destruction and their partners to a lifetime of emotional trauma. While no amount of rationalization can justify the breach of trust that manifests in the wake of infidelity, complex emotional situations such as these are hardly as black and white as they’re made out to be.
A cheater’s mind is fraught with feelings of guilt, fear of getting caught, the uncertainty of the future of both relationships, a sense of being torn between their primary and affair partners. They love the initial thrill of an affair but they do get their karma down the lane. But do cheaters realize what they lost? Do cheaters miss their ex? If such questions have been on your mind because your partner has breached the line of faithfulness or even out of sheer curiosity, we’re here to help you understand how can cheating affect the cheater. Let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth with confessions of people who have cheated on their partners.
What Is Cheating?
Before we get to decoding how does cheating affect the cheater and how does it feel to cheat on someone you love, it’s vital to define what counts as cheating in a relationship. Broadly, cheating can be defined as a monogamist or mono-amorous person in a committed relationship forming a romantic connection with someone other than their partner.
However, as we said before, when it comes to complex emotional matters, things are hardly black and white. There is often a lot of grey area to navigate. For instance, for some people, even looking at another person as an object of desire is cheating. They may believe that there is nothing called harmless flirting when you’re already in a committed relationship.
Likewise, looking through your old flame’s photographs on social media can be considered cheating on your partner. Cheating can be very subjective and how a person defines cheating is entirely up to their perspective on cheating. People could be micro-cheating and treating it as a bit of harmless fun or they could be involved in an emotional affair without even realizing that they are being unfaithful to their partner.
Cheating has taken different forms in the modern age but how do cheaters feel about themselves? This is a very important aspect that determines how cheating will affect a relationship. Unless a person is a seasoned serial cheater, betraying their partner’s trust takes a huge toll on their peace of mind and emotional health long before their transgression comes to light and even if it doesn’t get exposed at all.
Related Reading: Confession Story: Emotional Cheating Vs Friendship – The Blurry Line
How Do Cheaters Feel About Themselves?
- How does a cheater feel after being caught?
- Do cheaters get their karma? Do cheaters suffer?
- Do cheaters realize what they lost?
- Do cheaters miss their ex?
- Do they feel shame?
Questions like these begin swirling around in our minds when we are cheated on but we don’t realize that there are deadly lies cheaters tell themselves and their partners to get rid of their guilt and wrongdoings.
We still hope that by asking the right questions to an unfaithful spouse or partner, we can lessen our pain. When that doesn’t work out, we want our partner to feel the pain that we are going through. In most cases, cheaters do feel remorse for their actions long before they are caught.
Yet, people cheat and continue going down the path of self-sabotaging their relationships, knowing full well the consequences of their actions. Though cheating is a weakness, it makes people feel powerful and in control of their stories albeit momentarily. Perhaps, it gives them a sense of fulfillment in the moment or infuses a rush of thrill, excitement and desire in their lives.
Whatever be the reason behind this tendency to play with fire that has the potential of engulfing their entire lives and reducing it to ashes, cheaters do suffer emotionally at every step of the way. Infidelity can be a lonely experience, which can turn into a tormenting mix of guilt, shame, fear.
How Do Cheaters Feel When They Get Caught?
One thing all cheaters have in common is that when they get caught and their secret affair gets discovered, most of the time, it is liberating. For all the shame, pain, hurt, accusations, an affair coming to light also brings with it an end to the secrecy, hiding, carefully constructed web of lies to keep one’s partner in the dark. That can be a welcome relief for a cheating partner because most people are aware, at the back of their minds, that lifelong affairs are a rarity and an illicit romantic connection comes with a limited shelf life.
Once the affair is exposed, the cheater feels like they are compelled to stop running away from making a choice between their partner and paramour. There is no longer a need to continue staying in a relationship that suffocates you but you can’t get out of owing to a latent sense of duty. There is also no need to continue deceiving the partner and betraying their trust at every step of the way.
Getting caught brings a cheater face-to-face with clear choices ahead of them: surviving the affair and rebuilding the relationship (provided their partner is willing to give them another chance), starting a new life with their affair partner, or leaving behind both relationships and turning over a new leaf in their life.
How do cheaters feel about themselves upon getting caught? No matter how constricted a person feels when cheating on their partner, the discovery of their transgression is never easy to come to terms with. Cheaters suffer consequences and every cheater goes through different stages of guilt during this time, ranging from shifting the blame to their partner to trying to salvage the relationship, slipping into depression over what they’ve lost, and finally, coming to terms with the consequences of their actions.
So, if you’ve wondered do cheaters realize what they lost, they most definitely do. However, by then, a lot of damage has already been caused to all parties involved.
Related Reading: Everything You Need To Know About The 7 Types Of Affairs That Exist
What Is Cheaters’ Psychology?
Basically, two types of mentality lead to cheating:
- First, when you are too cowardly to make a clean break off your current relationship but need a way out
- Secondly, when you feel entitled to be loved by more than one partner irrespective of how your partner feels about it. You want a new girlfriend/boyfriend, You want a new romance because you feel like you are entitled to it.
The first one may be a result of deep-rooted insecurities or poor attachment styles that make you want to seek an easy way out of a sense of unfulfillment in your primary relationship than address it head-on. These kinds of cheaters suffer, feel shame, and they feel guilty for acting out of their own insecurities. The second has all the telling markings of serial cheaters perspectives.
Cheaters from the second category never change. Even those who turn to cheating as an escape mechanism may find it hard to break the pattern without the will to work on rewiring their basic perceptions of love, relationships and conflicts with the help of an expert counselor or therapist. Most cheaters justify everything other than actual intercourse as casual or harmless. Cheaters have all kinds of things to say about what they feel about cheating and some don’t feel guilty at all. Strangely sometimes wives feel guilty when their husbands cheat.
6 Cheaters Tell Us How They Feel About Themselves After Cheating
Do cheaters get their karma? If so, what are the karmic consequences of cheating? Do they feel horrible about themselves for cheating on their partners? How do they go to sleep at night and look at themselves in the mirror? How do cheaters feel about themselves? The mind can truly boggle by a barrage of questions that infidelity can rake up. We’re here to help answer at least a few of those through these insights on how cheating affects the cheater from people who’ve lived these experiences first-hand. These are true stories and therefore the names have been altered.
1. “I cheated before my marriage” – Rohit
“Bandana and I have been married for 6 years. I was caught cheating. I cheated on her with God knows how many people. But that was before we were married. I immediately uninstalled all the dating sites after I got married. I didn’t tell her before we were married because I thought that it didn’t matter. I tried to tell her that but she would not listen. Then she asked me something that made me realize where I went wrong.
“She asked me, why did I hide it in the first place for so many years if it didn’t matter. For the first time, I started feeling bogged down by cheating guilt and realized why I hid it from her for so long. I was wrong then and I’m wrong now. I have felt the karmic consequences of cheating long after my transgression. What I feel for her is true love and now she is heartbroken. She gave me another chance and we decided to stay together. I can only hope she will find it in her heart to forgive me. I realized that cheaters suffer equally as the ones who got cheated on.”
2. “I feel horrible about her questioning eyes” – Kashyap
“Piu is the love of my life, she’s my home. But for years I cheated on her as I felt suffocated by commitment because of my low self-esteem. But then, these affairs started feeling like a burden and I wanted to be released from them. I started having cheaters regret. I knew I made a mistake by cheating on someone I truly love. So, I confessed everything to Piu and she forgave me. Yes, I have been an unfaithful partner but she forgave me. However, I couldn’t forgive myself. I cheated on her because of my own insecurities.
“My commitment issues got the better of me and it was the biggest mistake of my life. I am trying my best to fix things. If you ask me how do cheaters feel about themselves, I would just say one word, horrible. I have erased her smile. Every time my phone rings or I get a text, she looks at me with a question in her eyes but she doesn’t say anything. I feel like I’m in the prison of my own guilt. I feel so much remorse. I just ruined our relationship.”
Related Reading: The Affair Aftermath – 6 Ways To Get Over Cheating Guilt
3. “Karma got back to me” – Bihu
“When I was dating Samar, I cheated on him with Debu. It went on for a while until I finally broke up with Samar and started dating Debu. Samar was devastated but I didn’t care. It all affected me only when I found out that Debu was cheating on me. It is only then I started to understand how Samar must have felt. When you cheat on someone, someone else will cheat on you in the future. I felt the same pain that I gave someone. That’s cheaters karma.
“I called Samar to apologize but it was too late. Samar was already in a happy relationship. My pain of being cheated on by Debu was only challenged by my guilt of cheating on Samar. Do cheaters get their karma? If you ask me, I’d say there’s no escaping it. Karma got back to me. The situation was truly sad and taught me a terrible lesson. This is one of the main reasons why I tell my friends to never cheat on someone they love because people who cheat are never the same again. The guilt of what they did haunts them forever.”
4. “I feel guilty when he shows love” – Nilima
“When Pritam went to work abroad I felt very lonely. Rohit and I got intimate a few times but we both knew that it was nothing serious. It has been a long time, but now Pritam has come back to India and wants to marry me. I feel guilty but I don’t know if I should tell him the whole thing but I can’t say yes to the marriage without telling him anything.
“I feel like I have betrayed his trust and can never have a normal life with him anymore. Every gesture of love he shows me makes me feel more and more guilty every day. I want us to stay together but I don’t know how to deal with my guilt, which leaves me stifled every moment. That’s precisely how cheating affects the cheater.”
5. “My hasty decision ruined everything” – Shilpi
“My boyfriend, Swarna, was in a relationship with three other girls from my class or so I was convinced by one of my friends. I felt insulted and cheated. To get back at him, I went ahead and had a one-night stand. I made one of the classic mistakes in a long-distance relationship of letting distance erode the trust. Later, I found out that my friends were helping Swarna plan a surprise visit to see me.
“It was surprising for me but a shock for Swarna, who walked in on me in bed with another person. How could I ever hurt such a person? Maybe I have ruined my relationship with my hasty vengeance. I begged and wanted us to stay together but that was out of the question. I’ll never get over the guilt of what I did to Swarna. I cannot even begin to tell how I feel about myself after cheating. Do cheaters realize what they lost, you ask? Every single moment. Cheaters suffer a lot, I’d say.”
6. “My wife supported me when my secretary started blackmailing” – Riju
“My wife felt neglected while I had an affair with my secretary. My wife, mother of my two children: she sacrificed her career to take care of me, my children and my family and I rewarded her by cheating on her. I ignored her and spent all my time with my secretary.
“I had to tell my wife about the affair when my secretary started to blackmail me. My wife supported me and helped me to deal with the situation. But I lost her trust. I’m doing what I can to reinstate love and trust in my marriage but I don’t know if it would ever be enough for her to recover from her heartbreak. I only feel remorse now and nothing else.”
Do serial cheaters feel remorse?
Serial cheaters are different from one-time cheaters because cheating comes to them pathologically and it is a part of their system. Serial cheaters can keep cheating with a straight face and keep convincing their partners every time that everything is hunky-dory. Serial cheaters are typically narcissists who look at every person as a possible conquest, they are very charming and feel no remorse about cheating. Sometimes on rare occasions, if they feel guilty about cheating they quickly brush that aside and get back to their ways. So if you ask serial cheaters how they feel about themselves chances are they would say they feel great.
If someone cheated on you and you decide to cheat on them with someone else, then trust me, you are not going to heal this way. Cheating is a menace that destroys lives and families. Most of all it destroys trust in a relationship: that is truly a regrettable loss. It takes a toll on everyone involved, including the cheater. If you have been cheating on your partner and don’t know how to put an end to the affair before it’s too late, know that you’re not alone.
Scores of people battle similar dilemmas and benefit from seeking counseling to understand how to break problematic attachment patterns. The fact that you want to make amends is a step in the right direction. You can go through this journey with the guidance of a skilled therapist. With licensed and experienced therapists on Bonobology’s panel, the right help is only a click away.
We Both Have Trust Issues In a Relationship and Don’t Know What to Do
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