Can you come back from cheating?

Once a cheater, always a cheater’. It’s a phrase we were fed in our formative years, and—in some ways—it was a pretty feminist warning. It was protective armour, meant to encompass a general idea of ‘if they’ve hurt someone once, they’re likely to do it again’. Cheating was always part of the holy trinity of reasons that women were ‘encouraged’ to leave a partner; 1. Does he hit you? 2. Does he drink too much? 3. Does he cheat? If the answer to any of those three was a resounding ‘yes’, women were buoyed to exit a relationship. But the trouble with that ‘golden trifecta’ is how reductive it was. Just like the phrase ‘once a cheater...’.

Both ideas have no nuance, no room for the vagaries of being an adult in adult relationships—the messiness, layers, and chaos of it all. In the real world, cheating can come in a hundred different flavours, ranging from callous to desperate. And cheating, though incredibly tempting to villainise carte blanche, can often come from somewhere broken. There are so many questions around it. Why? Why now? Why this person? What was it really about? But the question I’m asking is, what next? Can a relationship ever come back from cheating? Or is it still the death knell we were all taught to believe it was?

Cheating in itself is a subject so rich, psychotherapist Esther Perel delved into detail in her book State of Affairs. There are a series of explorations in it that examine the ripple effect of straying outside the confines of your defined relationship, particularly a monogamous one. “Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness. Infidelity says, ‘You’re not special after all’. It shatters the grand ambition of love,” Perel says. 

But while the book is incredibly illuminating, it is also more rooted in the American experience than any other (though gently peppered with some degree of European and South American perspective). In India, relationship—and marital— structures are different, influenced by a litany of factors that don’t colour the Western lens as much. There are families, social stigma, traditional conditioning that we either inherit or fight hard not to. 

In the research stage of this column, I joined a global subReddit called ‘Cheating Stories’. It has over 248K followers (at the time of writing this), and is a safe, anonymous space where people share stories of their suspicions or experiences having been cheated on. I learnt quickly how deeply it can shatter somebody—and how unforgiving people can be about it in a blanket fashion. Phrases like ‘leave him immediately’, ‘get rid of her,’ ‘oh, he is definitely not to be trusted, you are better off without him’ turned up frequently. Rarely did I ever see the phrase ‘did you ever find out why she did it?’ or ‘I know you love him. How do you feel?’ 

The stigma of staying is real. It’s the kernel of why most people leave after a big infidelity—because, apart from the trauma they’ve been through, there is the shame of having forgiven such a colossal slight. “I left my ex four years ago when I found out he had slept with a close friend of his when he was in her city on work,” Mahira* shares. “I couldn’t stop imagining the two of them together. The betrayal of it was too much. There was a part of me that wanted to find a way to let it go. But my friends would not have it. They were incensed at the idea of us even being in touch after what he’d done. He was broken-hearted, called it a mistake he’d never repeat. It’s been four years and I haven’t been able to move on from it. We’re back in touch, but I haven’t told my friends. I don’t know where it’ll go with us, but the truth is, in four years, I haven’t found anything like what we had. Isn’t that worth working out?”

 

When Alisha’s* husband of three years cheated on her, it devastated her. She loved him, and their life together. “But being the victim was not my style,” she says. “I thought a lot about leaving him, but it never felt right. It was a random one-night stand—I felt like people make mistakes. So...,” she shrugs sheepishly. “I decided to make my own mistake. Even the score.” She slept with a man she knew would bother her husband, but wasn’t actively part of their lives—a former colleague of hers. “Is it healthy? No, of course not. We’re in therapy. But him cheating broke my heart and took my power away. This gave me some of it back.” 

For the strong woman of 2024, cheating arouses a cocktail of emotions—feeling hurt, ‘unspecial’, betrayed, and, as Alisha* phrased it ‘like a victim’. Being perceived as a victim, too, is an offshoot. It’s why Kalyani* decided to keep it to herself when her girlfriend cheated on her, like all her friends had warned her she would. “They were being bigoted, assuming she would cheat because she’s bisexual and most of my friends (and I) are gay. It was an inherent bias they had, and when she slept with a man from her past, I was so ashamed that they were right. I still love her with all my heart—I don’t want to leave it. It’s going to take time, but I know we can work through it.” It’s been hard for her to not share this gargantuan thing with her close circle, but “it’s better than getting ‘I told you so’s and all of them yelling at me to leave her.” 

In Lakshmi’s* case, it was her that did the cheating two years ago—and the regret eats away at her every day. “I really fu*ked up. I slept with my ex because my boyfriend and I had a major fight. It doesn’t excuse it—but I thought we were over, and I was really sad. I woke up the next day and felt awful.” She wished it ended there, but it happened a second time when she suspected her boyfriend had slept with a girl from his work to get back at her. He hadn’t. “I got drunk and did it again because I was so sure. The second time did it for me—I cut off contact with my ex and told my boyfriend everything. I don’t know why he chose to stay with me, but he did—and now I spend every day trying to earn back his trust.” 

Like a devastating disease, we all assume cheating will never happen to us (unless, of course, it already has). And yet, a TechReport amalgam of surveys from 2017 to present shows that 16 per cent of married couples have admitted to being unfaithful— and 57 per cent of marriages that end, end due to infidelity. 
Cheating is cruel, but more common than we imagine. And as much as you might be pressured, by society, by the people that love you— even yourself, only you know the interior of your relationship. Only you are inside it, with an intimate understanding of yourself and your partner that the world only sees the surface of. 

In this instance, The Japanese art of Kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold—has never been a more fitting metaphor. Your relationship, as you know it, might have been broken. But only you can look at the pieces and see if they are shards of a shared past—or if it can be given new life and become something beautiful and different altogether.

*Names have been changed to maintain anonymity

Author and editor Saumyaa Vohra’s Match Point is a column that explores the ever-evolving dynamics of young love. Vohra is the author of the novel One Night Only, published by Pan Macmillan India.

The article was first published in Cosmopolitan India's Nov-Dec 2024 issue.

Lead image: Netflix

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