 This will be an article based on my personal experience. How I have dealt with dealing with something that no one should ever have to go through. I try to be open about personal experiences in my writing, and failing to address this issue would be a disservice to everything I stand for in my writing.Â
So to start, I want to say that I had been dating this person for two months when I found out he cheated on me when I went back to the mainland to visit my family for a week. I came back and spent the whole first day that I was back with him, and then I checked my dms.
 I saw the dreaded “Hey girlie…” message that told me that he tried to get with her while I was in Texas. I read this message while I was wrapped up in his arms. He asked what it was and I just stopped. I told him to give me a second to read what it said. I think my first reaction was shock, to immediately shut down and push it away from myself, to disassociate. I felt as though I had to know what he was going to tell me if I asked him. So I asked him if he had cheated on me, if it was just one girl or multiple people. He told me he had tried to sleep with multiple women, but all had denied him out of respect for me. I then asked, “Why? Why would he do this to me?” I believe that I was truly asking this question to God because I truly did not care for my boyfriend’s answer at the time. However, my boyfriend did not know that the answer he gave was that “I was gone.” I was extremely upset by that because I was gone for four days. That was a pathetic excuse.
I did make the mistake of taking him back later because I loved him. We had spent every day of the last two months together, and it was the best time of my life. We would go to Sandy’s lookout at times to dance, watch the stars, or just hold each other. We would go on adventures to restaurants and places we had never been to before. We would spend mornings wrapped up in the sheets together, as if we were the only ones that mattered in the world. He sat with me when I was having breakdowns. He’d just be there for me, and I’d hold him while he cried. We’d ride around in his beat-up old white truck, windows down because the AC never worked, just blasting music and holding hands. We spent so much time going to Dave and Buster’s that I had given him a Pikachu plushie that we had won through all the points we had accumulated. We lasted two months after that before he told me he did not love me, only like me and that he had been lying to me the whole time. It made me so irritated because I was putting all this time and effort into forgiving him for telling me that. He still wanted to be with me, but at this point, I decided it was not worth it.
I regretted that the second I decided to break-up with him. I will be honest. When I was with him, I was growing more than I had ever before. I feel that that is due to me being truly comfortable with who I was for the first time. I associated being a happy and productive person with loving him. In my mind, it was all entangled. So to get over him, I had to learn how to untangle myself with him and others around me. In the second half of this article I will be giving a step-by-step guide on how to get over someone who has cheated on you.
- Cry a lot. Cry until you feel you could never cry again because you are as dry as a desert. What I mean by this is to feel your feelings. Do not be afraid of the emotions you are experiencing. You are allowed to and should grieve for the loss of a relationship that was meaningful for you. It is healthy to feel it is what makes us human. Do not take that gift away from yourself even if right now it feels like a curse.
- Decide to love yourself first. This can mean different things to each person. For me it meant deleting all my social media because they caused me to focus on how others were seeing me at the time. I also dropped a lot of toxic friends because it was bad for my mental health to be around people who always tried to bring me down. I also started doing all the things that I had always wanted to do but was afraid that people would judge me for, like drinking coffee. Now I know that for some people they are gonna be very confused by that, but anxiety is a crazy thing and can make you think crazy things like that.
- Appreciate yourself where you are at now in your life. For me that meant romanticizing my life. Sleeping naked then opening my blinds to let the sun reach parts of me that I had hid from it for so long in fear that it would hurt me like so many before it. It meant getting myself those ice trays and a drip pour coffee maker that had been in the back of my mind for six months to make myself feel like I mattered. It meant putting up sticky notes to track the days I had not been on social media so that I could see the progress I was making in front of my own eyes.
- Decide who you want to be after you are done grieving. When I broke up with the guy who cheated on me, I decided on a word that I wanted to capture, which was “calm”. I wanted to feel and exude a calm presence and I spent every living moment trying to become that. Through that I learned that I don’t have to talk as much even though I did before. But honestly I never enjoyed being the extroverted friend. It was a box that I was thrown into by others so I just accepted it. I also learned that I love the library and being alone because in the library you are expected to be quiet. As far as liking being alone I think I enjoy it because I’m not forced into being someone I’m not. I can just exist in my own presence.
- Understand that you will never be fully healed. It still hurts when I look back on it. I don’t hurt as much. I feel it in passing but not every day, not even every week, but I still feel it sometimes. It is just whether or not you’re willing to accept it taking over the power of your life. Which now I’m not anymore. My life is very different now then it was then. I am extremely grateful for that because now I am probably the best version of myself that I have seen and I continue to grow exponentially.
I want to leave off with healing after getting cheated on is an extremely personal journey that I had to go on. If you are reading this, I am so sorry that this happened to you. Whoever they are, they don’t deserve the right to have you back after they disrespected you like that. They may love you, but that does not matter if they don’t respect you as a person. I know that is hard information to accept but it helped me a lot to understand why I couldn’t go back after my final break-up with the person I loved.Â