Let's Take it From the Top

Last post I asked my few (but no less loved!) readers to ask any questions to help with the recent writer's block jag. So, here we go.

First question:
"-how you decided to "forgive" him and try to make things worse???" (I'm going to assume here that she meant how I tried to make things better, and not worse. Am I right, Wanda??)

I admit, it took a LOT for me to be able to push this whole incident of his cheating to the back of my mind and move on. I would think it's safe to say that most women have this ingrained fear of being second best, or not measuring up. When someone cheats on you, it's easy to give in to that fear and let it consume you. I really had to take a big step back from our relationship at that point. I had to learn that The Ex cheating on me was HIS problem, not mine. He cheated for reasons having nothing at all to do with me. Only HE was responsible for his actions. I know that I kept wrestling with the idea that if I had been a better person, nicer, prettier, more SOMETHING that it wouldn't have happened. But that's really not the case. Once I came to realize that it wasn't my fault he cheated I had to make the decision to either leave him or to forgive him and move forward.

I was raised to believe that it's important to forgive people. People deserve second chances (and, obviously in this case, third and fourth and fifth chances too). We broke up for a couple weeks while I was dealing with this betrayal. We stayed in contact and The Ex took every opportunity to show me how sorry he was. I truly felt that deep down, he WAS sorry. I could tell he felt ashamed of what he'd done, and the fact that he told me right away instead of hiding it from me said a lot for him.

Honestly, I wanted to forgive him a lot sooner than I did, but I felt like I had this point to prove. I had to make him know that he couldn't betray me like that without some sort of consequence. When I eventually did decide that I would forgive him and give our relationship another try, I was so cold to him. I would get into these moods where I would just say the most scathing, hurtful things to him in some twisted attempt to make him hurt as much as I had. And perhaps if I was doing those things to him, I hadn't TRULY forgiven him, not completely. I'm not proud of the way I treated him after that, but I understand where those feelings came from.

A lot of work on my part went into rebuilding my trust in him. Right away I made him get screened for STD's, and for a long time after that there was very little physical contact between us. Even holding his hand would make me cringe. My overactive imagination would play these scenes of him with her over and over in my mind. I kept thinking "he touched HER with those hands." or "she was here, in this room, on his bed." The best way to describe how I felt at that point was un-safe. I don't know how to explain it exactly, except that it felt like all the familiar things about him were no longer just mine. All the things that I thought were shared only between us were now tainted by this outside person he had chose to let in.

Eventually, over time, things got a little easier to deal with. The wounds from this healed over but left proof that they were there at one point. I would constantly catch myself doubting his loyalty, lashing out at him when I thought he had done something shady. And maybe I never completely got over it...