If someone you love cheated on you, this one is for you.

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The sun had barely crested the horizon when I saw the man I loved for 4 years kissing another woman on the hospital bed.

I wanted to unsee what my eyes saw. I averted my eyes and looked out the window at the cobbled, cloudy streets of my hometown. It was six o’clock on Saturday morning in April in Addis Ababa, gloomy and grey, and it felt like that in my heart too.

But then my eyes can’t help but return back to the scene in front of me, even if it was the most painful scene my 28 year-old-heart could take.

I blinked and hoped each time that the hard undeniable truth would disappear.

But it didn’t, and the perspective I’d obviously lacked for the last four years crashed into me like a freight train.

How the hell could I have been so bloody naïve?

I refused to believe what I saw. I blamed my eyes.

Damn eyes! Stop lying.

When you love and trust someone, you deny the painful truth vehemently even though it’s staring back at you.

My boyfriend of 4 years had been slashing me mercilessly with half-truths. Through his perfect line of teeth, oozed rays of lies. He had been feeding me lies, over and over again, until I became an embodiment of lies.

With the shocking scene in front of me, the world that I had built with tiny bricks of dreams crumpled into pieces ruthlessly.

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The night before this horrible morning, my boyfriend woke up from his sleep at midnight clutching his stomach and gasping for breath. I took him to the nearest emergency room. It turned out he had food poisoning. After the doctors gave him antibiotics and fluids, he fell asleep. I stayed awake holding his hands the rest of the night.

When the sun rose the next morning, I went out of his room for a minute to look for a much-needed coffee, even if the coffee I would find inside a hospital would taste horrible.

I was adding caffeine in my unslept brain with the not-so-good coffee when I returned back to his room. I didn’t expect the scene when I opened the door of the hospital room he had stayed the night in.

They were kissing oblivious to the rest of the world.

Fury swept over me, so swift and sudden that I was standing in front of them before I could take a breath. I lashed out, “you’re a liar!” He gasped, sucking in a harsh breath that made him splutter and cough in a way that would’ve broken my heart five minutes before. But it was already broken now, the pain masked by rage, and an all-consuming need to hurt him as he had hurt me.

His betrayal felt like a knife to my chest, like acid lacing my blood, but it was a pain I clung to grimly, afraid to let it fade in case it took all that was left of me with it.

“Hatred, resentment, and holding a grudge do no one any good and rarely achieve the result of hurting or damaging the one you cannot forgive.”

I could not say anything else.

I turned my back and walked away.

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Later that same day, he begged me to forgive him.

He thought cheating is something I would get over. I asked him:

“How long have you been cheating on me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. It just happened.”

“Nothing just happens. You made it happen. Answer my question: HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN CHEATING ON ME?”

“6 months.”

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I believed him. The moment I saw him kissing another woman, he had lost me forever. Maybe he had been cheating on me since we started dating. Who knows? Maybe he said 6 months to lessen the pain. As if cheating on someone you love for a short time would ever lessen the pain and the betrayal.

“Please let us talk about this. You can’t leave.” he pleaded his case – as if we’re arguing about what kind of teacups to buy.

But at that point, I was not listening. I was wondering. Wondering how I missed the signals.

Wondering how I became the other woman.

Wondering why I have not listened to my friends.

I had met him in a global meeting when I was 25. Until he broke my heart four years later, I loved him.

He was so handsome. I loved it when he looked at me like that. He’d hug and squeeze me, so tight and so urgent. Then he’d whisper, “Mine. You’re mine.”

This love felt so delicious.

And safe.

I didn’t think there was enough space on this planet to hide away with him.

We talked about the future. We talked about forever. We talked about going to Spain someday because my best friend lives there and I couldn’t wait to introduce him.

When we met after a long day, he swept me in his arms, and it was like coming home after a long and terrible separation, clutching each other as though we had a near miss and barely escaped with our lives. Even the reassurance of touch and taste did not feel like enough.  

With all this love – or what I thought was his love for me – I never imagined he would cheat.

Except friends told me he might be cheating on me. There was this woman whose office was next to him. “They’re spending so much time together,” my friends said.

I asked him:

“Are you cheating on me?”

“No. How can you ask me such a thing? You know how much I love you.”

A wise woman would have questioned more.

But I trusted his answers.

How gullible of me.

In my 20s, my heart was this wild, sovereign, beating thing that never listened to what my friends were saying.

I was loyal and solid and for real and was there for him and came through for him in more ways than I could imagine.

I just was not interested in being a woman who calls every hour of every day to check on someone she loves.

Do you know the wound of someone you love cheating on you feels like?

I have smelled this betrayal. I have sniffed at it. From close quarters. It crept into my skin when someone I thought I would marry betrayed me.

Days, weeks, and months after I walked away on that horrible morning, I would wake up, remember his betrayal and begin to shake.

I’d lie there, feeling like something was crawling under my skin.

Every night felt unbearable.

I felt ongoing physical symptoms: pain in my chest, suffocating pressure, and an inability to take deep breaths. A therapist friend I talked to told me the cause of these symptoms was probably my simmering rage and resentment towards my ex.

Now don’t feel bad.

It has been years since he stabbed my soul and butchered my spirit. I’m not sitting here writing this hating myself for how gullible I’ve been or feeling sad.

This was years ago. I’ve made my peace with this experience.

I learned a lot. 

Even though it took me years to open my heart and trust a man again, I’ve moved on. I’ve found a good man.

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Here’re 5 ways I healed the wound of someone I loved cheating on me:

I turned the questions on myself

Whenever someone we love cheats our default is to put the question on that someone who cheated.

Months after the betrayal, I banged my head against the wall (metaphorically, but also literally) and continued to ask myself questions about why he cheated on me.

Why? Why did he cheat? Why did he hurt me on purpose? What didn’t he get from me that he had to look somewhere else?

These kinds of questions were not just a guarantee to make me suffer but they were also futile. I raged and thrashed and got nowhere, every time.

This is because we do not have the power to dictate the actions of others – even if we love them the most. We can only dictate our own actions.

Finally, I came to my senses and realized that the way out is me.

Turning the questions on myself – even though it was incredibly painful – healed me.

How, Banchi? How on earth did I get here? How did I arrive at a place where I did not see or chose not to see the signs that someone I loved for four years was cheating on me?

What’re you going to do about it now?

The day you turn the questions on yourself you will gather your heart and your things and you will walk away.

Not because you stop hurting or you suddenly stop loving him. Your pain or love for him is not the point.

You will walk away because you will come to understand the only way to heal the wound of someone you love cheating on you is to turn the painful questions on yourself and answer them as honestly as you can.

I looked at all the things I’ve survived

Someone you love cheats on you. And you’re tossed aside. Everything hurts. It all feels scattered, fragmented, shattered.

“I thought I was the only woman in his life. It turned out, I was the other woman.” I said this every time friends asked me how I was doing.

This feeling of being the other woman broke me. It made me feel like I was less of a woman.

I felt cold all the time.

Still…

I never, ever told myself that I didn’t have the strength to move on. I have the strength to do anything. This is because strength does not come from declaring its lack of existence.

It’s strength that begets strength, and it’s this that proved to me I could move on from a betrayal.

When our heart breaks into million pieces, this is when we need to remember that we’re not broken.

When our heart bleeds with so much pain, we only see the waves of the ocean. The surface is noisy and you are caught in it, tangled in the pain. 

But beneath the ocean, there is a bobbling kind of stillness. If you go deep you see that you have everything you need.

Step away from the surface, the ripples, the choppiness. Look at what’s right at the center of you, at your core, radiating warmth.

Look at all the things you have survived.

Beautiful, intact, sacred you. Indestructible.

You’ll feel warm again.

You’re not broken. What you are is unbreakable.

I’m whole and so are you.

I gave myself time to recover

When someone you love cheats on you, you think you will never recover. Life will never be the same and you can’t believe how much you took for granted before this pain stole so much.

You’re heartbroken and look. You will be horrified when I say this, and will feel like I don’t understand, but soon, very soon, you won’t be.

As cliché as it sounds, in time, your shattered heart will mend.

I decided to never go back to him

One time, a few months after I walked away, he was waiting for me at the main gate of the Institute I work for. He begged me to go back to him. He swore that he had changed his ways. But I couldn’t move past his betrayal and no longer felt safe.

Even though he begged me to go back to him, I didn’t want to.

He could no longer be the man I was certain would never lie to me.

Eventually, his betrayal crowded out me being in love with him.

A dear friend of mine is having a hard time these days to move on after her boyfriend of 2 years cheated on her. She tells me that she still loves him.

But being in love is not a valid reason to stay in a relationship that’s bad for you.

“I can’t leave” is just not true.

It’s so easy to say, “I can’t, I can’t, I just can’t oh my God I love him so.”

But watch me.

Sure I can.

The reason I stay is usually because I am terrified. Because what if I regret this? Because I would rather be in a bad relationship than be alone. Because what if he stops cheating?

Because I lack faith in myself.

Staying in a relationship that is bad for me negatively affects me by continuing to undermine my faith in myself.

In other words, the longer I stay, the harder it is to leave.

The way out is to leave. Now. Right now.

This is terrifying.

I leave and it’s hard. Really hard. It hurts to the bone. I rebuild myself. I slowly recover. I slowly collect all the things I had lost. And one day, not too far away from today, I wonder what the heck took me so long.

All these things are true for my dear friend too.

All these things are true for you too.

I wished for his happiness, without me

Hatred, resentment, and holding a grudge do no one any good and rarely achieve the result of hurting or damaging the one you cannot forgive. We cannot wish ill upon someone who hurt us and expect everything to go well with us. We can’t go through the world wishing that person who betrayed us ill because they didn’t love us, because they cheated on us, because things didn’t work out with us, because they hurt us.

It’s not right, nor realistic.

But also because it constricts and diminishes us.

I resented my ex with every fiber of my being for two years. The more I resented my ex, the more my wound aggravated. But then I realized this resentment is not worth it.

Letting go and wishing that person who hurt you happiness without you is how you cleanse your heart from this hatred.

Forgiveness is how you heal the wound. How you heal yourself.

Forgiveness does not mean the person occupies the same place in your life. It does not mean you carry on as if the betrayal never happened. You can, for example, forgive someone and resolve never to see them again. Like I did. You don’t distance yourself out of spite but out of respect for yourself.

Forgiving someone who cheated on you is not a gift to the person who hurt you but rather a gift to yourself.

It will set you free.

It will heal your shattered heart.

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