When we eventually did break up for reasons unrelated to his cheating, I realized that I never wanted to dismiss him or hurt him. We were together but we were never really the same. It was as if our relationship had gone through a cosmic shift. I thought more about what my partner had said about me (and later, about her) than I did about the kiss and wondered if I would ever be able to dismiss him as easily as he’d done to me. Since the only person I’d told lived hours away from me, the whole ordeal became an almost constant part of my internal dialogue. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it, though. I told my partner I was ready to stop talking about it every day, which he was thrilled about, and so I did. It felt easier at the time to let it all go. It’s normal to doubt your partner in this situation, but I knew things were bad when I started doubting myself. I did the whole comparison thing for a few days, picking at myself relentlessly and texting screenshots to the one friend I’d told so she could see how badly I didn’t square up. Online, our lives felt startlingly similar and frankly, we also sort of looked alike, so my partner’s defense was more than just a little irritating. You might be wondering why I spent so much time sympathizing with this person but I felt like I knew her. He vowed that she wasn’t even attractive to begin with, which was not only untrue but also hurtful. He said that his actions at the time were influenced by alcohol and that he was never really attracted to her. I confronted my partner as soon as I discovered the incriminating text messages and sure enough, he tore her apart like he’d done to me with her. I came to know things about her my partner didn’t, like how we both had pets we adored, or how we seemed to like the same shade of lipstick, and that we somehow wore identical accessories on our birthdays years before our lives crossed paths. What I did find, though, was that she was a lot like me. To be honest, I’m not sure which outcome I’d have preferred to find. For months, I visited her Facebook and Instagram pages daily to see if he’d made an appearance on there or if she’d moved on with someone else. I think about how awful it felt to see someone I trusted belittle my entire existence in print (or text, I suppose) while a nameless, faceless stranger took my side. I also know now that my partner’s character flaws would come back to haunt us later on, but I still think about that fleeting moment of solidarity every now and then. None of this was her - a single woman’s - fault. I know she didn’t really do me any favors by not pursuing a relationship with him. In fact, I definitely posted one of those sarcastic, laugh-at-my-pain tweets years after the fact thanking her for refusing to go out with him after the alleged kiss. It’s never easy to process being cheated on so I held on to this technicality for the next year we were together, flip-flopping from rage toward them both, then just at her, and at him, then weirdly to gratitude. She turned down my partner’s weeks-long request for a date after they kissed because she found out he had a girlfriend. I remember being alone in my car at the time, not really listening to the Hootie & The Blowfish song playing on the radio in the background and staring at the worst string of text messages I’d ever come across. He just never did until I uncovered the truth on my own. It happened months ago and he meant to tell me, wanted to tell me, was dying to tell me. It had been a spontaneous kiss and nothing more, he explained. My partner’s infidelity took place not even six months into our relationship, but I didn’t find out about it until much later. More importantly, I could forgive myself for letting it slide. “If it wasn’t really cheating, then I could forgive him,” I reasoned. I can still list every reason I stayed with my partner after he cheated, but none is more heartbreaking than the one where I convinced myself that it wasn’t really cheating. It wasn’t until then that I understood that girl and I wanted to give that girl a hug, not a self-righteous lecture. “I’m never going to be that girl,” I thought.
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