Why Is Cheating the Only Exception to This Rule?
We're supposed to be tough, mature, emotionally resilient people.
** Trigger warning: You probably don’t want to read this if you just found out you’ve been cheated on.

There are those who believe, when they see a headline that someone flipped out and killed his girlfriend, that that person must have had a serious mental problem. Should they hear, for instance, that a girl involved with a married man rang his wife up and told her the story because he dumped her, they think ill of the girl. Of course he was going to leave her. She should have toughed it out and not done something destructive.
Books like Obsessive Love by Susan Forward (oldie but goodie!) and Facing Love Addiction by Pia Mellody tell these tales of desperate, rejected lovers and make it clear there’s something wrong with that person.
What’s the one case in which we feel there’s an exception?
It’s the case where a married person got cheated on.
We hear of a story where a betrayed married person discovered their spouse cheating and did something like kill themselves or the cheating partner or landed themselves in the hospital doing something self-destructive, and we say, Poor thing. They couldn’t help it. That bastard or bitch just shouldn’t have cheated. Didn’t that person know that cheating is so bad people just fall apart?
Then we look at many stories that do, in fact, talk realistically about the reasons people cheat, the distance that settles into many marriages, any discussion of polyamory, or any consequences of having cheated that aren’t sufficiently condemnatory, and we say our society “glorifies cheating.” When I’m pretty sure any story on the topic of infidelity is a story about pain and various ways to think about and handle that pain: which ways work better and which work worse.
Which REALLY is the healthier mindset?
Do we really want to be a people who consider extreme behavior normal when it’s cheating and abnormal when the cause was anything else?
In 1995, actor Christopher Reeve was thrown from a horse, broke his neck, and learned he would be a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. For a time, he considered death. But he went on to become an activist for spinal cord research and to direct and even act again. Brittany, who makes YouTube videos under the name Empowered Para, has been paraplegic most of her life and became that way when she was thirteen. She dated, married, enjoys a sex life, and gave birth to two children.
And as a society, we’re in awe. We admire this quality of human resilience, that ability we have to dig in and handle all manner of life’s attendant miseries. When something like this happens to people, we say, You can handle it.
When life’s other tragedies happen to people, we accept and applaud (and at some point, even expect) a can-do mindset where people rise above their problems and handle their tragedy with toughness and grit.
When a person has been cheated on? That seems to be the one time we don’t.
Do we really want to be people who flip completely out because we find out our spouse had a secret relationship, and then kill them and burn their body? (Apparently this was a real headline.)
Yes, I understand people really are so hurt when they discover their spouse cheated that they might feel this bad; but do we really want to be a people who normalize this kind of reaction as the right or only one?
Do we want to be people who fly off the handle this badly over anything?
Do we really want to be a people so emotionally dependent on a relationship that we’re going to shoot ourselves in the head because they cheated? (Another true headline.)
Do we really want to end up in the ER for a stomach surgery because we swallowed $7000 to punish someone who hurt us by cheating? (Yes, apparently another true story.)
Do we really want to be a people this unstable … in the realm of marital fidelity only?
Or do we want to be a people who are a little bit more resilient than that?
Look at all the other horrible things that happen to us in this life. People get cancer diagnoses. People lose a beloved child. People go bankrupt, they get in car accidents and lose limbs. They dive into a shallow pool when they’re sixteen and snap their neck and they’re paralyzed for the rest of their lives before they’ve ever even had sex.
In none of these horrible tragedies do we consider it normative that people kill someone and burn their body, shoot themselves, or swallow $7000 cash and end up in the ER with a GI obstruction.
Unless someone cheats.
Then we consider it reasonable to completely flip out, lose our minds, and go psychotic. Not only that, but we believe that, therefore, people must not cheat because it’s the most horrible thing you can do to someone.
Because the cheated on simply has no resilience and should not have, and we shouldn’t look into relationships and understand more about them and the purpose of our lives in such a way as to develop any.
People just better not cheat. Because that is the one thing we can’t handle.
This, however, only applies to the betrayed spouse.
In any other romantic link, if we are cheated on or dumped, we must simply remember we have value and get over it. We are expected to hang onto it and tough it out.
It’s only the betrayed spouse who is seen to be so fragile they cannot possibly think, act, react, any other way except complete, utter devastation. We protect this in the betrayed spouse in a way we do not in any other wrong in any other relationship, or indeed any other tragedy in life. Marriage is supposed to be the one realm where we are immune from human tragedy.
Any other time we rely so heavily on what someone else does in order to feel okay ourselves … don’t we pathologize that? Don’t we talk about how to set ourselves free from what the other person did in the relationship so we’re not so heavily reliant on what they do or don’t do for our own emotional stability?
Let’s say I had a mentally ill mom who abused me (which, in fact, I did). Part of my recovery is going to be detaching enough from what this person did that I’m not constantly going back and expecting her to be different and stuck in misery in my life because she won’t.
And that is a definition of functional recovery for me. It’s generally understood that I’m supposed to work toward that. Because parental abuse, though it shouldn’t happen and we certainly don’t condone it, does happen in life, and when it does the recovery is on us.
But when marital infidelity is the topic, the focus changes. In marriage, infidelity is seen as never going to happen, and the betrayed spouse just should never have to deal with it because they are seen as people who can’t.
Why is that?
Why do we see marriage as the one arena where we are helplessly dependent on how another person behaves? We don’t even treat parents who physically abuse their kids with the same severity as we consider this one behavior of marital cheating.
And we treat adult children of actual physical abuse in the home as more capable of resilience and recovery than we do the cheated-on spouse.
The physically abused child is expected to grow up, recover, and get on with life. But marital infidelity is the one tragedy in life that, in our minds, must not happen, because it is so unrecoverable the betrayed spouse simply cannot handle it.
We even seem to treat infidelity more seriously than we do wife-battering.
If a woman is physically abused by a spouse or boyfriend, we wonder why she does not buck up and get herself out of the home.
What’s wrong with her? Why does she keep going back? Doesn’t she know she’s supposed to just dump that dude and move on? Why is she letting this affect her like that? People do not understand it. We must explain and explain to people what it is about physical abuse that incapacitates a person this way.
But if she’s cheated on? We explain to ourselves over and over again why a betrayed spouse cannot recover, therefore infidelity has to be the one unpardonable crime. The crime we never seek to understand. The one heinous slaying of another’s spirit we need not look any farther into or expect any resilience from on the part of the victim.
The person who got cheated on seems to have a special protected victim status in our minds.
Everyone else who suffers tragedy is expected to grow enough to handle it. Only when we get cheated on are we considered to be so weak we cannot.
Why do we feel this way, and: Is it really true?
And good luck trying to tell people "Just because you did something bad doesn't mean you're a bad person and negate all the good you've done in life," cause they don't want to hear it.
You aren’t wrong, but my whole life feels like a bad joke and I was the only one not in on it right now.