If you ask 10 people why they cheat, you’ll get 10 different answers. I wasn’t getting what I needed. I felt smothered. We’d grown apart. The truth is, those are stories we tell ourselves to feel like decent people doing indecent things.
People cheat (or micro-cheat) for a thousand reasons, but the through-line is always the same—disconnection—and the problem is rarely the person you’re betraying. For me, cheating was a brief suspension of loneliness. It was also the only way I knew how to quiet the noise in my own head.
Serial cheaters are the most tragic kind. I know because I was one—and I dated them, too. They’re not villains so much as addicts: people who crave the high of newness and the rush of being seen. The thrill of being wanted feels, for a fleeting second, like proof of worth. But it never lasts. Once the novelty fades, the noise rushes back in—and they run.
This isn’t a cheater’s apologia; I know exactly how selfish that behavior was. For years my own pain just eclipsed everyone else’s.
The first time I cheated, I was in college, long-distance with my high school boyfriend and terrified of being alone. One night after a drunken make-out, I confessed over tears on the phone, wanting to believe I was still good. Then, years later, I fell in love with someone who cheated on me. I went through his phone one night, while he was in the shower, and saw a thread of late-night texts with his roommate.
“Please don’t tell Eileen,” he wrote.
“I won’t tell her, but if she asks, I won’t lie.”
I broke up with him immediately, then got back together with him, then cheated out of spite, as if I thought hurting him would balance the scales. It didn’t. It only deepened the hollowness I’d been trying to fill.
Between those early betrayals and the final reckoning, there were short-lived flings and emotional affairs, moments of weakness that all stemmed from the same thing: I couldn’t stand to be alone. Then came COVID. I fell into an affair with an ex while both of us were dating other people. It was wrong, of course, but karmically fitting—two people addicted to each other’s chaos, playing out the final act of a story that had ended long before. When it was over, I felt empty but clear.
