Stop Yourself From Cheating In Your Next Relationship
By: Jennifer M. Wilson
Tags: Marriage, Sex, Self Improvement, Relationships, Infidelity

Stop Yourself From Cheating In Your Next Relationship

Break your patterns.

Photo by Tibor Pápai on Unsplash

Listen up, people.

Don’t let previous relationship partners get in your head about their perceptions of you. Maybe take it under advisement in the same way you can get feedback from a peer on editing your work. But don’t let it get under your skin.

On another note, guess what? I let something get under my skin.

I regrettably spoke with a guy I fell in love with while married to my husband. We broke it off months ago but on my end, the feelings still linger. We hadn’t spoken on the phone in months.

So it pissed me off when Jon mentioned (to paraphrase) that cheating in my marriage is a huge red flag for future relationships. My internal, silent response was, “I love you, but fuck you for thinking that about me. Eat glass, fucker.”

Since I can’t tell him my rant, I’ll write out my diatribe here.

Let me put this out there: I think cheating is the absolute worst, most heinous crime you can do to your partner outside of physical abuse.

I have had 7 serious relationships in my life. I cheated during one. That’s a 14% rate of cheating. My Spock-like brain must quantify everything. However, I acknowledge that the relationship I cheated on was the most significant. I wrote out the story about how we both ruined our marriage with our betrayals, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

The difference for the future? I’m not afraid to communicate my needs anymore.

When I began cheating on my husband, I was immature and lacked emotional intelligence. I didn’t know how to articulate my needs as well as tell him how his yet-to-be-diagnosed porn addiction hurt me. There was no way I had the strength to even say, “I’m unhappy with our sex life and I’d like to figure out how we can improve it for both of us to be satisfied.” Eventually, I tried but the damage was already done.

While my husband was also emotionally immature and suffered from Madonna-Whore syndrome, at least I could have held my head high knowing I did the right thing.

What would stop me from cheating again now that my marriage is over? A lot.

Attention

I don’t need the attention of many men. I only want the attention of one man. How do I know this?

I have a profile on a fetish site. I have a significant number of followers. I only created the account because I was desperate to know if someone, anyone, found me boneable.

After I met Jon, I stopped giving a shit about the guys who saw my profile. I only posted as an excuse to brag about him and how happy I was (not like I could tell my real life friends). If guys wrote to me, I checked my messages to see if there were any funny ones that I could share with Jon. I was open and transparent with my inbox because I didn’t want him to feel insecure in any way. I respect that most guys don’t have their girlfriend-types on fetish sites where guys jerk off to their pictures. If he had asked me to take down my entire profile, I would have in a heartbeat.

I had the attention of thousands of men, and all I wanted was Jon. No desire, no interest, nothing. I had some serious thirst traps with twenty pack abs hitting me up and I didn’t hesitate to delete or ignore them.

Desire

I averaged having sex 4–6 times a year for almost two decades. That’s a dead bedroom. It’s not like I didn’t try to take care of my own needs. I could open a sex shop with all the toys I keep in a box in my closet.

But sometimes, you just need to scratch an itch. Transactional in nature, I’d meet up with a guy, bang it out, and then tell him “peace out!” while throwing my jeans back on.

Now that I know the value of regular sex, I know that I won’t need to “scratch an itch”. If I’m with someone who wants me as much as I want them, then there is no reason we would only have quarterly sex that leaves us wanting more.

Intimacy

While intimacy goes hand in hand with desire, it’s still a category on its own.

It took me until this year, and my experience with Jon, to learn that what I craved was intimacy. All the happy hormones that happen during sex, the rush of it all, the exhaustion after, and the random conversations while laying there sweaty.

Even when I had sex with my husband, none of that happened. We’d bone, I’d go to the bathroom and secretly cry, then we’d go do our own thing elsewhere in the house. On a good day, we might turn on a TV show while laying on opposite ends of our California King-sized bed.

Without intimacy, it is nothing more than “scratch that itch” transactional sex. I can even share intimacy during quickies. But it has to be there. It’s my deal-breaker. If after sex, I still feel miles apart from the person I’m with, then something needs to change.

It’s been eye-opening to understand that about my needs in a relationship. By separating from my husband, I’m standing up for my needs in a way that I never did before. He may think it’s shallow and just about sex. I know it’s a closeness and a bond between two people; I’m done crying after sex because it felt like a chore. Intimacy matters.