A Love Letter To My Cheating Ex-Husband

I didn't think this day would come. Ever.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think this day would come. Ever.

I’ve written love letters to my heartbroken self.

I’ve written love letters to the women you slept with while we were married.

I feel like I am no longer tormented by the flashbacks of finding messages on your phone or seeing your car at her house. But they still come, and they still burn.

We have young children together, so our interactions are necessarily frequent. You still annoy me with your self-centered approach to parenting and life in general. I feel empathy for your current girlfriend — she seems so kind. I hope you don’t hurt her the way you hurt me.

I am still devastated on behalf of our daughters, in particular our youngest who was just three weeks old when you left.

But.

I see now that your season in my life was the catalyst for my greatest period of growth.

So I’m ready to tell you how grateful I am for our time together and every lesson you taught me.

Lesson #1: Grace

When I found myself reading a text from you to another woman, describing what you’d like to do to her body, I felt sick with rage, numb with shock, and knocked over by rejection all at once. I wanted to scream, cry, punch, and crumble. I did some of these things, you saw that. But the reality is, when you discover infidelity in your marriage it’s unlikely that’s the only thing going on in life. I had young children, a full-time job, and other family commitments to keep. I needed time to process it all.

So, I had to learn to go with grace. It was the only way to regulate myself enough to be able to go on with life while I worked out what to do.

Maintaining a sense of composure and balance during these times of extreme distress was hard. It took everything I had. But I learned that there’s huge power in grace. It’s a kindness toward self when you feel like it’s all falling apart. Grace kept me from making rash decisions in moments of heightened activation and gave me the compassion to take my time to decide my next move. It stopped me from giving you any more of my dysregulated energy than necessary. This was a lifesaver because arguing with you about your behavior was one of the most exhausting things I’ll ever do in my life.

I’m grateful for learning the power of grace in this way because when I finally decided to end our marriage for good, I knew it was the right thing for us all. Then I was able to let it all out (and I did).

Thank you for helping me to understand the immense power of going with grace.

Lesson #2: Humility

Being cheated on is incredibly humbling. There’s a lot of shame around it, too. But the humility I experienced when I was finally able to admit that I was wrong about the health of our relationship was confronting at first, then unbelievably freeing.

For almost a decade I told myself that we just needed to work on things, that you really did love me but struggled to stay faithful due to your internal demons, that if I threw more love at the situation you’d never cheat again. None of these things were true. It took me so long to allow the penny to drop, but when it finally did the shift in perspective was instant. It made me realize that I needed to drop the pride and accept that I had made a bad choice in you as a partner. The warning signs were there from the start and I made a mistake. This realization hurt, but it was the pain I needed to start the journey back from the depths of relationship hell.

Thank you for teaching me the power of humility and overcoming pride and shame to make better choices for myself.

Lesson #3: Self-love

In what will be news to no one, your repeated affairs did a number on my self-worth. It didn’t help that my attachment style required validation from you to help me feel safe. Yikes. What a combo! By the end of our relationship, I felt unattractive, unloveable, and, frankly, unfuckable. But here’s what else I realized from the bottom of the toilet where my self-worth was residing — the only person I could rely on to pull me out of that was me. I had been handing over responsibility for making me feel good about myself to other people for my whole life, and our relationship ending was the catalyst for me to finally change that.

I started a process of healing my relationship with myself. This has become a strong, daily practice of self-love and worthiness. I no longer have to pull myself out of daily self-confidence lows or seek validation from others about how attractive I am to them. Because guess what? I love myself now. Crazy, huh?

It’s a superpower, and I’m so grateful I had the experiences I had with you to show me there’s another way to feel worthy.

Lesson #4: Boundaries

I had zero boundaries with you while we were married. I attempted to have a few in place when we first got together, like needing a night or two to myself when we first started dating or needing a solid night’s sleep so I could function at my job. But these were quickly abandoned when you started getting mad or stonewalling me when you didn’t get your way. When I reflect on this now, it’s no surprise that this became a pattern for us. Obvious boundaries, like not flirting, meeting up, or sleeping with other women somehow got this same treatment.

I guess over time my tolerance for boundary-destroying behavior became so high, and your tantrums became so exhausting, that by the time the relationship ended, I had no boundaries left. In fact, not only were there no boundaries, but I’d also paved a nice smooth path for you to skate right across them.

No wonder you just kept cheating. To be clear, I’m not shaming myself for this. I know you have a well-established pattern to get what you want from life and I was a sucker for this. But I don’t know if I would have the skills I now have to create and maintain boundaries without your complete disregard for mine during our relationship.

So, thank you for showing me, in real-time, what happens when I don’t respect my boundaries. I’m an absolute boss at this now as a result.

Lesson #5: Ambition

This final one has taken me by surprise if I’m honest. When you’re in something that saps all of your emotional energy, you lose interest in doing many of the things that once lit you up. Your capacity for important people in your life is limited. It’s all you can do to go through the motions of daily life.

This is how I felt throughout most of our relationship. When we met, I was a runner. I loved reading books, planning weekend getaways by the beach, and singing and acting. I loved drinking wine and eating cheese with my friends. I loved going to the movies with my Mum.

By the time our relationship was over, I was doing none of these things. I was a shell of my former self and all I wanted to do was lay down for 20 hours a day.

When you left, the energy started coming back.

It was almost instant. And it was more than the energy. It was, as if, the second you walked out that door, I had permission to fill my cup again. For years, I had stopped allowing myself to do anything that was just for me. I started running again, having weekends at the beach, and hanging out with all my favorite people.

Then something really interesting happened. I kept going. I had deprived myself of joy and hope of a great life for so long that I became almost intoxicated with what else might be possible. I made a big career move and landed a great job that pays me more than I have earned in my whole life. I decided I was going to buy a beautiful big family home all on my own, and I did. Later this year, I am running an actual marathon. And I won’t stop here. I now have dreams and aspirations that I work on manifesting every day and it is amazing.

Thank you for showing me what it’s like to deprive myself of joy. The end of our relationship created the drive and ambition for an extraordinary life for myself.

I couldn’t be happier.