emotional cheating is cheating. period.

my musing for today:

I came across the excerpt below while reading this article about the 10 essentials for any good relationship.

"5. An understanding that cheating can be emotional as well as physical.

Spoiler alert: You don’t actually have to touch genitals to have cheated on someone and/or betrayed their trust. If you are having deep, personal, romantic conversations with someone behind your partner’s back, if you are still harboring feelings for someone else, if you are seriously considering other possibilities while still completely attached to your current flame — you are being an asshole and should stop it. It’s insane how many people don’t acknowledge the myriad ways that someone can be cheated on that don’t actually involve sex. Do you really think that your partner finding out that you’ve been exchanging passionate emails with an ex is going to be that much less destructive than having slept with someone else? I mean, in many cases, knowing that there were actual feelings involved make it all the worse, as it can’t just be brushed off as a drunken mistake. Let’s at least provide each other the decency of breaking up with our partners before engaging in Nicholas Sparks-esque gchats with the cute girl from work."


I've known this for years. I really thought it was common sense until an idiot I knew told her boyfriend that she hadn't actually cheated on him when she did exactly this to him. How do I know? Because she did it with my boyfriend. And to this day she shouts from the corners of social media how 'un-sorry' she is for the emotional beating she gave everyone involved (real mature, right?). I scoff at the notion that she thinks she has a good relationship with this guy she cheated on when she won't even acknowledge it as such. You can recover from this kind of damage to a relationship but only if you first acknowledge what actually happened. If not, all the rebuilding of trust and intimacy is built on hollow ground and is basically a farce. And like this excerpt states, emotional cheating is even harder to come back from, so she is woefully wrong to think how solid and good her relationship is. Given her grand state of self delusion though, she will probably live out her life this way no problem, which means the real person who should realize this and get out is the boyfriend she cheated on.

In the end, this wasn't a musing of mine so much as a rant, but what I am musing about is that everyone should accept that emotional cheating is just as real as physical cheating is. Then, like the excerpt says, have the decency of breaking up with current partners first. In my experience, neither cheating party was decent enough to do this, but what makes her so detestable as a person still is:
She never acknowledged that it was cheating
She spread false rumors about me afterwards
She tried to turn mutual friends against me
She hasn't gained the slightest bit of maturity enough to be sorry and take responsibility for her actions which is why years later I still have to hear about how 'not sorry' she is.

So if I'm going to properly muse, there can be life in a relationship after cheating. People who cheat are not condemned for life IF they can acknowledge what they did and be truly sorry for it. We all make mistakes, but it's how you handle those mistakes that show who you are as a person. At the very least, if you're maturing and growing as a person (which tends to happens after 5 freakin years), you should be able to look back at things as see them more clearly, more objectively, more honestly. The only person you have to be better than is the person you were yesterday. The sooner you start this process the better, so be an adult and mature already.