I Cheated On My Boyfriend When I Thought He’d Been Unfaithful, Only To Find Out He Was Planning To Propose

When I suspected my boyfriend of cheating, I took it as a free pass to be unfaithful to him in return. As it turns out, he was actually just hiding his plans to propose to me. Oops?

1. He’d been acting secretive, but not for the reason I suspected. Call me a bit obsessive, but when your boyfriend starts hanging up the phone really fast when you walk into a room and not coming home from work at the usual time, you start to wonder what the deal is. I had no idea he was planning an elaborate proposal. My mind instantly went to the worst case scenario and I convinced myself he must be sleeping with someone else.
2. We hadn’t even talked about marriage, so a proposal was the last thing I expected. Maybe if the subject of marriage had been mentioned I wouldn’t have been so quick to jump to conclusions, but we hadn’t been together that long and I wasn’t ready to get engaged, so I figured he must not be either. I assumed he was getting a little bored. As it turned out, he was ready for the ultimate form of commitment.
3. I dealt with my sense of betrayal by sleeping with someone. I was so angry and heartbroken that I never thought to question my certainty of his infidelity. I felt humiliated by the fact that he’d supposedly kept it a secret from me, so instead of confronting him about it, I made up my mind to hurt him equally as badly by sleeping with someone too.
4. It was yet another reminder that playing games rather than being an adult will always come back to bite you. It’s so easy to look back at the whole thing and realize that if I’d simply asked “Are you cheating on me?” there would never have been this much drama and mutual pain. I thought I was evening the score by sleeping with someone else, but really I was just being childish. Relationships should always have open communication, especially when something seems off.
5. The fact that I was so quick to mistrust him says a lot about our relationship. It may seem nuts that I jumped to conclusions about him so quickly, but it actually made a lot of sense given the rest of our relationship. I never felt like he was totally open with me about anything. It always seemed like he was holding something back. This made me really insecure, and while it may just have been his personality, it always left me wondering how he really felt about me.
6. He should’ve at least mentioned that he wanted to marry me before dropping a ring in my lap. In this day and age, marriage should be an ongoing topic of conversation before someone proposes. I would expect any future husband of mine to give me the courtesy of asking how I feel about marriage and when I might want it to happen, if ever. The proposal is just a formality that I could honestly do without.
7. I don’t want to be in a relationship with a guy who shares so little of his thoughts with me. Some guys (and women) can be a little emotionally detached, but they should at least put in the effort to getting better and opening up to the person they’re with. My ex didn’t seem to think there was a problem. I always felt like he was off in his own little world that I couldn’t be a part of, and that made it a lot easier for me to believe he was hiding something hurtful.
8. In hindsight, I think I intentionally sabotaged our relationship. I was so quick to retaliate by sleeping with someone else that it can’t just be rationalized as revenge for an unfounded suspicion of infidelity. I felt lonely in the relationship and had been looking for ways to fill the space for a long time. When I thought he’d been unfaithful, I was more than ready to use it as a way to blow up the relationship.
9. If you can’t trust the person you’re dating, you need to be single. At the end of the day, I just didn’t trust him. Even if he hadn’t been secretive about the proposal, there would’ve been other things to make me suspicious and insecure down the line. He wasn’t open with me, and that made me feel like I wasn’t important in his life. If you can’t trust the person you’re with and feel emotionally safe with them, you shouldn’t be in the relationship.
10. I still haven’t forgiven myself. No matter how many things my ex could’ve done differently, the fact remains that I cheated on him. Even if he had been cheating it wouldn’t have been an excuse for me to sleep with someone else. I feel terrible about how the relationship ended even though I know I deserved better. Since we broke up, I’ve learned to be a lot more careful about assumptions and choosing who to date.