An open letter to the guy I cheated on

Ah, to be young again. We were quite into each other as I remember. Probably not as cute as I remember. We were joined at the hip for a few months before the downward spiral that was the better half of our relationship.

We were at a house party and I had consumed an outrageous amount of alcohol, so my head was pretty spinny. I was going up the stairs to try and be sick in the toilet this time and not the bath, when I saw it. There you were, on top of some bitch on the stairs. What the hell is happening? I can only begin to describe what I felt at this moment:

Drunk, very drunk.

Confused; probably a symptom of number one.

Angry. Everyone can see you – do you realise that? The party is ruined.

A bit sad. Probably more than a bit. I turned on my heel, and I went and sat in a room and tried to process the information for a little bit. I came to a conclusion: you owe me. I then left the party in a whirlwind of hate and vodka sweats.

I came to realise this: That night everybody was drunk, and it was only a kiss, and we weren’t that serious, and the next day it still hadn’t quite hit me. So when the girl you kissed called me in tears the next morning, I said we could forget about it. I’m pretty cool that way. Also, my brain was still recovering from the night before.

So, I held it against you for a few long months, you paid your debts, and we moved on. Well, not really. I think I felt that we could never be on the same level unless we were even, I just couldn’t really forget about the embarrassment of that moment. This sounds really creepy, like I plotted my revenge or something, that’s not what happened. I just kissed another guy, almost by mistake. It’s like one of those really tiny moments where your brain makes a calculation really quickly and comes to the wrong conclusion and you just go with it, and then you’re like “what? Why did I do that?” At the time, all I could think was “oh fuck, what the fuck is going on? Why am I doing this? Is this a dream?” But after it happened, I felt strange. I felt clarity.

You’ve got to realise, when you do something that is so against your own moral code, it forces you to really think about why this has happened and what has got you to this point. It forces a weird objectivity over the situation. Right after I kissed him, I realised that I had never forgiven you. I had always felt that you deserved the same thing, an eye for an eye and all that. I had forgiven you in a panicked and severely hungover state of mind and had just wanted so much to ignore it that I convinced myself it didn’t matter. I couldn’t admit that I was hurt because I was never hurt by it. I lost all respect for you in that moment and the only thing that kept us together was my feeling that you still owed me. I just couldn’t admit it and wanted it all to go away.

After I figured that out, I was so apathetic about the whole situation that I told you, no qualms, the next day. The first time we were alone, walking up the street together, I told you during a natural gap in the conversation that I had cheated on you. I told you who it was with, I told you when and where and what, in one smooth sentence. You stared at me for a split second and then started laughing. I did it so freely that you thought I was joking. I cared so little about the whole situation that I only pressed it a little bit. I didn’t really care if you knew or not. I think I had left you within the week maybe? Or the month?

In that short time, I began to notice that we had been in two separate relationships. Until that point I had always assumed that in a relationship, each person’s care and affection for each other moved at a parallel pace. The more you loved someone, the more they loved you. I now realised that it didn’t. You were with a girl that you loved and cared about, who loved and cared for you too; and I was in a distant relationship framed in betrayal. I didn’t care for you as much as you cared for me and after this became clear, I finally felt guilty. Yes, you had kissed a girl when you were drunk months ago, but I had spent most of our relationship looking in from afar, never really trusting you and always looking down on you and then at the end of it all, I had done the same thing anyway. What I did was so much worse and I finally realised that. It didn’t feel like justice, it didn’t feel like I had beaten you, I didn’t feel any better.

That was what finally broke us up. I did you a favour. You were a generally OK guy who had made a mistake and tried your absolute best at all times with the chance that you were offered. At that point, I was not capable of giving you what I had offered you and that was why we had to break up. Yes, it was initially your fault, but I should have either broken it off right there or I should have honoured the chance I gave you. For that, I am sorry.

I also want to thank you. Being with you made me realise that I had to be open and honest with the people around me. If I was going to be in a relationship, I had to really be in it, not just waiting around for a chance to score points. Because of you, I know that when someone hurts me, trying to get back at them will not help. It always makes it worse for everyone involved. Thank you for helping me realise that revenge is only sweet for a second before it turns bitter.