If you ask 10 people why they cheat, you’ll get 10 different answers. I wasn’t getting what I needed. I felt smothered. We’d grown apart. The truth is those are stories we tell ourselves to feel like decent people doing indecent things.
People cheat (or micro-cheat) for a thousand reasons, but the through line is always the same—disconnection—and the problem is rarely the person you’re betraying. For me, cheating was a brief suspension of loneliness. It was also the only way I knew how to quiet the noise in my own head.
Serial cheaters are the most tragic kind. I know because I was one—and I dated them too. They’re not villains so much as addicts: people who crave the high of newness and the rush of being seen. The thrill of being wanted feels, for a fleeting second, like proof of worth. But it never lasts. Once the novelty fades, the noise rushes back in—and they run.
This isn’t a cheater’s apologia; I know exactly how selfish that behavior was. For years my own pain just eclipsed everyone else’s.
The first time I cheated, I was in college, long-distance with my high school boyfriend and terrified of being alone. One night after a drunken make-out, I confessed over tears on the phone, wanting to believe I was still good. Then, years later, I fell in love with someone who cheated on me. I went through his phone one night while he was in the shower and saw a thread of late-night texts with his roommate.
“Please don’t tell Eileen,” he wrote.
“I won’t tell her, but if she asks, I won’t lie.”
I broke up with him immediately, then got back together with him, then cheated out of spite, as if I thought hurting him would balance the scales. It didn’t. It only deepened the hollowness I’d been trying to fill.
Between those early betrayals and the final reckoning, there were short-lived flings and emotional affairs, moments of weakness that all stemmed from the same thing: I couldn’t stand to be alone. Then came COVID. I fell into an affair with an ex while both of us were dating other people. It was wrong, of course, but karmically fitting: two people addicted to each other’s chaos, playing out the final act of a story that had ended long before. When it was over, I felt empty but clear.
Somewhere along the way, I got tired: tired of lying, tired of pretending, tired of the emotional hangovers that followed every thrill. Years of therapy later, I can say without hedging or performance that I haven’t cheated in years.
People can change. I’ve seen them do it, and I’ve done it myself. But change isn’t magic. It’s work—relentless, uncomfortable work. And most people won’t do it until they recognize their own reflection in the damage they’ve caused.
I asked a few other people who’d cheated why they did it. One woman told me it happened while she was engaged. She’d tried to leave several times, but family pressure kept pulling her back. “I felt trapped,” she said. “Every time I hooked up with someone else, it felt like breathing again—not good breathing, but necessary.” Another friend admitted, “I wasn’t even unhappy. I just didn’t know how to be content. Real intimacy scared me more than being alone.”
Someone else told me, “Our bedroom was dead. My partner wouldn’t touch me, and I wasn’t getting what I needed. Years later I found out they were sleeping with everyone but me.” Another woman said she finally cheated after catching her boyfriend with other girls multiple times: “I decided to do the same thing. It’s what finally got me over him.” One person explained that they cheated because they’d been accused of it: “It hadn’t even crossed my mind before, but their suspicion made me feel small and untrusted. Looking back, it was such an immature way to try to take back control.”
None of us were sociopaths or villains; we were people who hadn’t yet learned to be honest with ourselves.
We talk a lot about the pain of being cheated on but rarely about the pain of being the cheater—the quiet shame, the self-loathing, the constant noise in your head as you try to hold two truths at once. You become a master of mental gymnastics. You rationalize, compartmentalize, narrate your own deceit until it sounds almost noble. And then one day, if you’re lucky, things get quiet. You start to understand what you were searching for in other people.
That’s what retirement from cheating feels like—not triumph but stillness. The quiet relief of no longer living a double life—of no longer mistaking attention for affection, or drama for passion. Of realizing that validation doesn’t have to come from someone else’s eyes.
People change when they get tired of betraying themselves. That’s what happened to me. I wanted to be someone I respected, even when no one was watching.
Cheating hurts. It destroys trust and leaves scars that don’t fade easily. But I also believe in grace—for others and for ourselves. The human condition is messy. We are contradictory, insecure, flawed, and endlessly searching for connection in all the wrong places. The work is in acknowledging that, owning it, and doing better.