My boyfriend cheated on me

The advice arrives within about an hour, from everyone, and it is always the same: leave, you deserve better, once a cheater always a cheater. Some of that may turn out to be right. None of it helps you at the point you are actually at, which is usually not deciding but reeling, and that is the point at which somewhere neutral to talk is worth more than another opinion.

You are allowed to not know yet

Because you are not married, everyone treats this as a clean decision you should have made yesterday. There is no house to divide and no lawyer required, so the assumption is that walking out is simply a matter of doing it.

What that skips is that the relationship was real, that you may have built a good deal of your week and your future around it, and that ending it is a loss whether or not anything legal was involved. The absence of paperwork does not reduce what you have lost. It just removes the social permission to take time over it.

You do not have to decide this week. Deciding fast usually has more to do with wanting the uncertainty to stop than with knowing what you want. It is the most common reason people end up back in the same place months later.

The pressure from everyone who knows

Whoever you told has now formed a view, and it is generally the strongest view in the room. Friends who love you tend to be more certain about your relationship than you are, partly because they are not the one who would lose it.

Two things follow. If you decide to stay, you will be doing it against their advice, and some of them will make that awkward for a long time. If you decide to leave, you may find yourself doing it partly to satisfy them, which is a bad reason and is difficult to spot from inside.

It is entirely reasonable to tell people you are not discussing it yet. You do not owe anyone a running commentary on your own relationship.

The question underneath: what was wrong with me

Almost every woman I work with in this position gets here eventually, usually within days, and it rarely gets said out loud.

It shows up as looking her up. Comparing your body, your age, your job, how interesting you are. Rereading old messages for the moment it started. Deciding it was because you were too available, or not available enough, or had let yourself go, or had asked for too much.

That is not analysis, it is rumination, and it produces the same answer every time because it was designed to. What it is really doing is converting something that happened to you into something about you, which feels more controllable and is considerably more damaging.

People cheat for reasons that live in them: opportunity, entitlement, avoidance, a fear of ending things directly, a poor tolerance for their own dissatisfaction. Very little of it is a report on the person they were with. If your sense of your own worth was already thin, this will attach itself to that rather than sitting separately, and that is the part worth treating.

Is "once a cheater, always a cheater" true?

Not reliably, and the phrase is repeated with far more confidence than the evidence supports. Some people do it once, in a specific set of circumstances, and never again. Some have a pattern. The phrase is popular because it makes a hard decision simple, not because it predicts well.

More useful than the slogan is what he is doing now. Did he tell you, or did you find out. Is it fully over, including the contact you have not been told about. Is he willing to answer the same question in three months without treating it as an attack. Does he want you to be finished with this by a date that suits him.

That last one predicts more than almost anything else. A partner who needs your reaction to be over quickly is not offering repair, he is managing his own discomfort.

If you want to try again

It is possible, it is slower than people expect, and it requires more from him than an apology. Repair means tolerating your questions past the point it stops being satisfying for him, changing the access that made it possible, and accepting that trust returns through accumulated small evidence rather than through a conversation.

Where you both want to try, that is affair recovery work, and it is a structured process. Where the relationship had significant problems before this, those do not disappear because something worse happened, and they are usually where repair stalls.

Be honest with yourself about which you are doing: rebuilding something that was good, or avoiding the loss of something that was not. Both are understandable. Only one of them works.

If you decide to end it

Expect the anger that made the decision possible to fade, and grief to arrive behind it, often weeks later and often when you thought you were through the worst. A lot of women are unprepared for that and read it as evidence they made a mistake. It usually is not.

Practical things that shorten it: block rather than monitor, because you cannot process someone you are still watching. Do not seek details you do not need. Do not use the next relationship as proof of anything. And be careful with the conclusion your mind wants to draw about what you are worth, because that outlasts the relationship by years if nobody challenges it.

If what is left is a flatness that covers everything rather than sadness attached to him, that is closer to low mood and responds to different work. If it is dread, checking and an inability to settle, that is anxiety.

How I work with this

I am Shagoon Maurya, a registered counsellor and psychotherapist registered at ACA Level 2 and with PACFA, seeing clients online across the world and face to face in Melbourne. A large part of my relationship work is with one person in the room, whether or not the relationship continues.

What that gives you is somewhere the decision is not being voted on. We start with a free 15-minute conversation, and nothing has to be disclosed in it.