Words To Describe How Someone Feels When They Are Cheated On
By: Katie Lersch: Many wives struggle with explaining the depth and accuracy of their emotions to their cheating husband. They want their husband to feel the full blunt of their emotions. They want him to know just how devastating this is. But it can be hard to find the words that he will listen to or understand.
Someone might explain: “short of cheating on my husband to show him how this feels, I am not sure how to explain it to him. I will cry and I will blubber about how horrible this is and how I feel so humiliated and betrayed. At first, he seemed to be listening, but now sometimes when I am explaining this, I see his eyes glazing over, like he has stopped paying attention. It’s almost as if he thinks that I am being an overly-dramatic female in this regard, but I know that I am not. What words can I say to make him understand it?”
I know how you feel. I will list some phrases that you can choose from. I’ll start with phrases that I think might relate to men and then I’ll go to some of the common phrases that I used and I know other women have used. Above all, say what comes from your heart and is honest and unique to you.
In a sense, no one can fully understand what someone else feels unless they have walked in someone else’s shoes. (This is true of all life challenges and not just of cheating.) But what you are trying to do is to create understanding, which creates empathy, and then regret. Here are some words and phrases to get you started.
– “Imagine how you would feel if I cheated on you with a thinner, richer, and more well-endowed man and then told you that it was over and that you just needed to move on? Would you move on or would you dwell on it for a little while? Would it hurt your pride and your self esteem? Would you be humiliated, hurt, and embarrassed? Because I am experiencing all of these things.”
-“What if you were playing on a team sport and you showed up to every practice and were always there for your coach and your team? What if you played on this team for years and went through the good and the bad together? What if you felt in your heart that your coach knew how hard you worked for him, only to find that the second a new player came along, your coach replaced you with that player? You were replaced even though the other player hadn’t proven himself in any way. Would you feel shocked, betrayed, and cheated? That’s how I feel right now.”
-“Please try to see this from my point of view. I thought I had a certain husband and a certain marriage. I thought that, because I put in so much time and care, that both things were secure. Now I am finding out that neither were what I thought. That has tipped my world off its axis. I am having a hard time getting my footing. I worry that I can’t trust you and you were the one person I should have trusted more than anymore.”
– “I feel like the one person who should have always had my back stabbed me in it instead. I know that you don’t want to hear this because it makes you feel worse about what you did. But you need to hear it because you need to understand just how much this hurts me so that you won’t do it again. You need to hear me because you need to have the motivation to rehabilitate yourself and our marriage. This is not going to be easy, so we need to put it all out there so that we know what we are dealing with and know where we go from here. This is one of the worst things that you could ever do to me or our marriage. You need to understand that. There is no sugarcoating this. There is no diminishing that you took the most sacred relationship and the most valued vows and you made a mockery of both. Your actions showed that you did not respect either and that you were willing to put them at risk. I know that this might sound harsh. But it’s very important to me that you understand this so that you can take responsibility for it. Asking me to even consider moving on or forgiving is asking a lot. And I can’t even think of doing either until I’m sure that you fully realize what you have done.”
I hope these phrases get you started. Know that you will probably have multiple conversations that are some variation of many of these examples. You may not feel heard immediately, but it’s vital that you eventually do. You can read more about some of the things I did to make sure that I was heard and understood after my husband’s affair on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com
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