As we all know, there is no perfect guy. You’ll never find him no matter how much you look and where you look.
What you will find is a person whose flaws and shortcomings you can accept and work with.
This person is going to care for you emotionally and physically because he wants to care for you.
Love will inspire and continue to inspire him to do so and you won’t even have to ask him to stay loyal, kind, and loving because he’s going to want to make sure he is.
Thanks to the happy hormones love releases in our brains, the right guy is going to connect with you and appreciate you. He’s going to be glued to your personality and stay incredibly thankful for the opportunity to give love and receive love from you.
All he’ll need to stay committed to you is a healthy mindset and a good attitude.
And that’s because without a healthy relationship attitude, a relationship can’t last very long. It sooner than later falls apart at the fundamental level and causes a guy to stop appreciating you.
That’s when a guy typically develops resentment for you, lies to you, deceives you, cheats, or possibly even monkey-branches to another relationship.
Previously, we’ve discussed how cheating affects a man. That’s why it’s only fair that we also discuss how cheating affects a woman.
This article is for those women who have been cheated on or are afraid of being cheated on and wonder, “What does cheating do to a woman and her self-esteem.”
What does cheating do to a woman?
Cheating does bad things to a woman. It causes her self-esteem to plummet and forces her to suffer like never before.
Due to shattered confidence and self-esteem, the cheatee (the person who’s been cheated on) quickly takes responsibility for the words she said throughout the relationship and the things she didn’t do or should have done better.
She does this out of self-blame and doesn’t realize that her partner’s cheating is her partner’s internal problem, not hers. He was the one who discarded his moral values and cheated on her without much forethought and care.
This is why we can say that people who cheat prioritize their emotional and sexual gratifications over their partner’s feelings.
They value their emotions and cravings so much that they don’t care about how their immoral actions affect others. All they think about is “Me, me, me,” and as a result, commit a selfish sin.
If only they understood that cheating on a girl humiliates her and destroys her self-worth more than they could ever imagine.
Here’s what cheating does to a woman and her self-eseem.
Cheating in a relationship makes a girl lose faith in her own abilities
When a girl gets cheated on, she oftentimes loses faith in her worth and abilities. She starts to undervalue her capabilities and as a result, accepts herself as a girl of average or below-average value.
She does this when a guy who meant the world to her shows her how little she means to him. He’s the person she trusted with her mind, body, and soul—and his opinion mattered to her the most.
But because he decided to cheat on her regardless of how much his opinion meant to her, the girl takes his cheating personally and experiences the worst pain imaginable.
She suffers from betrayal and begins to wonder what she did to deserve it.
The only time that a girl doesn’t get affected by cheating is if she falls out of love with her boyfriend prior to his cheating and sticks around for relationship benefits or something other than love.
Being cheated on makes her unable to love again
If a guy cheats on a girl and leaves her for someone else, he unknowingly causes so much pain and anxiety that she stores the pain in her memory.
This means that even after the girl has processed the cheating and feels better, she still remembers how it felt when she got betrayed.
She remembers the gut-wrenching pain in her stomach, the sleepless nights, and the self-destructive thoughts that destroyed her self-esteem.
The pain she went through and the thoughts she thought basically gave her the inability to love someone new (or her ex) because, in the back of her head, she remembers the pain like it was yesterday.
All the cheatee therefore wants is to remain happy by herself and not give anyone else the ability to hurt her again.
At least not until she feels emotionally ready to try her luck again.
Cheating causes long-term mental and psychological issues
According to research conducted by MayoClinic, women get diagnosed with depression more often than men.
They tend to be more emotional than men, so they tend to suffer more too.
Here’s a list of emotional, psychological and mental effects that cheating causes to a woman:
Self-doubt
When a woman gets cheated on, she tends to go through a phase of self-doubt. During this phase, she doubts her ability to make her partner happy and wonders why the cheating occurred.
If she knows the woman her (ex)partner cheated with, she compares herself to her and scrutinizes every detail. She looks for quality or skill she doesn’t have and wonders how to obtain it.
She does this out of fear that she’s not worthy of love and care.
Oversensitivity and jealousy
If a woman stays with her cheating partner or meets someone new shortly after she gets cheated on, she oftentimes becomes extremely sensitive to anything that could indicate infidelity.
She becomes so afraid of history repeating itself that she stays on the lookout for signs of cheating and tries to prevent or avoid the cheating from occurring again.
For example, when she notices that her boyfriend, fiancé, or husband is talking to someone who could be a threat, she could overreact and tell her partner to stop talking to other women.
Insecurities and false accusations
After finding out that their boyfriends cheated on them, betrayed women often become incredibly insecure. They create the worst possible scenarios in their heads (the kind they fear the most) and accuse their new partners of cheating.
They do so because they still remember the pain they felt when they got betrayed and possibly even abandoned.
So unless the betrayed woman’s new partner is incredibly mature and understanding, the woman doesn’t gain much sympathy from the guy. She can’t because she appears insecure and out of control.
Possessiveness
When a woman gets cheated on, she naturally feels incredibly pulled toward her partner. She wants recognition from the person who took it away, so she tries to possess the guy who cheated on her.
She basically wants him to be hers and only hers. And she wants it so badly that she puts her life on hold just to possess her partner.
Because of such need for control, her partner perceives her as incredibly needy, insecure, and weak.
Loneliness and nostalgia
Cheating affects a woman internally. It makes her lonely and hungry for real love – the kind she had when she was in the early stages of her romantic relationship.
But because she can’t find such love again, all she can do is crave it and wonder if she’ll ever feel the same way again.
Needless to say, obsessive yearning makes a girl reminisce about the nostalgic times when she didn’t cry and have to worry if she’ll ever find real love again.
Anxiety and depression
Cheating is by far one of the worst predicaments a person has to go through. When it occurs, it causes a person to experience:
difficulties sleeping
ex-dreams and nightmares
a loss of appetite
a loss of personal goals and ambitions
uncertainties about the future (partner, children, mortgage, etc)
In some cases, getting cheated on also causes migraines, nausea, stomachaches, vomiting, diarrhea, heart palpitations, difficulties breathing, panic attacks, extreme chest pain, and even paranoia.
Here’s a picture explaining the effects of cheating on a woman.
What women get affected by cheating the most?
Women are known for their sensitive, kind, and caring attitudes. We bond with others through conversation and find great pleasure in knowing that we’re understood and cared for.
Just knowing how valuable we are validates our purpose in life and inspires us to see the beauty in relationships.
John Gray makes a good point in his relationship book, Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
He says that women are emotionally reliant on their family, friends, and partners for their well-being.
This means that most of us take relationships very seriously. And because we take them seriously, we’re susceptible to anxiety, pain, and depression when things don’t go according to our expectations.
When we get cheated on for example.
I believe that a woman who’s incredibly close to her partner and emotionally dependents on him for a relationship suffers the most.
I’d say she suffers much more than a girl or woman who’s completely independent and doesn’t need a man to have a good time.
How does cheating change a woman?
Cheating makes a woman feel inferior not just to the woman the guy cheated with, but also to the man himself.
That’s why a lot of women work extra hard to improve themselves into new, stronger versions of themselves so that they impress not only their partner but also themselves.
They lose weight and get fit, cut their hair, do some skincare, buy new clothes, and do whatever it takes to move on from the past image of themselves.
They do this to forgive their partner and to disassociate themselves from the people they were.
As for the women who are extremely afraid of getting cheated on/hurt again, they build strong walls around them and make sure that no man ever gets past their defenses.
A lot of women who get cheated on grow inwardly while others become worse
Women who get cheated on tend to learn different lessons. I’d say some become anxious and others stronger. How they recover from cheating really depends on whether they work on themselves or not.
If they get therapy and practice forgiveness and self-love, they usually start loving again selflessly relatively quickly. They overcome the pain of betrayal and once again fall in love.
As for those who don’t practice forgiveness and instead think to themselves that all men are liars and cheaters, they obviously steer away from love.
They seal their hearts off from another possible betrayal/heartbreak and say no to living a romantic life.
Getting cheated on by my ex affected me badly
You may have read my story titled, “Did my ex fake our relationship.” If you did, you likely remember that my ex cheated on me, ghosted me and acted as if I didn’t exist.
My ex basically treated me worse than a cockroach and pretended that our relationship never happened.
He really hurt me badly. I felt immobilized and couldn’t cope with stress. But I knew I had to somehow gather my strength and emotionally separate myself from him.
About two months after he ghosted me, I felt much better, so I decided to message him (big mistake, I know).
He replied by saying he doesn’t recognize my number and that I shouldn’t text him.
I didn’t know if he was the one who replied or the girl he cheated with, so I figured it’s best I leave him alone. Clearly, he saw my message but didn’t want to talk to me.
Although I didn’t beg and plead for a second chance, he blocked me on Facebook and pretended that our relationship wasn’t real.
The pain surging through me convinced me that his love for me was a lie and that he forgot about me already.
I remember I blamed myself so much that I kept asking myself the following questions over and over again:
Am I not good enough?
What am I lacking?
Where did I go wrong?
What did I not do?
Why did he leave me?
What could I have done to change his mind about leaving me?
I thought that maybe I’m not sexually attractive or that I lack in the looks department.
I just couldn’t believe he promised me the world, got my hopes up, and then left me for someone else.
I even started to think (and believe) that relationships are a waste of time and that I’ll just get cheated on by my next boyfriend.
I couldn’t even bear the thought of being with someone new because I completely lost myself in trepidation that another betrayal is going to happen no matter what.
That’s why I developed trust issues that are still deep-rooted under my skin today. I sometimes still ask myself, “What if my new boyfriend cheats on me the way my ex did? What if he ignores me too and treats me poorly?”
Even though I met someone new, this didn’t stop me from feeling anxious. I’m still suspicious of my new boyfriend and the girls he talks too.
I get easily jealous and I dislike promises because I don’t want to get disappointed again.
But luckily, my current boyfriend understands why I’m sometimes insecure. He’s completely transparent with me and gives me reassurance whenever I need it.
I understand that it’s not his responsibility to make me secure in the relationship. It’s me who needs to keep working on myself.
Trust goes both ways they say. And if one side of the relationship doesn’t trust the other, the other eventually stop trusting too.
That’s why I’d like to encourage everyone reading this to not close their hearts off to new romantic opportunities.
Open yourselves up and embrace the unknown. Say yes to life and start meditating and practicing positive self-love affirmations.
When you’ve gotten over the backstabbing, remember that your (ex)boyfriend who cheated on you doesn’t need to define your romantic life.
Only the person who values you for who you are and stays with you should.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article.