12 Things You Learn When You Meet The Other Woman

Marielle Stobie
Marielle Stobie

1. Your relationship was not a game that the other man/woman won because they were skinnier or sexier or had a cuter laugh than you. Your relationship was a relationship. It was supposed to mean game over.

2. As much as you’d like to blame the other man/woman for running your relationship, they didn’t do that. Your shithead of a partner did that.

3. Nobody is out to get you specifically. Everybody just wants to be loved and is fighting as hard as they can for themselves.

4. Hating the idea of someone is a lot easier than hating an actual person.

5. Getting cheated on doesn’t mean you’re less lovable than the other person. Chances are they would have switched spots with you in an instant.

6. It’s a really long road to forgiveness but the empathetic path gets you there faster.

7. There are no true “bad guys” out there; only people whose morals resemble a potpourri of excellent intentions with the occasional bad seed thrown in there haphazardly.

8. Chances are you’ve got a few bad seeds too, even if you haven’t found them yet.

9. Your worst enemy can turn out to be someone you have a surprising amount in common with.

10. Nothing the other man/woman can say is going to take back the past. You will always have been cheated on and it will never be a fair thing to have happened.

11. Sometimes receiving a genuine apology really does help though.

12. Once you’ve forgiven the other person and forgiven your (hopefully ex) partner and tried to move on from it all, you might find that there’s another person left to forgive and it’s you. Forgive yourself for not knowing what you couldn’t possibly have known. Forgive yourself for losing a game that you were never meant to be playing. Forgive yourself for falling in love with a person who turned out to be untrustworthy, and then forgive yourself for not knowing what you couldn’t have possibly known. The last person often isn’t the final frontier: you are. Your past self is the last ‘other person’ that you need to get over to move on.

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