The Truth About Being The Loyal Girl With A Broken Heart

You're stronger than you think. You took the higher moral ground. You're not someone who hurts the people around you. You're someone who keeps taking on pain and maybe tried a little too hard to save everyone.

By

Christopher Campbell
Christopher Campbell

There’s a saying that goes, “After a breakup, the loyal one stays single and deals with the damages until healed. The other one is already in a relationship.”

It sounds so bleak, so dismissive and so hopeless. And at a glance, we think it’s true. After all, we’re the ones suffering, discarded and unloved, while they get to go about galavanting around with their new girlfriend and living their happy, happy life. We’re the ones nursing our broken hearts, devastated and ashamed, forced to witness someone else living the future we always thought was meant for us.

But fret not dear one, I’m here to completely spoil that saying for you.
The truth is, you’re suffering because you, as the loyal one, chose the higher, moral ground.

“Yes, I knew that already,” you might say. “And look at where that got me!”

But hear me out.

Happiness isn’t easy, that’s why we must suffer to find it. Peace isn’t easy, and that’s why we must go through chaos to achieve it.

The cheater in this situation, who immediately self-gratifies by hopping into another relationship, who doesn’t seem to even care about you, my dear, will find himself again in another relationship that breaks apart. After all, it’s been proven that affairs do not last. In fact, only less than 5% actually make it to happily ever after.

And there is a reason for that – how can there be trust when that relationship already started out on a foundation of lies and deceit? In fact, you should pity, not resent, the new girl for the cheater is very likely using her to fill a void within himself.

Dealing with your pain and working through the damages is the only way to achieve true self-growth. What do unremorseful cheaters do? They avoid dealing with pain, self-gratify and do all these very surface level things that will never turn the ugliness inside into anything else but more ugly and black.

For only a person who can hurt someone else so much intentionally is deeply hurt inside himself.

But instead of acknowledging that hurt or taking responsibility for it, they hurt everyone around them. They are the victim–it’s “your fault” that you fell in love with them in the first place, after all. “You didn’t do this” so it was OK for them to look elsewhere. This absurdity, this inability to handle their own reality will cause them to live miserable lives because it’s always going to be all about them.

And so, very few things they interact with will actually be meaningful.

Very few relationships they have will be fulfilling.

But you, the hurt girl reading this, you’re stronger than you think. You took the higher moral ground. You’re not someone who hurts the people around you. You’re someone who keeps taking on pain and maybe tried a little too hard to save everyone.

There is a quiet, deep honor that comes with having strong morals. There is a deep sense of the divide between good and bad. There is a deep satisfaction internally, knowing that despite all that crap, you held strong. You never lost your integrity.

After all.. when you’re on your deathbed, are you going to look back on your life, happy that you cheated and hurt someone so badly?

No. You’re going to say that you went through something really devastating, in fact, one of the shittiest things that ever happened to you, came out stronger, rebuilt your life, traveled the world and lived an amazing life with amazing friends.

You’re going to say that you hit rock bottom and it was the best thing that ever happened to you.

THAT’S what’s in store for you in your life. Not the cheater’s. They are so far behind you, you can’t even see them. Thought Catalog Logo Mark


About the author

Cherlyn Chong

Cherlyn is a transformational life coach who helps smart, busy women get over their ex bfs/husbands, heal fully and end the cycle of toxic love.