You’ve discovered that the person you’re in love with has been cheating on you. Yes, the person that you have been talking to every day for hours and hours. The person that you had a lot of future plans with. The person that makes you smile like an idiot all the time and who you keep texting in the middle of the day just to check up on while you are at work. That person that you were worried sick about when they were a little bit sick.

That person that can brighten up your whole day with just one word and whom you share with all the details of your day. The one that you think about all day long and to whom you spilled all your secrets and even all your fears to. The person that shared with you all your dreams and even helped you lift them up. Yes, that person has been cheating on you.

Sometimes it’s too hard for us to admit that someone we are so in love with and someone that we care about that much could have done something so awful to us. So, instead of acknowledging what they did to us, our minds play a little game with us which is to make us believe that we were the bad people in the story. We start to think that maybe it was somehow our fault that this happened. I know it sounds so ridiculous saying it out loud, but honestly, a lot of us go through this. We blame ourselves for something that we didn’t even do instead of actually admitting to ourselves that the people we love have done such a thing to us.

So, we might start to doubt ourselves and ask ourselves a series of self-blame questions like “What did I do wrong?” or “What did I do to lead them to do this?” or “Was it me?” Then, when we start to accept what they did, we start to ask ourselves another kind of self-blame question, like “How come I didn’t realize this sooner?” or “How could I have missed this?” or “How could I have been so stupid and naive?”

We start to blame ourselves for not paying enough attention to all these red flags that were right in front of us. We start to blame ourselves for not being more alert or for not picking up a sign or a hint when we saw one.

But after dwelling over all this and after being stuck for a while in this chain of thoughts, I hope that you realize that no matter how much you exhaust your mind from thinking these thoughts, what happened was never your fault. You deserve to hear this, and you deserve to say it to yourself loud and clear. You shouldn’t blame yourself for something that you didn’t even do in the first place.

You deserve to know that no matter how much a relationship goes wrong, it is not a justification for cheating. You deserve someone who is honest enough to have a real conversation with you and tell you about all the problems that have been going between you two and discuss them with you. You deserve for them to actually tell you whether they want to continue with you or not.

You deserve to know that choosing to see the good in the people you love and taking a leap of faith in them is not stupidity or naivety. I hope that you can give yourself that peace of mind and realize that you don’t need to keep blaming yourself in different ways for something that wasn’t even your doing just to defend someone you love or for the sake of keeping their image as good as it has always been in your mind.