Cheating Isn’t the Worst Thing Someone Can Do to You.

Suhaila Atef

Aug 14

3 min read

Ask a man or woman what the worst thing people can do to them is. They respond so quickly with “Cheating”; you wonder whether their brain could have generated anything else.

My last girls’ night out, one of my friends broke a not-very-awkward silence with: “I caught him cheating; I think he destroyed me.”And then I started to think: “Did he?” Is cheating really worth the hype? The worst thing someone can do to you can’t really be cheating. Cheating actually has nothing to do with you. You can’t always feed the hunger of people who were never satisfied.

A friend of mine once told me,

“Cheating is not the worst thing that someone can do to you; it’s only the easiest thing that can be pointed out.”

And it hit me. It’s treated like it’s the most destructive because it’s the one with the most physical evidence. The evidence that’s hidden and why it really has nothing to do with you is the cheater’s inner conflict, how they choose to escape rather than confront; the person who is cheated on is often a mirror rather than a cause.

The cruellest thing you can do yourself is losing trust in yourself along the way. You start comparing your face, body, and laughter, without realising that this person is actually completely random. You don’t have to view them as the better mirror of yourself, someone that you should’ve been. This makes you replay the playlist of your insecurities, listening to every single song; you start to hum, make every song your favorite to cry to, when you should’ve never put it on in the first place; it was buried in your library a long time ago, for good reason.

Think of repeatedly being accused of something you didn’t do, twisting your actions, events that you eventually start to doubt every single thought that you ever had. Being isolated from every single circle that you have, to the point that you find yourself all alone when someone decides that they don’t want to be with someone this desperate anymore. They changed you into something that they eventually realised cannot work for them. How many times this person has promised you that they will change, that they will never repeat this specific behavior anymore; those promises, even after the person has left, don’t mean shit to you anymore.

Relationships can become abusive through manipulation, gaslighting, emotional neglect, control, financial dependence, isolation, or criticism. Forms of harm that quietly erode a person’s sense of self.

Unlike unfaithfulness, which breaks trust, these patterns rewrite reality, convincing someone that their instincts are flawed and their feelings are excessive. The damage is not always in what a partner does, but in who they slowly persuade you to become. By the time the relationship ends, the greatest loss may not be the relationship itself, but the version of yourself that disappeared trying to survive it.

A partner can betray you without touching another person; they can manipulate you until guilt becomes your language, gaslight you until reality feels unreal, isolate you until they are the only voice you can hear, or criticize until confidence becomes unfamiliar. Someone not choosing to end up with you after years of investment, when you should’ve given it to yourself.

The worst kind of betrayal is not leaving you wondering where they were last night; the worst kind is leaving you wondering who you are, making you feel that you need to rebuild yourself again. It’s the betrayal that leaves you hating yourself, not because they met someone else; they never met you in the first place. The worst kind of pain is not rebuilding trust with people; it’s rebuilding trust with yourself. We fear being left, but sometimes the greater tragedy is when the wrong person never does.