I Destroyed My Relationship Before I Finally Saved Myself.

To quote Samantha Jones, defender of messy women and hard truths: “Chill, babe. We’re all bad in someone’s story.”

For nearly a year, I had an affair with a friend’s husband while living with my boyfriend of almost six years. Even now, writing that sentence makes my stomach turn. Not because it isn’t true, but because it is. I was in my thirties. I knew better. I was the kind of woman who would have destroyed a man for doing this to me.

And yet, there I was, actively participating in the kind of betrayal that permanently alters people.

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes from realising you became someone you never thought you could be. I still revisit that version of myself sometimes and think: What the fuck was I doing?

The answer is complicated, but also painfully simple. I was lonely. Not the cinematic kind of lonely, either. Not sitting dramatically by a rain-covered window in silk pyjamas. I mean the quieter kind, where you slowly disappear inside your own life while still technically participating in it, where you sleep beside someone every night and still feel emotionally untouched.

I wanted to feel chosen, seen, desired. I wanted someone to look at me with urgency again. And when someone finally did, I mistook attention for intimacy.

That’s the dangerous thing about emotional starvation: eventually, crumbs start feeling like a feast.

At the time, my relationship was already collapsing in slow motion. My ex and I met in our hometown through mutual friends, fell hard and fast, and spent years trying to force compatibility out of chemistry.

In the beginning, our relationship felt exciting in the way relationships often do when alcohol is heavily involved. Our weekends revolved around bars, parties, late nights, greasy food, and hangovers. Wash, rinse, repeat. Going out wasn’t just something we did; it was the foundation of our relationship.

But eventually, I changed.

Or maybe I just grew up.

I stopped drinking because every night out turned into an argument, tears, or some version of emotional exhaustion. I started struggling with my body, my mental health, and my anxiety. Meanwhile, his party lifestyle bled outside the lines of the weekend; drinking marathons ended with him stumbling home at four in the morning, smelling like the bar mat and bad decisions.

I became the sober girlfriend pretending to be asleep when he got home because it was easier than fighting. Over time, I wasn’t just sober. I became the designated foil in his story. The wet blanket. The built-in pause button on a life that was always moving towards another round.

In his world, I wasn’t really part of the fun; I was what the fun had to bounce off. The friend groups where the night only felt alive through alcohol had a way of quietly assigning roles, and mine was clear, even if no one ever said it directly. I was the one who didn’t fully participate, the one who left early, the one who “didn’t get it.” The punchline in jokes I was technically in on.

There’s a specific kind of social isolation that doesn’t look like exclusion. It looks like presence without belonging. I was there in the room, at the table, in the group-chat energy of it all, but always slightly outside the current. Their personalities expanded with every drink, becoming louder, funnier, and more exaggerated. And mine contracted.

So I became quieter. More observant. More removed.

There’s something deeply sad about realising your peace only exists in someone’s absence.

I spent a lot of nights alone with my dog, Opie, reading or watching television while waiting for someone who never really intended to build the same kind of life I wanted. At first, I thought relationships just required compromise. Then I realised compromise does not usually entail chronic loneliness.

I asked for quality time. He wanted the weekend.

I asked for connection. He wanted another round.

And slowly, without either of us fully admitting it, I began building an emotional life separate from him.

Around that same time, my mental health collapsed. Anxiety, depression, therapy, medication: all the glamorous accessories of being a woman quietly unravelling in her early thirties. I was trying desperately to pull myself out of a dark place while still pretending everything was normal.

That was when another man entered the picture.

Affairs rarely begin with sex. They begin with attention. With listening. With someone noticing the sadness in you and making you feel understood before they make you feel wanted.

He knew exactly what to say because I handed him the blueprint myself.

The truth is, I wasn’t the beginning of his story. I was just another chapter in a pattern he had been perfecting for years.

At the time, I wanted so badly to believe what we had was different, deeper, more emotionally charged, somehow exempt from the rules that had defined the rest of his life. But men who cheat habitually rarely have profound love stories over and over again. They are creating opportunities.

And he was a man who had never really been faithful to anyone.

Before me, there had been other women. During marriages, during relationships, during periods when he was supposedly recommitting himself to being better. Infidelity wasn’t some shocking lapse in judgement for him; it was woven into the architecture of who he was. His first marriage reportedly began while he was already involved with someone else and ended in much the same way: overlapping timelines, emotional doublespeak, women carrying the emotional consequences while he moved seamlessly between them.

The more distance I get from it all, the more I understand that experienced cheaters operate almost like emotional illusionists. They study people. They mirror vulnerabilities back to you. They make you feel uniquely understood while often using the exact same script they’ve used before.

And because I was emotionally depleted, because I was lonely and desperate to feel chosen, I confused being psychologically analysed with being emotionally seen.

He positioned himself carefully: patient, attentive, emotionally available in all the ways my relationship no longer felt. He listened when I talked about my depression, my loneliness, the disconnect I felt at home. Looking back now, it unsettles me how much information I handed over willingly. Every insecurity, every unmet need, every fracture in my life became an opening.

At first, it was subtle. Lingering conversations. Emotional intimacy disguised as friendship. The kind of attention that feels harmless because technically nothing has happened yet.

Then, one night, he asked me if I thought about him the way he thought about me. And that was it. Not because that sentence was romantic, but because once a line is acknowledged, both people begin consciously walking towards it.

At first, the affair felt intoxicating. There’s a thrill in being desired by someone when you’ve spent years feeling invisible. I mistook our secrecy for depth. I mistook intensity for intimacy. I thought the emotional and physical connection between us meant something larger than it actually did.

But eventually, I realised I was confusing seduction with care.

What I viewed as passion was, in many ways, familiarity for him. Validation. Conquest. The thrill of access. Men like that often aren’t searching for partnership; they’re searching for reflection. They want to feel powerful, irresistible, and important. Affairs become less about the women involved and more about maintaining an internal narrative about themselves.

And the most humbling realisation of all was understanding that I was never uniquely immune from becoming collateral damage, too.

Because eventually, I saw it: the compartmentalisation, the inconsistencies, the emotional shapeshifting. The same behaviours that likely existed long before me. The secrecy that once felt intoxicating eventually started feeling deeply sad. There is nothing romantic about realising someone is capable of looking multiple people in the eye and performing different versions of themselves to each one.

Affairs survive on fantasy, but reality always enters eventually.

And when it did, I had to confront something difficult: I had spent so much time blaming my unhappiness on my relationship that I ignored the fact that I had also attached myself to someone fundamentally incapable of honesty in any meaningful way.

Still, none of that removes my responsibility.

I think often about my ex-boyfriend and how deeply I hurt him. Regardless of our problems, regardless of the emotional neglect, regardless of the fact that I suspected long before our breakup that his attention had already shifted elsewhere, I betrayed someone who loved me in the only way he knew how.

I think about the wife in this, too. About the humiliation, devastation, and confusion that come with discovering your marriage contains rooms you were never invited into. I carry genuine remorse for that pain. Some apologies never fully land because they cannot undo what’s already been done.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: That affair destroyed my life. And thank God it did. Because the collapse forced movement.

After my relationship ended, I escaped to New York City to stay with my best friend for a few weeks. I remember sitting there emotionally wrecked, exhausted, embarrassed by the debris of my own choices, and still feeling something unfamiliar underneath it all.

Relief.

New York felt like oxygen after years of holding my breath.

I had visited the city for years before finally moving there, always leaving with this strange ache in my chest, like I was abandoning a version of myself every time I got on the train home. My mom had just moved as well, and most of my friendships had quietly become tethered to my relationship in ways I didn’t fully recognise until it ended. My job was remote, so there was no physical place anchoring me anywhere.

Then suddenly, because my entire life imploded, there was nothing left tying me to a place that no longer fit me. So I left.

And somewhere between rebuilding my routines, finding community, healing my mental health, and creating a life that actually reflected who I was becoming, I realised something important: Sometimes your worst decisions drag you towards your real life.

Not because cheating is noble, or destruction is empowering. But because rock bottom has a way of removing every false thing you were tolerating.

These days, my life is quieter in the ways that matter and fuller in the ways I once thought love was supposed to make me feel. I live in a city I adore. I’ve built friendships that nourish me. I laugh constantly. I feel connected to myself again. I take care of my body because I want to feel strong, not because I want someone to choose me.

Most importantly, I no longer build my identity around being loved by another person. That version of me collapsed already. Good. Some endings deserve to happen. And maybe that’s the real lesson in all of this: build a life that belongs to you so completely that nobody leaving it can destroy you.

---

Photo ©  Photography of Nicole by Paulina Shafir