On a humid August afternoon, I stood in a silver bridesmaid dress and watched a friend recite her wedding vows. I had left my then-boyfriend behind in San Francisco. At 24, I was falling in love with him, enjoying our slow progression, but I wasn’t ready to take him to a wedding.
As the groom recited his vows, tender and clever, I drifted into fantasy. A fantasy in which my boyfriend was in bed with another woman.
Heat shot through my neck. I didn’t imagine the face of this other woman, and I didn’t imagine them having sex. I only imagined my rage at the site of his unmade bed. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. In my fantasy, I would be able to smell betrayal.
The groom kissed the bride. People clapped, and so did I, but in my mind I was 2,500 miles away, standing angrily in the bedroom of the boyfriend (who never actually cheated). I spent the entire wedding cultivating a fantasy I would harbor for decades.
The details never change, just the man. I learn I have been cheated on. I proceed to rage in a wild manner that can only live in my imagination because I would never rage like that in real life. I shatter ceramic plates, rip his shirts off hangers and toss them out the window. The boyfriend owns a lot of shoes and ties, and they pile up like mountains in the street.
“Get out,” I yell.
The boyfriend is wildly apologetic. He’s going to fight for me. That’s what he yells as I push him out the door, before I melt onto the floor and sob.
To clarify, I only drummed this up with men I loved. Almost always six months into a relationship, when our connection was becoming deep and real, when I felt safe and seen. It was intrusive, interrupting tender moments like cooking dinner together. Somehow, thinking about being cheated on made me feel closer to whichever man I was with.
Did it turn me on? I couldn’t tell. I held the question at a confused distance. Thinking about it filled me with shame, and often exhilaration. I know many people’s lives have been devastated by cheating. I never told anyone.
Eddie and I met in our 40s. From his online profile, I learned he was newly divorced and adored his daughters. It was unwise to get involved with someone fresh out of marriage, but his freshness attracted me. He seemed passionate and vulnerable, traits that often get lost after years of serial dating.
None of him was lost on me. We had riotous laughing attacks and raw, meaningful conversations. We loved music and spent days playing the songs that had saved our lives, through his worst years of marriage, through my childhood hell.
When I was a child, my father fixated on me in profoundly harmful ways. While he stopped short of sexually abusing me, he smothered me with inappropriate attention. More damaging than his attraction was how he blamed me for it, as did my mother. Their anger and resentment wreaked havoc on our family, for which I blamed myself. When I was 15, my school guidance counselor got wind of my situation, which started a process that briefly landed me in foster care.
At 19, I left home and never returned.
In my 20s I fell in love with good men who introduced me to their families and wanted a future together. I wanted to be loved so badly, but the only love I’d known had been suffocating and obsessive. I left those relationships at the slightest hint of discomfort, unable to tolerate the intense emotions that came with love.
Convinced I needed no one, I bulldozed through countries, jobs and relationships, uprooting myself constantly. I needed therapy. But then, understanding the severity of my father’s mistreatment would have required learning how to sit with immense pain. Instead, I kept re-enacting the relief I had found in leaving home by leaving good relationships.
Eddie had spent the last 20 years creating his family; I’d spent those decades running from mine. He expressed his romantic desires and aspired to make them reality. I had luxuriated in a certain deprivation of desire that kept everything I’d ever wanted at arm’s length.
On our third date, he got excited at the thought of me meeting his children. I threw up at the suggestion and blamed it on the duck we’d had for dinner. Even after years of therapy and becoming a therapist myself, I hadn’t been able to dismantle the unconscious belief I was at fault for what had happened in my family.
“What if the girls get attached to me?” I said, “and then we break up?”
I was standing in his walk-in pantry studying their snack preferences. Eddie turned me toward him and put his arms around my neck, a slight smile forming at the corner of his mouth. “Is that what you’re afraid of?” he asked.
“I don’t want to hurt them.”
“Maybe you don’t want to get hurt,” he said.
He was right about that. I was afraid.
Those old childhood beliefs had created a hypervigilance. I wanted to protect everyone from myself, and the future hurt I might cause. This was especially true of men. And God forbid I ruin another family.
As I started talking about my fears, things shifted between us. I opened up more with Eddie than I had with any man. Soon I got excited to meet his girls, to hang my sweaters in his closet.
Then one night, while we were having sex, he called me by another woman’s name with a sleepy reminisce in his voice that made me think it was more than just a slip. Later, on the laptop he had lent me while mine was in the shop, I saw text messages that revealed he had been cheating on me.
A fantasy realized is no longer a fantasy.
The intense hurt carved me up, but I held it together. I confronted Eddie, presented evidence, expressed disappointment and requested space. Calm, rational, controlled.
In the privacy of my home, though, I exploded. I cried into my pillow and raged against it, beating out the feathers. I took a hammer to a framed photo of his. I wanted to physically extricate the pain from my body. I was blown away by the ferociousness of my feelings. So different from the quiet, calcified, historic hurt I had buried.
Eddie texted every day, reaffirming his devotion to our relationship. Then, he called.
“I might leave you,” I said.
“It’s not what I want,” he said, “but I get it.”
“You know it’s not my fault, right?”
“Of course it’s not your fault,” he said.
“Say it again,” I said, “Tell me again it’s not my fault.”
“It’s not your fault, Rach. What I did was not your fault.”
How to describe what I felt hearing those words. An ecstatic, mesmerizing, dizzying relief. Words I would never hear from my father or mother. Words I had waited all my life to hear.
During our time apart, I revamped my fantasy. Real life relics replaced generic clichés. I imagined chucking Eddie’s prized football memorabilia out the window, smashing his ceramic plates, giving him the finger. Then I let myself unravel, hiccupping and hyperventilating like a little kid until he scoops me in his arms, and I cry my eyes out, for everything I’ve never let myself cry about.
Cheating is one of those universally agreed upon crimes of the heart, a clear-cut assignment of wrong and right. Maybe I needed something that clear-cut to feel right about having been wronged. By Eddie. By my father.
Eddie wasn’t my father, and that’s what made it safe to sit with the pain and anger. He could give me things my father couldn’t. Acknowledgment, apology, amends. Repair.
Our birthdays were a day apart, and Eddie had rented a cabin — a trip we had planned a while back. I agreed not to cancel. We would go to that cabin and see what happened. In the car, unready to talk, I placed my hand on his arm and turned up the music.
It was late when we arrived. My anger had softened, and I was overcome by sadness. I wanted to absorb it all, everything I had repressed and run from. Feelings I had only felt entitled to in my cheating fantasy. A fantasy, it turned out, that had little to do with cheating. Like a long-term storage unit, it merely had provided a safe and reliable place to leave these parts of myself until I was ready to unearth, then reclaim them.
Rachel Sontag is a therapist living in Portland, Ore., and the author of the memoir “House Rules.”
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