Confessions of a retired cheater

From Vogue Magazine

Eileen Kelly

If you ask 10 people why they cheat, you’ll get 10 different answers. I wasn’t getting what I needed. I felt smothered. We’d grown apart. The truth is those are stories we tell ourselves to feel like decent people doing indecent things.

People cheat (or micro-cheat) for a thousand reasons, but the through line is always the same—disconnection—and the problem is rarely the person you’re betraying. For me, cheating was a brief suspension of loneliness. It was also the only way I knew how to quiet the noise in my own head.

Serial cheaters are the most tragic kind. I know because I was one—and I dated them too. They’re not villains so much as addicts: people who crave the high of newness and the rush of being seen. The thrill of being wanted feels, for a fleeting second, like proof of worth. But it never lasts. Once the novelty fades, the noise rushes back in—and they run.

This isn’t a cheater’s apologia; I know exactly how selfish that behavior was. For years my own pain just eclipsed everyone else’s.

The first time I cheated, I was in college, long-distance with my high school boyfriend and terrified of being alone. One night after a drunken make-out, I confessed over tears on the phone, wanting to believe I was still good. Then, years later, I fell in love with someone who cheated on me. I went through his phone one night while he was in the shower and saw a thread of late-night texts with his roommate.

“Please don’t tell Eileen,” he wrote.

“I won’t tell her, but if she asks, I won’t lie.”

I broke up with him immediately, then got back together with him, then cheated out of spite, as if I thought hurting him would balance the scales. It didn’t. It only deepened the hollowness I’d been trying to fill.

Between those early betrayals and the final reckoning, there were short-lived flings and emotional affairs, moments of weakness that all stemmed from the same thing: I couldn’t stand to be alone. Then came COVID. I fell into an affair with an ex while both of us were dating other people. It was wrong, of course, but karmically fitting: two people addicted to each other’s chaos, playing out the final act of a story that had ended long before. When it was over, I felt empty but clear.

You’re not the only one - read cheater guide