15 Real Women Confess What It's Like To Try And Patch Up A Relationship

Cheating is one of those things that's really hard to get over. For many people, it's their only deal breaker in a relationship. You cheat, you're out, and there are no exceptions to that rule. For those people (and you might count yourself as one of those people), there is no coming back from cheating. However, for others, cheating isn't as much of a deal breaker. Sure, it's incredibly hurtful and hard to deal with, but it's also not a reason to end a relationship… at least at first. Right?

Perhaps some women are able to alter their perspectives and take it as an opportunity to strengthen their relationship with their partners. It's indeed a big wake up call that things aren't entirely working, and so change is in order.

Many people have gone out of their way to try and rekindle a relationship after an affair, and it ends with interesting results every time. Unfortunately, those results aren't really the results you might want half the time. It's kind of a crapshoot making a relationship work after an affair, since it is the biggest test of trust, but many people have tried it. We found fifteen women from all over the Internet who talked about why they chose to stay with their partners who cheated and what happened afterward. Here are their stories.

15 Never Love A Man More Than Yourself

She's damn right! Good riddance, indeed! What kind of person tries to make it work with the person they cheated on, only to dump them later on for being clingy? For one, clearly, she could have stood to be at least a little clingier since he cheated on her. For another, many people claim that they cheated because they don't feel loved by their main partner enough, so they go and seek it out elsewhere. However, it's really hard to make it work and make that person feel loved when expressing your love for that person makes you seem clingy. This is on top of the insult of the cheating in the first place. Seriously, this girl, whoever she is, can do better.

14 At Least He Told Her Himself?

It's a lot easier to handle dealing with the fact that your boyfriend or even your husband cheated on you if they don't add insult to injury by lying to you. Honestly, the lie makes it worse. Because he lied, you have no choice but to question everything you think you know about the relationship. If you can't trust what he said to you about something like cheating, it'll be impossible to trust him for other things, and that's honestly the death knell for the average relationship. Sometimes when you're dealing with a cheater, the only thing you really feel like doing is letting it go because you'd rather work through the pain than losing your best friend. It's a really sad place to be.

13 That's Really Deep…

This confession made me think of a psychological phenomenon called the sunk-cost fallacy. The sunk-cost fallacy is when you'd rather stay in a situation or deal with something that makes you profoundly unhappy just because you'd put a lot of time and work into it. This is why people stay at dead end jobs for forever and why people will stay in relationships long past their expiration date. They just don't want to admit to themselves that they've wasted time, so they'd rather waste more trying to save it so they don't have to move on to something new. This is a terrible reason to stay in a relationship. If you feel like you need to move on or like you need to get away from a cheater, you should do that. Wasting time stinks, but wasting more time for no reason stinks worse.

12 Learn From This Story, Ladies…

When I was a little girl, my parents got divorced. Both of them worked, so while I was sad that my parents were no longer together, I never had to worry that I wasn't going to be taken care of because my mom had always worked. As I got older, she would tell me to focus on my education and do whatever I could to succeed because there's nothing worse than feeling like you're stuck being totally dependent on another person for your survival, especially if it's a man who could cheat or otherwise betray you. It was a lesson I never forgot and am very fortunate to not have learned the hard way, but not every woman is so lucky, like the woman who wrote this confession.

11 You're An Incredibly Patient Woman… Is That The Word?

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here. I just want to find this woman, take her out for a cup of tea, and wrap her in a blanket and tell her "oh, honey." I totally get how there are situations where you can take a cheater back and be confident in the relationship, but this certainly isn't one of them. Honestly, woman, you have no idea if this man is still cheating or not! He could very well be cheating all the time and be totally confident that he's still going to have a woman at home waiting for him because he knows she will never leave him even though he deserves it and she deserves better. This kind of thing never fails to break my heart. Whoever this woman is, I hope this finds you and I hope you know you deserve better.

10 I Hope She Knows Better Now!

Okay, there are some things I need to say in response to this. I totally get what it feels like to want to stay in a romantic situation that drives you crazy or makes you otherwise unhappy because it's easier than the alternative or because you think he's "the one." If I had time, I would tell you that whole story now, but it's not important. What is important is that I learned that going back into the dating scene is infinitely better than trying to make it work with a guy who really doesn't care about you. It might feel easier to stay with him, but you're actually doing more work trying to act like a dead relationship is perfectly healthy.

9 Circumstances Can Trap You In The Worst Kind Of Relationships

This situation is particularly tragic because it's honestly really easy how a person could end up in this situation. Let's say you're a struggling college student who falls in love with a guy who makes money. Maybe he owns a business of his own or has a healthy trust fund. The two of you build a life together, and while you maintain your independence, he helps foot the bill for you to realize a dream you would never have been able to without help. Everything's great until your world is rocked when you find out he's been cheating on you. You want to leave, but then you go to seek comfort in the dream you have, distraught, and realize that leaving him means leaving your goals undone for a considerable amount of time. It's a scary place to be.

8 "Love And Stuff" Isn't Enough

We often decide to stay in terrible relationships because of "love and stuff." Love and stuff are often used to justify a lot of ridiculous mistreatment at the hands of people we like and are supposed to care about us. We deal with toxic family members and friends a lot of the time because we think that love is supposed to be enough, and love makes up for all of the things that they do. "Blood is thicker than water" and all. The problem with this is that love and stuff aren't enough: respect has to be part of every relationship you have. You have to respect each other on some level, or else the relationship and the love you all share won't mean anything.

7 And The Relationship Continues…

This is the problem with cheating: trust is irrevocably damaged. Okay, maybe not irrevocably: sometimes a relationship can overcome this insane breach of trust. However, the people who can truly forgive and forget something like this are rare, and as much as we might want to be one of those people, you'll never know until you're faced with that situation. You might be really sure that cheating isn't a deal breaker for you and totally change your mind when the man you love is standing in front of you, telling you what he did, or worse, when you've unraveled his lies about it. Even when the guy is totally honest about the situation, it could very well change the entire relationship forever. Cheating is just bad, guys.

6 Now That's One Way To Handle Infidelity

This is a really rare situation where an incident of cheating ends up leading to an open relationship, but it's totally possible. However, there are healthy and unhealthy ways to open a relationship. While we can't tell how this couple is just from one Whisper confession, we can figure out whether an open relationship is right for us. The only way open relationships work is through lots of communication, and if there's cheating involved, there's a really good chance that communication might not be happening. Also, open relationships require that much more work to stay healthy, and cheating is decidedly unhealthy behavior. Opening up a relationship after cheating can work, but everyone has to be okay with it first.

5  You Do A Lot For Your First Love… But Seriously?

This woman makes me irrationally angry, to be honest. Sure, this guy is your first love, but he slept with your best friend. Sure, your best friend is responsible for her own actions in the situation, but I don't think I've ever heard of someone dropping their best friend for the guy who slept with their best friend and cheated on them. Sure, he's your first love, but he's also a world-class jerk. Now that he knows you'll drop your friends if he sleeps with them and prioritize him over them, he's going to be that much more emboldened to ruin your friendships. And on top of that, you're marrying him! I don't know who or where you are, lady, but I hope you dumped him before you married him because if you didn't, you're going to be spending a fortune on a divorce lawyer.

4 That's A Level Of Forgiveness Not Many People Have

I can honestly respect this way of thinking. This is a woman who knows cheating is wrong and a breach of trust but also knows when to forgive and when it's time to throw in the towel. If she didn't know he was sorry, I'm sure she would have left him no problem. However, she saw that not everything is black and white and she loved him enough to see if he could change. According to her, he did. While we'll never know if he did or not, we do know that dealing with cheating isn't as simple as break up and move on, at least not all the time. There's definitely a difference between someone who only cheats once in the heat of the moment and would never dream of doing it again and a serial cheater.

3 I Feel Like This Story Requires Some Context…

This is one of those times I wish that Whisper didn't have a character limit because this is the kind of story you'd expect to see on Jerry Springer. So a guy was talking to a girl who wasn't his girlfriend, and she told him that she was dying of cancer and wanted to sleep with him before she died… and it worked. Now she has no friends because of her actions. While it's truly reprehensible to pretend you have cancer for a chance at a roll in the hay, why do I feel like there's more to this? I could totally see the guy telling his girlfriend that the girl lied about cancer to sleep with him to cover up the fact that he just hit on her, or worse, that he tried sleeping with her and she rejected him, so he's out for revenge. Things like that do happen because guys can be really petty. We'll never know!

2 We Made It Work… For 20 Minutes!

Sleeping with someone's family is particularly vile, so I can't fault this woman for not trying to make it work. I could actually picture the way this went down. She walked into her place and saw her boyfriend in bed with another woman, and was doubly shocked to find out the woman was family, and probably someone who would have had a key to her place on top of that. She was mad but told him that she just needed some space and they'd talk in the morning, so he got his stuff out of her place and waited for her to call. That's when she changed the locks, her phone number, and blocked him everywhere on social media. I'm pretty sure it didn't happen exactly this way, but a girl can dream!

1 Love Is Blind, Indeed

It's that last sentence that really hits home for me, and I'm sure it does for a lot of you reading this. Taking back a guy who cheated on you can be a lot like purposefully blinding yourself. You know what he is, but you'd rather live in denial and put the blinders on so you can remain blissfully happy with him, because it's better than the scary alternative of leaving him and moving on with someone else, especially since that someone else has the power to hurt you just like this guy did. It's a hard thing to accept that someone you love and who said he loved you could betray you in such a fundamental way. Sometimes it's rewarding to make it work and it pays off, but a lot of the time it doesn't, and too many of us know that from experience.