I don’t want to become her judge, but I can’t pretend I wasn’t hurt.
There is something particularly complicated about the idea of judging another woman when you are trying to rebuild your own life after betrayal.
I know very little about what was happening inside her mind. I don’t know every conversation that took place, every justification that was made, or every feeling she experienced.
I know my experience.
I know what I lived through.
I know how it felt to discover the truth and look back at moments that suddenly meant something different.
And I know that, from my perspective, she was part of something that caused enormous pain.
I don’t need to know every detail of her inner world to acknowledge that.
But I also don’t want to spend my life trying to determine whether she is a good person or a bad person.
Because, if I’m honest, I don’t think that question will give me what I’m looking for.
Maybe it would feel satisfying to decide that she is a terrible person. Maybe it would make the situation easier to understand if I could put her into a box marked bad and never have to think about the complexity of it again.
But life is rarely that simple.
People can do hurtful things. People can make selfish choices. People can cause damage that they may never fully understand.
And people are still people.
Recognising that doesn’t excuse what happened.
It doesn’t mean I have to like her, forgive her, trust her, or welcome her into my life.
It doesn’t mean I owe her kindness at the expense of my own wellbeing.
It simply means I can acknowledge her humanity without dismissing my own.
I can refuse to dehumanise her while still believing that her choices were hurtful.
I can hope she learns from what happened without needing to be part of that process.
And I can decide that whatever kind of person she is, that I no longer want her character to be the thing that determines my peace.
Because I have spent enough time trying to make sense of what she did. I have a life to live, too.
I would be lying if I said I hadn’t wondered what she had that I didn’t.
I think this is one of the cruelest things betrayal does to you.
It makes you question yourself in ways you never thought you would.
Was she prettier?
Was she more exciting?
Was she easier to be around?
Was there something about her that made him feel something he wasn’t feeling with me?
What did she offer that I didn’t?
And perhaps the most painful question of all: Why wasn’t I enough?
I know, logically, that another person’s choices are not a measurement of my worth.
I know that his decision to have an affair was not proof that I was lacking something.
But knowing something in your head and believing it in your heart are two very different things.
There have been moments when I have compared myself to her, even though I know that comparison cannot give me an answer that will heal me.
Moments when I’ve wondered whether I could have been different, looked different, acted differently, or somehow prevented what happened.
But I am slowly learning that I cannot heal by turning myself into a woman who competes with the person involved in my husband’s betrayal.
I don’t need to become prettier than her.
I don’t need to be more interesting than her.
I don’t need to prove that I was the better choice.
I don’t need to win a competition I never agreed to enter.
Her existence is not evidence of my inadequacy. Her involvement in my husband’s affair is not a verdict on my worth.
I was enough before I knew her name in this context.
I was enough when I was pregnant.
I was enough when I was struggling.
I was enough when I was exhausted and trying to navigate new motherhood.
And I am enough now.
I am allowed to rebuild my confidence without making her the standard against which I measure myself. That is part of finding my way back to me.
When I discovered the affair, I had to make a decision about what I wanted my future to look like.
I had always imagined that infidelity would be the one thing I could never move past. I thought I knew exactly what I would do if I were ever put in that position.
But then it happened to me.
And suddenly, life wasn’t as straightforward as I had imagined.
There was a marriage. There was a little boy who depended on us. There was a history of love, memories, promises and a future I had pictured differently.
There was also betrayal.
And somehow, I found myself choosing to stay and see if what had been broken could be rebuilt.
That decision was never about pretending nothing happened.
It wasn’t about saying that what my husband did was acceptable.
It wasn’t about making the pain smaller so that our life could continue as normal.
It was about deciding that I wanted to see whether we could create something different from the wreckage of what had happened.
I wanted to rebuild our marriage, but I also needed to rebuild myself.
And that process has involved confronting feelings I never expected to have, including my feelings toward her.
Sometimes I have wondered whether choosing to stay means I should also choose to let go of every negative feeling I have about the other woman.
Whether, because I have chosen to work on my marriage, I should somehow be above the anger.
But I am learning that healing doesn’t work like that.
I can choose to rebuild my marriage without being okay with what happened.
I can love my husband and still acknowledge the damage his choices caused.
I can work toward forgiveness without rushing myself into it.
And I can choose not to give this woman any more of my energy while still admitting that what happened hurt me.
Staying is not the same as forgetting.
Choosing to move forward is not the same as deciding that the past no longer matters.
And trying to heal does not require me to manufacture feelings of compassion that I am not ready to feel.
I am allowed to be a work in progress.
For a long time, I think I believed that being a good person meant finding a way to forgive.
That if I wanted to heal properly, I needed to reach a point where I could look at the people who hurt me and feel nothing but acceptance.
But I’m beginning to question whether forgiveness needs to be the immediate goal.
What if, for now, the goal is simply to stop allowing the hurt to consume me?
What if I can acknowledge that I am angry without feeling pressured to turn that anger into forgiveness?
What if I can accept that I may never understand her choices, and that I don’t need to understand them to move forward?
I don’t owe her a relationship.
I don’t owe her access to my life.
I don’t owe her an explanation of my feelings or an announcement that I have forgiven her.
And I certainly don’t owe anyone a performance of grace just to prove that I have healed.
Maybe forgiveness will come one day.
Maybe it will look like genuinely wishing her well.
Maybe it will look like no longer feeling the need to know what she is doing, whether she feels guilty, or whether she has ever thought about the damage that was done.
Maybe it will simply look like thinking about her less and less until she no longer occupies the space she once did.
Or maybe forgiveness will mean something different to me entirely.
I don’t know yet.
And for once, I’m trying to be okay with not knowing.
Because my healing is not a race, and it is not a performance.
I don’t need to prove that I’m over it.
I don’t need to prove that I’m the bigger person.
I just need to keep finding my way forward.
I can have compassion without abandoning myself.
If there is one thing I am learning through all of this, it is that compassion for other people should never require cruelty toward yourself.
I can recognise that the other woman is human without minimising the hurt I experienced.
I can acknowledge that people make complicated, sometimes deeply hurtful choices without excusing those choices.
I can refuse to wish pain upon her and still feel angry about the pain she was involved in causing.
And I can stop punishing myself for not responding to betrayal with endless grace.
I am a woman who was hurt.
A woman who had to confront a reality she never imagined she would live through.
A woman who has had to rebuild her confidence, question her assumptions, work through her triggers and find a way to move forward without losing herself in the process.
I am also a woman who sometimes gets angry.
Who sometimes has thoughts she isn’t proud of.
Who sometimes wants someone else to understand just how much it hurt.
And I don’t think those things make me a bad person.
I think they make me human.
I don’t want to become someone who is defined by resentment. I don’t want this experience to harden me so much that I can no longer recognise goodness in other people.
But I also refuse to believe that the only way to prove I am healing is to be endlessly understanding of the people who hurt me.
I can be compassionate and have boundaries.
I can be forgiving and still remember.
I can be kind without pretending I wasn’t wounded.
And I can choose peace without rewriting the story to make it less painful than it was.
Maybe being the better person isn’t about never feeling hatred.
Maybe it’s about refusing to let hatred become the person you are.
Maybe it’s about giving yourself permission to feel the full weight of what happened, while slowly deciding that you deserve a life that is bigger than the people who hurt you.
That is what I want.
Not revenge.
Not comparison.
Not a lifetime spent wondering why.
Just peace.
The kind of peace that comes when I no longer need to understand her to understand myself.
The kind of peace that comes when her choices stop feeling like a reflection of my worth.
The kind of peace that allows me to look at the woman I was when all of this happened, and feel compassion for her, too.
And perhaps that is where my healing needs to begin.
Not with forgiving her.
Not with hating her.
But with remembering that I deserve the same compassion I have been trying so hard to give everyone else.
To the woman I was before the betrayal, and the woman I am still becoming: you do not have to be perfect in your pain. You are allowed to be angry. You are allowed to be hurt. You are allowed to take your time.
You can be a good person and still have difficult feelings.
You can be healing and still have hard days.
You can choose love without denying the hurt.
And you can become someone stronger without pretending that any of this was easy.
I don’t know if I will ever have all the answers about her.
But I am beginning to understand that I don’t need them to reclaim my peace.
And right now, that is enough.
– Sarah xx
Leave a Reply