Author: ahopeafterhurt

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

There is a part of this story that I’ve never really known what to do with.

Her. The other woman.

Even writing those words brings up feelings I’m not entirely comfortable admitting to. Anger, disgust, sadness, resentment, curiosity and, sometimes, a level of hatred that makes me feel like a person I don’t particularly want to be.

Because the truth is, I don’t want to be a woman consumed by hatred. I don’t want to spend my life carrying anger toward another person. I don’t want to become bitter. I don’t want my husband’s affair to turn me into someone who judges other women, who assumes the worst of people, or who loses the ability to see humanity in someone who has hurt me.

But I also don’t want to pretend that what she did didn’t hurt me.

Because it did.

Deeply.

And somewhere between wanting to be the better person and wanting her to understand even a fraction of the pain I’ve experienced, I’ve found myself wrestling with feelings that seem to contradict one another and I’m still trying to figure out how to hold them all.

One of the hardest parts of this entire situation is that she wasn’t some random woman my husband met on a night out. She was someone I knew. Someone I’d met more than once. Someone whose face wasn’t unfamiliar to me. Someone who existed in the same world I did.

She was a mother, just like me.

And I think that is part of what made everything so difficult to comprehend.

While I was navigating pregnancy, motherhood, and a version of myself I was still trying to understand, there was another woman involved in a part of my husband’s life that I knew nothing about.

I was trying to build a family. Trying to be a good mum. Trying to navigate my own struggles, including postnatal depression, while questioning things I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

For almost a year, I had suspicions that something wasn’t right. I questioned things. I felt that something had changed. And when I tried to make sense of those feelings, I was met with denials and explanations that left me questioning myself.

I didn’t know the full truth then.

But I knew something hurt.

And when I eventually discovered what had been happening, I wasn’t just confronted with the reality of my husband’s betrayal. I had to confront the fact that another woman had been part of it, too.

Someone who knew I existed.

Someone who knew I was his wife.

Someone who knew I was a mother.

Someone who, from where I stood, had enough information to understand that there was a family on the other side of her choices.

I have often wondered what she thought about me during that time.

Did she think about me at all?

Did she think about the fact that I was pregnant? That I was at home with our baby? That I was trying to navigate motherhood while my marriage was something entirely different behind my back?

Did she ever picture me when she was with him?

Did she ever feel a fraction of guilt?

Did she ever stop and think about the woman who would eventually have to pick up the pieces?

I will never know all the answers to those questions.

And perhaps that is something I will have to learn to live with.

I want to be clear about something. This is not me absolving my husband of responsibility.

He made his own choices. He made promises to me. He was the person who stood beside me in our marriage, the person I trusted to protect the life we were building together.

He owed me honesty, loyalty and respect.

And he was the one who broke those commitments.

I know that.

I have spent a long time trying to understand how someone I loved so deeply could hurt me in such a profound way. I have had to confront the reality that loving someone doesn’t mean you truly know every part of them, and that the person you feel safest with can also be the person who makes you feel the most unsafe.

His responsibility is his.

But acknowledging that doesn’t mean I have to pretend she played no part in what happened.

Two things can be true at once.

He was responsible for betraying me, and I can still feel deeply hurt by her involvement.

I can recognise that she didn’t make vows to me while also wishing she had made a different choice.

I understand that they both played a part in the affair, and that their choices didn’t happen without consequences for the people around them.

I don’t need to make her solely responsible for my pain to acknowledge that she contributed to it.

And I don’t need to hate her to admit that I struggle with what she did.

There is a version of myself I want to be.

She is compassionate. She is emotionally mature. She understands that people are complicated, that nobody is perfect, and that the worst thing someone has done does not necessarily tell the entire story of who they are.

She doesn’t want to wish suffering upon another woman.

She doesn’t want to spend her days comparing herself to someone else, wondering what she had that I didn’t, or trying to understand why she was worth the risk.

She doesn’t want to carry this woman around in her head forever.

She wants peace.

She wants to move forward.

She wants to be able to think about the affair without feeling the familiar knot in her stomach. She wants to reach a point where this woman is simply a part of a chapter in her life that she has survived, rather than someone who can still take up space in her mind.

And I want to be her, I really do.

But healing has taught me that wanting to be a certain kind of person doesn’t mean you magically stop having feelings that don’t align with that version of yourself.

Sometimes I feel compassion.

Sometimes I think about the fact that she is a person with her own life, her own struggles, and her own story. I remind myself that I don’t know everything about her, and that I don’t need to reduce another human being to one thing she did.

And then, sometimes, I remember what happened.

I remember the timing.

I remember being pregnant.

I remember bringing our baby into the world.

I remember those first weeks of motherhood, when I was exhausted, vulnerable and trying to find my feet in a life that had changed so dramatically.

And I feel angry, really, really angry.

Sometimes I want her to feel ashamed.

Sometimes I want her to understand what it feels like to have your reality shattered by people you trusted. To question your own judgement. To replay moments in your mind and wonder what was happening behind your back while you were simply trying to live your life.

Sometimes I want her to know that there is a real woman on the other side of those decisions.

A woman who cried.

A woman who struggled.

A woman who questioned herself.

A woman who had to learn how to live with a truth she never asked for.

And then I feel guilty for feeling that way.

Because isn’t the goal to let go?

Isn’t healing supposed to mean becoming less angry?

Aren’t I supposed to be the bigger person?

Maybe.

But I’m beginning to think that being the bigger person has been misunderstood.

Perhaps it doesn’t mean never having an ugly thought.

Perhaps it doesn’t mean offering forgiveness before you’re ready, or finding a compassionate explanation for every hurtful thing someone has done.

Perhaps it means allowing yourself to feel the anger without letting it decide who you become.

Perhaps it means acknowledging that a part of you is still hurt, rather than shaming yourself for not being further along in your healing.

I can want to be kind and still have unkind thoughts.

I can believe in compassion and still feel resentment.

I can choose not to act on my anger without pretending the anger doesn’t exist.

And maybe that is what being the better person looks like for me right now.

Not perfection.

Just a conscious choice about what I do with the pain.

More to come on this,
– Sarah xx