Can you come back from cheating?

When the sacred trust of a relationship is broken, your whole world seems to shatter. But can you—and should you—pick up the pieces?

- Saumyaa Vohra

Once a cheater, always a cheater'. It's a phrase we were fed in our formative years, and—in some ways—it was a pretty feminist warning. It was protective armour, meant to encompass a general idea of 'if they've hurt someone once, they're likely to do it again'. Cheating was always part of the holy trinity of reasons that women were 'encouraged' to leave a partner; 1. Does he hit you? 2. Does he drink too much? 3. Does he cheat? If the answer to any of those three was a resounding 'yes', women were buoyed to exit a relationship. But the trouble with that 'golden trifecta' is how reductive it was. Just like the phrase 'once a cheater...'.

Both ideas have no nuance, no room for the vagaries of being an adult in adult relationships—the messiness, layers, and chaos of it all. In the real world, cheating can comein a hundred different flavours, ranging from callous to desperate. And cheating, though incredibly tempting to villainise carte blanche, can often come from somewhere broken. There are so many questions around it. Why? Why now? Why this person? What was it really about? But the question I'm asking is, what next? Can a relationship ever come back from cheating? Or is it still the death knell we were all taught to believe it was?

Cheating in itself is a subject so rich, psychotherapist Esther Perel delved into detail in her book