What are they thinking?

Disclaimer: this post isn’t about you.

So over the past few months I’ve heard several (and I mean SEVERAL) stories of people (both guys and girls) taking their boyfriends/girlfriends/fiances/etc back after having been cheated on, repeatedly lied to, or worse.

The question on my mind every time I hear a story like this is: “What in the HELL are they thinking?” The answer, most times, is that they’re really not. Sure, everyone has their own motives, and in all of the above stories there was some great rationalization that went into the eventual forgiveness and re-acceptance… but that’s all it was. Rationalization.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Pretend, if you will, like our friends Dick and Jane are engaged to be married very soon. Continue to pretend that Jane finds out that Dick has been cheating on her. (After all, he IS a Dick) Jane, poor girl, decides to confront him and he admits that the transgressions have been going on for a while.

What’s a girl to do? Well, folks, let me clue you in. The CORRECT course of action is to call off the wedding a dump his sorry ass. Oh, and keep the ring too. Some people do just that. Others decide that he’s really sorry and he learned his lesson and, by god, he’s all reformed and better. He might be sorry, at least that he got caught, but is he reformed and better? Statistically speaking, that’s a gigantic, steaming pile of iguana shit.

Sure, there are lots of variables. Was it on-going, did he come clean himself up or was he caught, how long ago was it, etc, etc, etc… but, by and large, people who decide to keep the offender are taking a huge risk for a small short term gain — specifically, they don’t have to be alone, or away from the person they love, etc. In the long term, however, all they’re doing is asking to be cheated on in the future. ASKING FOR IT. So once someone decides to undertake this massively stupid case-study in self-denial, and one of the more rational members of society approaches them about it, what do we hear? Let’s talk to our hypothetical Jane:


“But it’s going to be sad! It’s going to suck! I love Dick!” Yeah, it’s not SUPPOSED to be fun when your significant other cheats on you, dumbass. I mean, honestly, the slut cheated on you… only one part of that scenario is any fun and, by definition, you weren’t involved.

“He sobbed, cried, begged, and pleaded! He learned his lesson!” Suuure he did. Wanna know what lesson he learned? Don’t get caught next time.

“He said he was sorry and promised never to do it again!” Oh, because he hasn’t (at least implicitly) made that promise before, right? It’s not like you had an agreement not to fuck around with other people, right? Good idea, to take him at his word, since he’s been so faithful to it in the past.

“I don’t know what I’d do without him!” Well, this is coming a bit closer to honesty. It’s more convenient to stay with him than to find someone else. Even if he cheats. It’s still stupid, though.


If you were party to Jane’s little crisis/decision, it’s inevitable that later you’ll hear her complaining that she does’t know if she can trust him and when she gets hormonal and he hasn’t called in the last five minutes she’ll be SURE that he’s cheating on her. Then she’ll get mad at him.

There are lots of other side-effects as well, most of which I don’t care to get into as this is largely a venting of the frustration caused by the above incidents. What it comes down to, as far as I’m concerned, is the following:

If you take back a liar/cheater, you can’t be too upset when they do it again. I won’t go so far as to say that you DESERVE to have it happen again… but you sure as hell don’t get any sympathy from me.