Why I stayed with my cheating partner

IT can be quite difficult abandoning something you may have spent your whole life dreaming of and then building on, and as such, many women opt to stay after their men cheat.

Tajea met Lincoln when she was going through a very rough break-up. She was a university student who could barely cope, but she soon had an anchor in Lincoln, who supported her financially, proofread her assignments, took her home to the country occasionally, and offered her great advice for moving on.

“I thought he was the love of my life,” she told All Woman. “I thought this man must be my superman. I thought, he thinks like a woman, he understands me, he completed me, to be quite honest. I had never before met a man who could complete my sentences, but he did.”

She said within two months after her break-up she had moved in with Lincoln and within another six months she was pregnant with his child. News of the baby had brought them closer than ever. But not too long after that the fairy-tale love story ended.

“For the first time in my life I felt loved, an incomparable love. But as I grew heavier, it was more difficult for us sexually, it was also difficult to move around without assistance,” she recalled.

Tajea said that her inability to offer him sex made Lincoln very bitter.

“He started complaining about everything, about the way I cooked, the way my hair smelled, the way I walked, but even more he tried religiously to tell me that childbirth would prove challenging if I did not engage more sexually.”

She said while this was only the eve of her depression, she could tell that her nightmare had begun.

“Seven and a half months into my pregnancy, he started leaving earlier and returning later, calling less and talking less, but I tried not to make much out of it.”

She said that complications during labour forced her to remain in the hospital for a few days.

“While there, I began to reflect on the way that a man could change so suddenly. I returned home four days later. Something was not quite right about the environment but I just could not put my hand on it. It did not take me long before I found blonde hair in my hair brush, stud gold earrings that did not belong to me, and a strange white toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.”

Now she was reliving the ordeal that she had tried to escape just a few years before. The only difference was that this time she was unemployed, a mother, and helpless. Even as Lincoln created a storm in her life, all she could think about was what her family would make of the man who rescued her from all the drama in her life, only to add more drama.

“He empowered me to find the strength to move on. He is my only source of funding. He takes care of my family in the country and he is the father of my child. I could not leave him,” she said.

As the months passed she did everything she could to impress him — wearing lingerie to bed, making candlelit dinners, and even going against her own principles to fulfil his erotic sexual fantasies, but all he did was take from her. She said that he made her feel like walls in the street that he used for his graffiti.

And as the months passed he became more barefaced.

“He would drink and come in with lipstick and other forms of make-up on his clothes, and stained by the scent of women’s fragrances. More than ever I wanted to leave, but he was good with his daughter and I had made a promise to myself that I would never be a single parent.”

Cheating in her eyes had become normal, and even once when she decided to leave, the thought of homelessness, the thought of being unable to feed her daughter and family, especially her ailing mother, forced her to unpack her small getaway suitcase.

“I know what it is like to be hungry and I didn’t want to go back to that. I could not allow my baby to go through that, and with his stature he would take her away from me, I would be homeless and I did not want to know how that felt, so I stayed.”

For Keisha, the betrayal by her man, Clinton, was even more devastating.

“I could not get over him. He was the one who took my virginity and I had devoted all my life to him. For five years of my life, I was living with the man I thought was my soulmate. I had shared some of the best years and made my most fond memories with him. I thought we were inseparable,” she said.

When Clinton told Keisha that he thought they were not working out, she was devastated. He had told her that he was taking a spiritual journey and would remain celibate until he figured things out. But less than a month later, Keisha got news that Clinton had moved another girl into his home.

Living in the same community made this more challenging. He refused to answer her calls. Several months went by and Keisha was finally beginning to regain control of her life when Clinton resurfaced.

Keisha did the unthinkable — at his first signal she rushed back into his arms like nothing happened.

Financial dependence, staying because of the children, and the fear of being harmed are among the reasons women stay with their cheating partners.

Relationship counsellor Wayne Powell said, though, that women have to be conscious about the realities that may be true for them when they make a decision to stay.

“A woman should let her head rule her heart and properly assess the relationship to ensure that her best interests are served; that is, is she putting in more than she is receiving out of the relationship,” Powell advised.

For women who leave for a period, only to return, he cautioned them against making the same mistake twice.

“If there is a great imbalance she may want to reconsider going back,” he said.

Powell proposes a theory to explain the reason women are more likely to return to their partners after a break-up.

“When a woman gets involved with someone in an intimate relationship she sees it as an investment and so puts in a great deal of time and energy with the objective of establishing a committed long-term relationship,” he explained.

“When the relationship is disrupted or terminated for whatever reason, she is devastated and would want to do all that is in her power to reinstate the partner and recommence the relationship.

“Men invest less emotionally in a relationship and so can walk away with much ease and not look back. Men are more physically and visually wired and most times are not socialised to express their feelings and emotions. Some men feel it is expected of them to engage in a touch-and-go approach when it comes to relationships and so would not be emotionally connected to the partner. This would facilitate the no-return policy,” he said.