How to trust after being cheated on by a woman in the past? Getting cheated on by a woman can lead to extreme cognitive dissonance, where you can no longer differentiate between a woman who is a decent, loving woman, and one who will betray you no matter what you do. So let’s talk about how you can learn to trust again after an ex-girlfriend cheated on you.
Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriend. My God, getting cheated on by a girl is so damn tough. I bet a lot of you guys really struggle with trusting women. Either you think that any woman is evil and intentionally will hurt you, or you might just believe that every woman is flawed and has it in her heart to cheat when she’s unhappy. It’s quite easy to project the behaviors of a cheating ex on other women, and sometimes we may even judge women far sooner than we should. Trusting after a big relationship betrayal isn’t easy.
When a woman cheats on you, it’s almost like someone has opened Pandora’s box. You start to see a woman’s ability to love like a two-sided coin. On one side, she can seemingly have a great ability to love you and make you happy. On the other side of the coin is the exact reverse where the most unloving behaviors are possible. And that’s where the hesitancy to trust comes from. It’s what creates the fear that you just haven’t seen the other side of her yet. What if you just can’t see her other side? What if you can’t recognize that a woman is bad for you and is going to flip on a dime to break your heart and cheat on you…? AGAIN…
It’s very easy to give up hope or become bitter when a woman has cheated on you. We tend to often extrapolate and predict our previous experiences in the future. So you might be thinking “If she was capable of this,” then anyone is capable of doing so. Which probably makes a lot of sense from your perspective. I’m sure you really loved your ex-girlfriend and you used to think that she is a really great woman. And perhaps she was a good woman on many levels. Maybe’s good to her friends, in theory she was good to you most of the time, and she’s well-liked at her job. Most people would think she’s a good woman.
But of course, just because a person is good in one area of their lives, doesn’t mean that they can’t have serious flaws in another area. You may just not have seen the dark parts of a woman yet. This must be your fear or concern, right? If you can’t trust the woman closest to you in your life, then how could you ever trust any woman that she is not going to betray you once she is not happy with the relationship? How could you possibly gauge if a woman is fundamentally decent, or whether she is only looking good on the surface?
And on a basic level, such kind of thinking isn’t really bad, nor is it inaccurate. Men and women are capable of the worst behaviors imaginable depending on the circumstances. And yes, theoretically, it is possible to experience the same kind of cheating behavior with another woman, but in the end, ending up with a bad woman is like purchasing the wrong type of product, like a laptop twice in a row.
By the second time, you should at the very least know what to look out for among the things that you do not want, or what you consider red flags, or see as warning signs that you are making the wrong choice. Believe me, I used to own a thin and light laptop once, and I’ll never own any of those extremely thin machines ever again. Their performance sucks because they get too hot since they can’t cool the laptop CPU and GPU properly.
Likewise, I will never date a woman again who parties too much or posts one half-naked selfie after another on her Instagram profile. And so on. You learn from your mistakes, and you try to spot the most obvious patterns from the past as quickly as possible. Is that approach perfect and bullet-proof? No, of course not, but it’s the best you can do.
There will always be SOME level of risk when dating that you may end up with the wrong type of woman who isn’t trustworthy. But just as there are a lot of women who are two-faced and only truly reveal their bad sides when a relationship becomes challenging, there are also a lot of women, if not most women, who will instead use problems in a relationship to improve it, not make it worse. A good woman sees problems as a means of getting closer to her boyfriend in an attempt to resolve the issues that make her unhappy. Not every woman is as terrible as the one who cheated on you.
If you want to have proof that it is possible to find a woman who is going to not betray you, then you ultimately need to only look directly at yourself and your desire for a faithful relationship. In the field of dating dynamics and dating science, we tend to often highlight differences between men and women, their desires, and so on, and that makes sense. Details matter. Especially in the extremes, or higher averages when it comes to different behaviors.
But on a fundamental level, every good man and every good woman desires a loyal relationship. Yes, there are certain factors that drive women to cheat on a man, but these factors primarily matter with toxic, narcissistic women who never had the capacity to be loyal to begin with. Most women, and also men, are no different from you: They are decent human beings who just want to be loved without lies, deception, half-truths, love that’s highly conditional, and so on.
It’s easy to become cynical and see every woman as your ex-girlfriend, but of course, most women would think that the way your ex-girlfriend cheated on you was terrible if they found out what your ex has done to you. And regarding the ability to trust a woman, it’s really important to understand that in a healthy relationship, trust often is built-up gradually in the early stages of dating, and from then on, maintaining trust is primarily a matter of not losing that trust. After all, gaining someone’s trust is easy. Keeping that trust is the hard part.
This is why it never makes sense to be pessimistic and hold yourself back from dating new women who could be incredible girlfriends. If you want to know if a woman is going to be bad for you and your mental health, then you have to establish initial trust, and then see if a woman is willing to slowly erode trust.
Even if you would end up with another woman who has a tendency to cheat, you would likely notice that erosion of trust early on. Partners who are willing to cheat would rather let trust and commitment fade, rather than maintain or rebuild it continuously. Most of the time, it is very easy to spot a woman who is a terrible partner, with terrible communication habits, terrible intentions, or terrible mental frameworks of what commitment looks like in a relationship. The honest truth is that a good woman only has two choices when she’s not happy: Either she is going to maintain the trust level through open communication and real attempts to get closer to her boyfriend, or she would break up with you because she feels she can get something better elsewhere. Every other behavior is the sign of a bad, low-quality woman that you shouldn’t date.
If you can establish early on that your girlfriend is making efforts to keep the trust and commitment levels high, then you know that you’re with a good woman. Now, with early on, I don’t mean in the first months, where everybody is always on cloud 9. I’m talking after half a year, or longer, when you will definitely notice some problems, disagreements, or even the occasional fight. That’s when trust and commitment matter the most. If the woman you’re dating is not retreating, but rather, is making efforts to get closer to you, then you can assume that she is not the type of woman who would betray your trust.
The pattern of a woman who seeks comfort anywhere but with her boyfriend, is likely a toxic pattern that you’ve seen firsthand. There is no way that you are not going to spot it early on when it begins to happen.
I know, it is a scary thought to put your trust in a woman when your trust has been betrayed by your last ex, but you don’t have to keep on giving your trust to a woman if you’re not happy with her. If you are in a relationship or start dating, it is perfectly fine to notice bad relationship patterns that you don’t want to accept, and then walk away from the relationship sooner rather than later if you believe that it is not possible to strengthen the foundation of the relationship early on.
Does this mean that you should always assume that a woman is already planting the seeds for ruining the relationship later on? No, of course not. Perhaps, you two will only have simple communication problems that you need to work on, and your future girlfriend will be happy to learn how to improve the relationship. Assuming that you’re with a good woman, she’d be glad to improve her behavior if she’s been withdrawing emotionally. Emotional withdrawal is often a subconscious process that we don’t notice until it’s too late. But if we actively lead a relationship, it will never get to the point of too much withdrawal.
So don’t think that you can’t find happiness with another woman. The next woman that you meet could be 3 times better than your last girlfriend. Or even more, after all, the bar is relatively low considering that your last girlfriend cheated on you. The moral of the story, going back to my initial point of most people being kind-hearted and decently adjusted: You’re more likely to meet a better woman this time around as long as you have neither too low, nor too high standards with a woman.
Don’t trust too easily. But also don’t close yourself off from trusting a woman. I know you feel terrified of making the first step to trust again, but you can do it. The hard part about dating after infidelity is the point of decision when you’ve started dating already. Do you continue to give your trust? Will you keep on extending it? Or do you think your trust may be better placed elsewhere with a woman who doesn’t trigger your gut-feeling of something being wrong? It’s not an easy choice, but I know you will make the right choice when you need to. So give another woman and another relationship another chance, and then decide where to take it after you’ve gotten an opportunity to get to know the woman better.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.
