Lesbian infidelity: when does your girl cheat on you?
Sitting on the edge of the bed, listening, soundless words that only provoke horrible images that you never wanted to ask yourself, in your mind you are trapped.
There is nothing more painful, apart from death, than hearing that the person you are in love with and love, tells you that he has had an affair or was intimate with another. We hear the stories and sometimes we even witness the betrayal, but we never want to venture into thinking that it could ever happen to us “not me, we have something special and I would know immediately”.
A friend told me once that it had been so long since her girlfriend had touched her that she thought it was stress and the natural progression of a relationship to stop being passionate, so when she got home she found her girlfriend on the steps and her because packed, she felt confused. Looking back, she said she should have seen the signs, but I said “how could you? Who wants to see that coming?” she smiled and replied softly “it would have been good to prepare for the pain”.
I guess it’s very similar to a natural disaster, we hear the alarms and sirens going off, but there’s really nowhere to hide or knowing the damage it will do. We may think we’re ready, but until we see the destruction, we really won’t know.
Feelings of abandonment, anguish, shame and anger take over and recovery seems so far away and irreparable that part of our spirit is left behind forever. The number of lesbian couples affected by infidelity is unknown, again there are few investigations or studies carried out in this area; however, we know that it is something that affects us deeply and the lack of support from society and our community has a great impact on our healing or lack of it.
Most lesbian relationships will not survive infidelity as women have a harder time separating sex from emotion and will usually develop a bond with the woman they are having an affair with. Forgiveness is difficult to establish in situations like this, since the person cannot forget the affair, since the relationship may not be based solely on sexual intercourse.
The affair is then the beginning of the end of the relationship, and it finds one way out through another. We are known as serial monogamous couples, jumping from one relationship to the next with no time to heal between them. This is an unfortunate part of our community as it breeds unhealthy people and relationships. Even before we have erased the image of our previous partner with another naked woman in our heads, we are already in bed with another woman with all our baggage of pain, mistrust and vulnerability.
I feel that it is even more painful for lesbians when a relationship ends due to an affair, as we feel isolated from our communities and society, it is even more lonely when our partner, our friend, leaves. Some of us have left our families, lost friends and traded entire lives to be with one woman and staying can be ruined. We trust our lover so much that when she finishes it blinds him.
Here are some tips for dealing with infidelity:
- Early on, sit down and discuss your own personal thoughts on fidelity, and what your boundaries and rules will be as individuals in this relationship.
- Ask each other’s history, as past behaviors are a good predictor of future behavior. Yes, people can change, but repetition is a problem.
- Give yourself time to heal. Try not to jump into another relationship without answering all the questions that plague you from your past and working on a plan for your future.
- Work on rebuilding your self-esteem. Going through an affair can leave us with a skewed view of ourselves.
- Spend time with friends and family, or even go to the gym, join a club, anything to start building your social support network.
- In your new relationship, create a safe space that allows you to be vulnerable, emotionally, and sexually exposed in a loving and respectful way.
- Work on forgiveness and trust. You cannot forgive or trust, you cannot be open to letting another love you more deeply.
You will survive the pain, you will change and the choice is yours, which direction to take. You can choose to resent and be angry at the world or you can learn and discover where the healing of your past needs to happen, focus more and determine what it is that you want and you will not lose.
Alex Karydi ~ The Lesbian Guru
