He cheated, I stayed – stuck in a marital cycle of betrayal and forgiveness

By Sonali Singh*

We’ve been married 18 years, and we were up against odds from day one. For starters, he is Christian and I am Hindu. In a country like ours, where marriages are confined to strict boundaries of religion, caste and even sub-castes, this itself created the most formidable barrier in our love story.

Even after we managed to convince our families that we were committed to one another for life, the personal and cultural differences between us seemed insurmountable. He hails from Mizoram, born to an IAS officer mother and a progressive family that prizes its links to government and political power. I, on the other hand, was born in a conservative Uttar Pradesh trader family with roots in Kanpur, though we later moved to Lucknow where my father set up his textile business.

Despite my patriarchal upbringing, I had a streak of rebelliousness in me, and I fought with my father to study in Delhi University while living in a girls’ hostel. Jacob* and I met in college 23 years ago – he was doing his Bachelor’s in political science, and I was doing my Bachelor’s in history. I instantly knew this was the boy for me. We have been together since then.

It was hard enough to adjust to each other’s lifestyles – our tastes in food, our spoken language, our cultural sensibilities – but there was another factor that constantly pricked at the edges of my love bubble from the very first year of marriage.

It was his penchant for flirting with other girls.

He called it harmless ‘entertainment’, something that didn’t mean anything to him. He said it did not affect his love for me, and that I was the only girl he had ever loved. All the others were just ‘fun’ distractions, nothing more.

But it bothered me no end. After we were married, I settled into a life of domesticity – Jacob got an analyst job at an international law firm with an office in Delhi, and we had our son within one year of marriage. I was content in this role. But the fear of infidelity meant that I became the quintessential jealous housewife, sniffing at her husband’s shirts while putting them into the laundry, going through his phone messages, even browsing his deleted emails.

My suspicions were not unfounded – I had once found evidence of his long chats with a beautiful older woman. Though he claimed it was just friendly banter and nothing physical – in fact, he claimed he’d never even met her in real life – for me, the conversation itself felt like a betrayal. He had written to her about his grievances against my father – it hurt me that he felt close enough to her to share this, though he’d never mentioned it to me.

When he set up a password on his phone, I confronted him. We had a massive showdown – he accused me of not trusting him, and I accused him of not being worthy of my trust.

But I finally gave in, primarily for the sake of our son and for peace in the home. I told myself to believe him. I told myself he loved me above all, and he would never leave me. I told myself his friendships with other women were just friendships. I stopped checking his phone and started working out at the gym to rebuild my sense of self-worth and to see myself as desirable again. I immersed myself in activities in our residents’ association, and kept myself busy taking my son to and from his various classes. I became the devoted wife and mother.

Then, about 10 years into our marriage, his ‘harmless’ online chats went into offline territory.

I once walked into a Café Coffee Day in our own neighbourhood and saw him there with a woman I didn’t know. He did not see me, or maybe he did and he ignored me. I cancelled my order and walked back out. When I confronted him at home, he told me she was a colleague. I was being paranoid. It was a ‘harmless’ work-related coffee chat.

All this happened around the time he and I stopped having sex. He was always tired and indifferent. He took to sleeping in our son’s room on most nights – he said he was exhausted and had dozed off while putting our son to sleep.

I worked out even harder, lifting 50 kg weights with ease, as if I could crush all my womanly desires and emotional longings under layers of sinew and muscle. I began giving fitness tips to a few friends and neighbours, which ended up becoming regular workout sessions in my living room on weekdays while our kids were at school. It felt good to earn my own income, however little it was.

And then, he went out for coffee with someone I knew – our family friend Reena* from the next apartment building, someone I trusted and counted as a close friend. Neither Jacob nor Reena told me they had met. Someone else mentioned seeing them together – I pretended I already knew.

Again, I fought with him. Again, he said I was upset over nothing – he was just giving her career advice since she was looking for a job. It was harmless. I was reading too much into it.

In the meantime, Jacob’s own career soared. He became a director in his company. We moved into a large five-bedroom apartment in a luxurious gated community in Gurgaon. I hosted elegant lunches and dinners for his corporate buddies. We went on holidays abroad and started wearing designer clothing. Everything was going great.

But a year later, I got a call from Reena. She had moved to Bangalore some time earlier. After a few stilted pleasantries, a dark silence hung between us. She said she wanted to tell me something – Jacob had visited her in Bangalore a few months earlier. He had used his position of power and pursued her, finally visiting her in person.

I couldn’t bear to listen to the rest of her story – I disconnected the call, throwing the phone on the bed with white rage, shaking in denial, screaming silently in my head.

This time, our fight lasted a month – it went the gamut from yelling to fainting to pleading to silence to more yelling to accusations to defences to justifications. Thankfully, my son was away on a school trip for the first few days. But Jacob’s mother was visiting us then – she sat in stiff silence while I ranted and raved, her neutrality only infuriating me further.

By the time my son returned, I was composed on the outside, and a tangled mess inside. Surprisingly, Jacob agreed to show me his year-long conversation with Reena. Unlike how she had described the situation, it was clear that the fire was lit on both sides. Both had shown interest and initiative: sexy gifs, saucy jokes – she’d even sent him a photo of her bare legs seated on a couch.

But when they’d finally met alone in a Bangalore restaurant, he had lost his nerve – he had realised she wasn’t the woman he imagined her to be. She had invited him home, but he didn’t go, he said. The rejection had hurt her ego – that’s why she had told me the whole story. She was vengeful and wanted to break our happy marriage, he said.

Of course, this was his side of events. I didn’t have the courage to know hers. I blocked her on WhatsApp and Facebook. For my own sanity, I had to believe that nothing more had happened after dinner. Jacob touched my feet in apology and deleted the entire conversation, blocking her number completely from his phone. It was a mistake, he said. He was not interested in her – it was just a misjudgement, a lapse of common sense. He was committed to me forever. I was the most important person in his life.

I went deeper into myself for strength – my workout now included yoga, with me stretching myself further and further as both punishment and reprieve. Men came up to me at the gym but I was never interested; I had a low opinion of the male species. I took up dancing with a vehemence, my feet thundering in the studio, leaving behind a thousand drops of sweat and fury.

I thought often about why I didn’t leave him. The answers were rational and humiliating: I didn’t leave him because of our son; because I had barely any income of my own; because I had got used to the material comforts of our life together; because of his public reputation; because we had fought to be together in the first place; because I had invested too much in his career and our marriage; because we loved each other; because I couldn’t imagine myself with anyone else.

To his credit, after that episode with Reena, Jacob changed. He began making efforts in the relationship. We went on dates. We became romantic again; desire returned and warmed our bed. He texted me ‘I love you’s from work. He spent more time with our teenage son and became a more involved father. He unlocked his phone and gave me full access.

I no longer felt the need to look at his messages. Though a part of my heart was sealed and locked forever, I trusted him once more. I believed him when he said I was the only woman he had ever loved. Things were going great.

But perhaps my jealousy was not dead, it was only dormant. Last month, triggered by a bout of PMS-induced paranoia, I checked his phone, going back into its history. He’d been flirting again – I found at least three conversations over the past five years with beautiful women he had tried to woo. Two of them didn’t take the bait; they changed the topic.

The third one was someone I knew, a former colleague of his. She seemed equally interested. There were several voice calls between them. Endearments like ‘baby’ and ‘darling’ bandied about casually.

A familiar scene now. A fight. An accusation. A defence. Just ‘harmless’ chit-chat with an old friend. Nothing serious. Accepted, it is a character flaw. Okay, it’s a deviance. Fine, it will never happen again. Promise.

Perhaps this bitter fire in my throat all the way down my heart and belly is what drinking poison feels like. If only I knew the reason for this serial betrayal, perhaps it would make sense. Perhaps if I was a philandering wife myself, or a poor housekeeper, or unattractive, or an uncaring spouse and mother – perhaps then these betrayals would feel justified.

But I’m none of the above. I am reasonably good-looking, I am fit, I am a great mom, I am a devoted and loving wife, I have never cheated, I am the woman behind a tremendously successful man. Then what is the reason?

Jacob is once again making efforts. Once again hugging me in the middle of the day, sending me carefully worded love texts. But I am mostly crabby. When he touches me, I feel a sense of hollowness. His love feels empty. I still desire only him, but this is not the man I desire.

I again ask myself, why don’t I leave him? The answer: because we have 23 years of memories together, we are best friends, we have a son together, we have a home and a social standing together. Alone, we are nothing. I’d rather have an imperfect partner than none at all.

Despite knowing this in my head, my heart burns, my throat feels sore, and my eyes hot and red as if I have swallowed poison. I will work out double time tomorrow.

The writer is a Gurgaon-based homemaker and part-time fitness instructor.

*All names changed to protect privacy. The lead image is AI-generated using Grok and is purely representative