Can you love someone and still cheat on them?

Visitor's Question from a 21-30 year old Female
Im just wondering How I know its love?

I been with my boyfriend for about a year now. But we just broke up. 8 months into the relationship he went to boot camp for 2 months. During those 2 months i was miserable, because i could never talk to him or anything, just send letters.

Well i met this new friend whom i started to like a little and he revealed his feelings to me even though i had a boyfriend. I then made the mistake and kissed him. When my boyfriend came back whom whom lives with me, I never told him of what happened. The friend though kept calling me and showing up at my house trying to see me, even though my boyfriend was there, he actually chilled with my boyfriend and we all hung out together and everything like nothing was wrong. My friend told me he had to see me and he didnt care if my boyfriend was there. He told me he wouldnt try anything since he was there or anything he just wanted to be in my company.

My boyfriend never figured out anything. He left again for school somewhere and now will be gone for 6 months. I just broke up with him recently figuring it was the best thing to do because i couldnt just keep cheating on him. I told everyone that i love him and i wanted to be with him but i just couldnt take the distance and the feelings of lonliness so i had to leave him.

everyone tells me that it isnt love then, because if it was i wouldnt have cheated on him while he was gone and still kept at it while he was here behind his back. Is this true? Do i not love him. I ask myself everyday and i just cant say that I dont.. im so confused, Please help me.

RomanceClass.com Advice
Love is about actively thinking about another person's feelings, working actively to make the relationship between you two the best it can be, being worthy of trust, communicating well, in essence 'watching their back' for them. If you are someone's boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife, you are the main person in each other's lives. You are the person they share their hopes and dreams with, through thick and thin, through better or worse.

So for you to cheat on your boyfriend, and then have the cheater in the house with him for many months, and not tell him, none of that is showing very much that you respect your boyfriend, or that you communicate with him, or that you are worthy of his trust. In essence it means you put your own desires above the concern you had for his well being. And the fact that you lied to him constantly afterwards meant that he really couldn't trust you. If you couldn't tell him that you kissed someone, what if you'd done more? He wouldn't be able to trust you about that either, you would have hidden it to protect yourself. Any time your decision comes down to "protecting me" vs "sharing with my chosen partner", you're violating the relationship.

He deserves to be with someone who is honest with him, trustworthy, loyal, who cares about him. If that couldn't be you, you should have released him back when that was the case. Instead you made him live through many more months of your 'second best' efforts. What if he started hearing people in local bars or shops or such laughing about how much of a fool he'd been made of by you? That's not fair to do to anybody.

So in any case I think you are fond of him and admire qualities in him. But if you *loved* him, you would have told him when you betrayed him, and then let HIM make the choice of what he wanted to do. By forcing him to live with deception and opening him up to a WORLD of hurt when he learns about your betrayal, you've set him up for a huge wound which could literally damage the rest of his life. When he learns about what you did and how long you did it for, it could affect how he trusts or believes in any other woman he tries to date.

I really would come clean with him and take the consequences of him yelling or being angry. It is FAR better than he hear about it from you directly and be able to deal with his emotions in private, rather than finding about it in some public place with people around looking at him, and having his life come crashing down around him.

-- from Jenn
One of Your Friendly Advisors at RomanceClass.com

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