7 Reasons Why Being Cheated On Can Be A Good Thing

Cheating seems like such a universal experience until it happens to you. Then it feels like you're the only person in the world who understands what that hot knife of betrayal feels like in your guts. Cheating feels like the worst thing in the world when it happens to you, but there are benefits to being cheated on, too. I know, I know — it sounds crazy. But stay with me. PsychCentral looked at the studies around infidelity and found that the likelihood of getting cheated on varies anywhere from 6 to 25 percent, depending on your circumstances and which study you look at. While that’s not everyone, and while not all instances of cheating lead to breakups, it’s still a pretty big pile of broken hearts. So it’s hard to imagine that out of all this hurt and sadness can come some pretty good stuff.

And mining your heartbreak for meaning isn’t just an excuse to listen to Taylor Swift and eat your feelings. Emotional digging itself also leads to good things. A study in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that taking some time to reflect on what happened helps speed along your emotional recovery. So while it may seem at times like life is just darkness and love is not real, the truth is, getting cheated on may eventually become the best thing that ever happened to you.

How is that even humanly possible?

1. It opens your eyes

When you're in love, it's easy to see the good and ignore the bad. Once you find out your partner has been cheating on you, it makes you take a good hard look at your your relationship. The little problems that you've been ignoring or only half-ass dealing with come to light. You can use this knowledge to make positive changes in your relationship (if you decide to stay) or to acknowledge and communicate issues in future relationships.

2. It opens up new possibilities

Maybe the cheating ruined your life, or maybe it wasn't the bombshell you thought it would be. Cheating can open the door to conversations about open relationships, polyamory, swinging and other types of non-traditional partnerships that you never knew you were interested in exploring.

3. It changes you

You might temporarily feel jaded, like you'll never trust or love again, but eventually those feelings will grow into something useful. You'll trust and love again, but this time you'll go into with more wisdom and experience. You'll be that much more in touch with what you want and what you will or will not tolerate.

4. It brings you closer to others

If you have friends who've been through infidelity, you now understand them in a deeper and more profound way. Commiserating and hashing things out with good friends can turn them into besties pretty quickly.

5. It gives you a sense of gratitude

A lot of us put in some hard times in some sucky relationships and trudge through life-shattering breakups before we find our person. All that time in the pit of relationship despair makes finding the real thing that much sweeter. When you finally find the right one, you'll be in awe of how much better this relationship feels. You can only truly know the good if you also understand the bad.

6. It can make your relationship stronger

Cheating isn't always the end of things. Sometimes people make mistakes, and those mistakes bring them closer together. And sometimes it takes the threat of losing something to realize how much you want it. Plenty of couples have survived infidelity, repaired their relationship, and grown stronger than ever in the process.

7. It leads you to something better

Tap your friend tree and I guarantee you'll find someone who will say "I'm so glad so-and-so cheated on me because otherwise I wouldn't have met my true love." Sure, getting cheated on sucks. But dodging a bullet feels pretty good, too.

So if you're going through it and struggling, just remember there are good things on the horizon.

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