I Was Cheated On and Chose to Stay - Here Is What I Learned

I found out that my partner of three years had been seeing someone else for four months when I was 26, living in Vancouver and in what I had believed was a stable and committed relationship.

The discovery was not dramatic - a message I saw on his phone during a shared moment, the specific stillness that follows a realisation before the feeling has quite caught up with the information.

What followed was several weeks of the most destabilising emotional experience I have had, and then - against most of what my friends and some of my own instincts advised - the decision to not leave immediately but to try to understand what had happened and whether there was anything in the relationship worth rebuilding.

I want to be clear that I am not prescribing this choice. For some people, in some situations, the only right answer is to leave. The decision I made was specific to my circumstances, my own needs, and what I knew about both of us.

What I also knew was that I did not want to make a decision of that magnitude from the most devastated position I had ever been in, without first understanding what had happened and why. The process of trying to rebuild something after betrayal is unlike anything else I have experienced.

It required me to hold a grief and an intention simultaneously, which is exhausting in a specific and sustained way. It required him to be honest about things he would have preferred to keep comfortable and to stay honest when the honesty produced consequences he had to absorb.

The couples therapy we undertook was the hardest conversation I have sustained over a continuous period. At the end of eight months, I left the relationship - not because the attempt had failed exactly, but because the full picture that honest conversation produced clarified that we had fundamental incompatibilities that the relationship had been managing around rather than resolving.

What I have from those eight months is something that leaving immediately would not have given me: the knowledge that I can hold something very hard without it breaking me, a much clearer understanding of what I actually need from a relationship, and the ability to look at the decision I made without regret because I made it from consideration rather than from shock.

The relationship ended. My understanding of my own capacity did not.