Your cheating heart

The worst thing about cheating is that someone always gets hurt, especially if love is involved!

If there is one great truth in life that you need to accept, it is this: people cheat!

Cheating starts early on in life, when you pretend to have tidied your room to dodge your parents’ wrath. Then you begin cheating in school, sitting next to the brightest child in your class and peeking into their exam paper. You cheat when you scribble your mother’s signature on your abysmal report card. And later, cheating takes different forms: you cheat on your diet all the time, you cheat when you don’t give your work your all.

So am I speaking from experience? Of course — I’m guilty of all the above! The idea, of course, is that as long as you don’t become a major cheater, embezzling millions of dollars from your country and company or stealing your best friend’s husband… you’re forgiven!

Unfortunately, I have had quite a bit of experience with dealing with extraordinarily daring cheaters, and know all the forms this particularly destructive sport can take.

First, you have your one-time cheaters, people who actually fall in love with ‘the other woman/man’ and can’t help themselves. These poor souls usually get caught. Then there are cheaters who are so slick they never get caught and have the game down to a tee.

The worst thing about cheating is that someone always gets hurt. The pain is especially excruciating if you, the victim, are madly in love with your spouse and think you are living in a fairy tale until you discover it was all a farce! Your life really does come crashing down and when you finally recover, you are more upset at your own foolishness than at your partner’s infidelity.

That’s how it was for me. I was young, deeply in love, and ended up badly shaken and broken. I couldn’t eat or sleep. The first cut is truly the deepest. The second time someone cheated on me, the affair came as a relief. The marriage was at its end and the affair was like a godsend that ended a false and pretentious relationship. I even caught the fella red-handed. He had convinced me to take a road trip and much to his dismay I arrived a day early, ready to catch him at it as my suspicions were fully aroused at that point. And catch him I did — no, I didn’t find them in bed together, but he was getting ready to go out and meet her and, when I confronted him, he admitted it. Suddenly, the receipt I had found for two Billy Joel concert tickets made sense.

My mother says that one should always keep things in perspective, she tells me that cheating destroys not one but two families. I saw her point when my husband’s lady friend’s spouse called me to say: “Your husband is having an affair with my wife.” But to me, all this talk of ‘broken homes’ is old fashioned. As far as I’m concerned, if either partner finds that he or she feels the urge to cheat, the relationship obviously has issues and the home has already been broken. I know a lot of you won’t agree with this and I may well be wrong, but let’s also accept that we often live in denial.  But anyway — let’s move on to other types of cheating.

I can’t not mention the whole other world of cheating that people rarely talk about: cheating yourself. When you choose to pursue a career you aren’t passionate about, which in most cases is what your parents want you to do or your spouse thinks is appropriate, you are cheating yourself.

Similarly, the wife who knows her husband is cheating on her and continues to live with it is cheating her own happiness. I too cheated my dignity and self-respect while I was in an abusive relationship. You’d think one philandering husband would be enough, but two? Yes, I could practically write a book about my experiences with cheaters. You may find yourself wondering ‘what kind of loser marries twice only to have both guys cheat on her?’ Trust me, I asked myself this question many times. After the second time I did seek professional help. I wanted a crash course on ‘how not to marry a loser’.

Since, we are on the subject, let’s also discuss what people say to cover up cheating.  “I’m working late,” is a perfect first excuse, which is often followed up with “darling, I have to extend my business trip a little because there is just so much to do.” As time goes on the excuses become more far-fetched and less believable: “that message wasn’t meant for me, somebody must have sent it to the wrong number.” Or how about “oh, that woman was a colleague, we were having a working lunch!” This is when you start going through your partner’s phone messages, hack into their personal email, hire a detective and begin spying on them.

Of course, extramarital affairs may not seem like a big deal to a lot of Pakistanis because, let’s face it, so many of our celebrities and politicians play the cheating game quite successfully.  I mean, most of the boys on our cricket team are cheaters! Is there anything worse than cheating on your country? I’m just glad that we can still boast of a few (yes, you can count them on one hand) upstanding, talented individuals who don’t cheat themselves or their fans. Aisam ul Haq is one such young man. Like the old Imran Khan, Aisam is the epitome of good. He befriended the Indians and the Israelis and made statements for peace and harmony at the US Open and continues to strive to do good for the country.

So why do people cheat anyway? Is it love? Is it sex? Is it romance? Is it the thrill of getting away with it? And what about our politicians, what kind of cheating do they get up to? We’ll talk about all that soon — but not today.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, January 23^rd, 2011.