“She kissed me, I just kissed her back.”
I just recently got cheated on, and this is what my boyfriend said to me as he broke up with me.
OVER THE PHONE mind you…
(Like, could it get any worse than that?)
A part of me wants to give him credit for telling me the truth and admitting that even though he claimed he had a girlfriend to this other girl on the dance floor, “she kissed him anyway.”
As time passed, it settled in more…
A girl is not just walking up to him and kissing him.
What else was involved? How much were YOU dancing with HER? And above all else, WHY are you blaming the girl and the girl only?
So it posed the question:
Why is cheating always the woman’s fault?
When I first found out and began telling my friends, I was looking for some mutual frustration. Their responses baffled me:
“Oh you know, boys will be boys.”
“Well, everyone makes mistakes.”
“Nobody is perfect.”
I’m sorry, but why have we deemed this action as excusable? When we start giving the man reasons to excuse his actions, it becomes even easier to deem their decisions as permissible, and look to other sources for why they did this, such as simply blaming the “other woman”.
So much of society today reinforces this idea of “The Evil Mistress Trope.” There is a lack of responsibility placed on the man, but it is automatically assumed that the woman is “seducing” in some capacity. That we are just these “angelic and enticing entities” that men are hypnotized by, as if men have no control over their own actions.
So of COURSE it can’t be a man’s fault if women just ooze these qualities !
Ugh, please.
Along with that, Why is it that men are almost praised for “getting bitches”, yet women are just called sluts if they do the same thing?
Don’t get me wrong, I in no way support cheating, but I feel that everyone needs to be held at the same standard.
Along those lines:
Let’s normalize getting angry!
Even when your significant other does admit their wrong doing, it is okay to be mad about it!
I am not suggesting to pull a Carrie Underwood and slash some tires, or smash some headlights, but she’s got the right idea about one thing: we have the right to be angry without being deemed crazy.
I personally struggled with this feeling of wanting to feel some sympathy until my ex texted me and responded to my respectfully curated breakup text with:
“I appreciate how you handled something so difficult.”
What in the negative accountability is that??
This leads me to my last point of, you probably guessed it…
Accountability!
It is important to recognize these situations and encourage people to be accountable for their mistakes.
How can we do this on an individual level?
I think the first step is helping people realize that accountability has to be taken. Even if it is as simple as hearing a classmate bragging to his friend how he was drunk and a girl was just “calling him over with her outfit”, but he got away with kissing her without his girlfriend finding out.
What’s stopping you from turning around and telling him,
“Hey, I hope you know that this is not okay, and your girlfriend has the right to know that you made a mistake.”
Or even if a girlfriend is telling you how her boyfriend cheated and you hear someone else say, “Well, you know he is just immature, and screw that girl”.
Absolutely not.
As a society, we need to stop blaming cheating solely on women.
Because apparently, with how things are going, a girl breathing across the room at a party is enough of an excuse for why your boyfriend cheated.
Its time to stop asking,
“Well, what did she do to make him cheat?”
And start asking why we are so determined to make her responsible for his choices.