Eight Relationships, Cheated On Six Times — Here's What I Stopped Blaming
Eight relationships. Cheated on in six of them. At some point the maths stops being about bad luck and starts being about the one thing every single one of those relationships had in common: me.
That's not me letting anyone off the hook — the people who did the wrong thing still did the wrong thing. But blaming them changed nothing about my situation. The only question worth asking was what I was doing to help create the same outcome, over and over, and what I was going to do differently going forward.
The Pattern Underneath the Pattern
Growing up, I watched my mum abandon herself for the people who mattered most, over and over. Without knowing it, that became my template. In relationship after relationship, I'd take a partner for granted early on — not neglect or mistreatment, just under-showing up — and then the moment they wanted to leave, I'd flip completely: obsessed, overbearing, insecure, abandoning my own wants and needs entirely to try to make them stay.
By the time someone's seriously considering packing their bags, that decision has usually been sitting in their head for a month or more. They've already pictured a life without you. So showing up in fix-it mode right at that point — saying all the things you'd said a hundred times before and never followed through on — carries no weight at all. I know that from both sides: I've been the one begging at the door, and I've been the one on the receiving end thinking it's too little, too late while someone tried to save something that was already over.
Loyalty That Was Actually Self-Abandonment
I was raised on the idea that you don't leave anyone behind. Good value in a lot of contexts. But it meant I never learned what my responsibility actually was versus what wasn't, and what I called loyalty was really self-abandonment — not because partners were demanding it, but because I needed to prove to myself I was doing enough.
That created a specific, ugly cycle: I'd abandon myself for someone, they'd lose respect for me because I was less of a man than the one they met, that made them feel suffocated and smothered — their autonomy disappearing because they were constantly managing my emotions — which then pushed them toward leaving or finding someone else. Rinse, repeat, eight times.
The Nine-Year Relationship That Changed Something
My longest relationship — nine years — was also the most painful ending, and it became the real catalyst. That much time, that much investment, taken away, forces a reckoning nothing shorter can. The relationship after that was the first time I'd actually started real self-development work. I still don't think I showed up fully — there was still unprocessed history in the way — but I was a genuinely different man than in anything before it.
That relationship also taught me something I hadn't expected: after a lifetime of chaos, a calm, healthy relationship was almost impossible for me to recognise as safe. I mistook the chaos of past relationships for passion, for love. When I finally had someone who just wanted to pay bills, be an upstanding person, and come home to spend time with me — no drama, no chasing, no games — I genuinely didn't know what to do with it.
The Separation That Actually Changed Everything
My most recent separation was the hardest one I've been through — not from obsession this time, but from grieving someone I still cared about while accepting we simply weren't aligned anymore. No cheating, no villain, just two people who'd grown apart. That kind of ending is brutal precisely because there's no anger to hide behind.
What came out of the other side of it was different from every separation before it. I didn't distract myself with anyone else. I didn't use substances. I stayed inside, built something, and went inward instead of outward. That period is where The Unbroken Mind actually came from — the first time in my life a breakup ended with me more solid, not less.
Becoming Someone Worth Staying For
Here's the advice I give anyone going through a breakup or worried about one: stop trying to control what the other person does. You have no power there, and trying anyway is just manipulation wearing a different outfit. The only real move is going inward — pour the energy you were spending managing them into asking hard questions about yourself instead. Not "how do I get them back," but "who do I need to become so the next person doesn't want to leave."
Attachment fear isn't really about the relationship ending. It's about what the ending confirms — that you're not worthy of being loved, that there's always someone better out there. You can only put that fear down by becoming a person who's completely solid on their own — not performatively, not for social media, but genuinely whole without anyone else in the picture. That doesn't mean you feel nothing when a relationship ends. It means you stop showing up from fear and start showing up from choice.
That's the entire foundation of what I teach now: build the version of yourself that doesn't need someone else to fill a gap, because you've already filled it. Once that's true, you stop trying to find someone to complete you and start choosing to share a life that was already whole with someone you actually want there.
Related reading: Seven Failed Relationships Later, I Finally Saw the Pattern and You've Been Saying Yes for So Long You Don't Know Who You Are Anymore