Jessica Hayes, 32, never had any time for cheaters. She believed that the cheater is always the bad guy and the victim will always be better off without them. “I had always identified as someone who would never get back with someone who did that to me,” she says. “Anyone who knew me would say that it was a core part of my identity.”
Jess first met Sam in 2019 when she moved to Scotland for work. They started dating in December of that year, and, like many others, had their relationship accelerated by the pandemic. “I’d decided to go back to Essex, and because we all thought the lockdown would only last three weeks, he came with me. It ended up being three months living together.” After that they moved in together officially.
By 2021, they were ticking all the conventional boxes. “It very much looked like a successful relationship on paper: we both had good jobs with high incomes, we had our own property, we had a dog, and we had the very generic kind of life that is supposed to make us happy.”
While she said the good parts were beautiful (“We got on so well and we laughed so much”) there were problems too,. “We didn’t realise it at the time but it was actually quite toxic between the two of us.”
She describes it now as a classic push-and-pull: she’d push for more affection or more communication, and he would withdraw.
“I feel like we were constantly back and forth, not quite understanding why we didn’t feel secure – we both thought that it was the external factors that weren’t right.” So they chased more holidays, more money, buying a flat, instead of looking inward.
This all came to a head at the end of 2022. Jess had started therapy and begun taking steps to her new career as a relationship coach, and wanted them to communicate better. “I remember having a conversation where I said, ‘You have to meet me at this point now because I’m outgrowing you.'”
A month later, Sam said they needed to break-up and they separated quickly, selling to a cash buyer and moving back in with their respective parents. This was out of the blue for Jess, but she had a gut feeling that something had happened.
Three months later, he rang and told Jess that when they were still together he’d had a one-night stand with a stranger, right after she had pushed him to communicate better. That was why he then broke up with her, though he was too ashamed to admit it. He had since started therapy to understand his actions and realised that he wanted to own up to his mistakes.
She says that when he finally confessed, she felt both validated and furious.
“It was a two-part grief: both about him cheating, but also because he was so adamant that he would never do that to anybody. It made me realise that if he can do that, anyone could. It was shattering.”
From one angle, it looked like Sam was entirely to blame for their break-up. But months after his confession, she was forced her to acknowledge her own role in pushing him away.
Without fully admitting it to herself, she had had an emotional bond with a guy she used to work with and, when her partner asked about it, either ignored it or denied it. It took her months after the break-up for her to admit that before she’d got with Sam, she’d kissed and shared a bed with him, with the suggestion being they would get together.
“My partner said that he had known in his gut the entire time.”
When he told Jess about the cheating in March, she described that as a clear end to them as a couple: “It seemed like a very firm line drawn for me.” But in August, he asked for a phone call and to come see me, which she agreed to.
Jess and Sam have now been back together for three years and have a six-month-old daughter (Photo: Jessica Hayes)“He stayed at mine in Essex and I still remember being so shocked when I saw him. When we were together he’d always said he wanted to pierce his nose and shave his head and I said, ‘Oh, don’t do that, you’ll look weird.’” When he showed up in August he had done both.
She said it forced her to re-examine her own behaviour: “It was a big mirror of how I had been controlling. When we were together if I’d said, ‘I’m getting a bowl cut,’ he would have told me to do what I want, and seeing him then made me realise: ‘F**k – I kept you small.'”
That weekend, they talked about everything frankly for the first time: what he’d done and why (he said he’d got to the point where he needed to get out of the relationship because he knew something was not being talked about – a one-night stand was ‘the ultimate destruction button’), why she’d lied, what it would even look like for them to be together.
After that, they started to speak and see each other occasionally. In those conversations, she said she could see how they had both changed: “You could tell that we’d both been to therapy and were actually trying to put the work into practice in the way we were able to communicate, express our feelings and feel seen by each other. It gave me a glimmer of hope that this wasn’t all talk.”
They decided to start seeing each other again, while also starting relationship coaching. “We could see the potential of what was possible, but we weren’t naive. We knew we wouldn’t be able to get through this on our own as we would miss our blind spots.” Within three sessions, she adds, “We both realised that the shit we were experiencing actually didn’t have anything to do with the cheating. That was just the surface, the mistake that exposed everything else”.
Realising this, she says, was a significant step in helping her trust him again. “I’m never going to have that full dead-set security that I’ve always wanted – but no one can. My partner thought he’d never do that to anybody but he did.”
He said that the only reassurance he could give her was that he can now see exactly how he got to the point of acting destructively, so if he starts to feel sad or isolated, or disconnected, he can recognise those signals and they can work on them together. “I think that was more reassuring than someone saying, ‘I promise I’ll never do this again.'”
She adds that the process of doing the work to understand why they behaved the way they did, improving their communication, and giving each other space, has been incredibly hard. “There were many moments in that first year when we were in couples coaching where we thought about just walking away.” But she said that they both felt in their gut they should keep going. “We couldn’t see our futures without each other, so we put in the work.”
Reflecting on what they now call “Relationship 1.0”, Jess sees their unhappiness and even his cheating as a co-creation.
“One of the things I feel confident now in saying, as someone who was cheated on, is that society focuses only on the cheating because it’s so easy to point the finger. If he’s in the wrong, then you don’t have to look at yourself. But if I only focused on that, I would have missed the opportunities to have seen my own mistakes. It’s not that I am responsible for his decision to cheat, but I am responsible for what happened in that relationship to get it to that point.”
On a practical level, Jess and Sam also found it really useful to talk about their relationship openly, warts and all (Photo: Jessica Hayes)Alex Croxford, a relationship coach who works with women who’ve had affairs, explains that people’s reluctance to see cheating as co-created is part of why relationships don’t normally survive affairs. “I don’t believe that somebody cheats in a relationship where it’s truly happy and connected, and there hasn’t been something else going on for a long time. This will probably trigger a lot of people but it takes the other person being willing to see what part they played in a relationship that led to that point.”
But in her experience, people cling to a very binary perspective of cheating because the pain that it causes is so significant. “The abuse that I get on Instagram for talking about cheating is wild,” Alex adds. “I’ve had death threats, I’ve been told they should bring back hanging or euthanise me on TV. Because people have made the decision that if you cheat, you are bad, and that’s the end.”
But that doesn’t mean relationships can’t survive – we just don’t often hear about them. One 2024 survey by World Population Review found 36 per cent of people in the UK have cheated on their partner – and another in 2018 from the relationship charity Relate found that a third of people in long-term relationships have remained together despite one or both parties being unfaithful.
The key to survival, Alex adds, is that both parties have to be utterly transparent. “It takes a lot of work: the person who cheated has to take accountability which means not just living in shame and guilt, but really understanding what patterns under the surface led to them acting in this way. And it takes the other person being willing to see what part they have played that led to that point of betrayal”. This level of work requires letting go of the first relationship and rebuilding from scratch – if one party doesn’t want to do the work or doesn’t let go of the first version, then the relationship cannot move forward.
On a practical level, Jess and Sam also found it really useful to talk about their relationship openly, warts and all.
“When we got back together, we sat down as a couple with my friends, my mum and my sister, my dad and his family and told them. And I let Sam lead it, be asked questions and answer them. A big part of us getting back together was that I didn’t want us slot back in with our friends and family like nothing had happened.”
They wanted to not only clear the air but show other people that this kind of reconciliation, when both parties work at it, is possible. But that doesn’t mean letting go of others’ judgement has been easy.
“It’s hard to accept that people will see you as either a cheater or victim and I had to work hard to get to a point where I accepted there would be people who felt sorry for me or like I’d fallen for something. There will be people who will want to keep us stuck in what happened but there are also people who are going to see all the work we’ve put in and that it is possible to reconcile.”
They have now been back together for three years and say their relationship (that they call “relationship 2.0”) is the best it’s ever been. “We have a six-month-old daughter and we are in a completely different, completely healthy relationship. We understand each other and see each other and love each other – even the dark and ugly parts. It’s important to me to share that you can f**k up, make mistakes and then learn from it. We still have conflict and argue because we’re human beings but we know how to communicate now.”
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