A Cheater’s Assistant

The tears fall from her eyes, and you drown in them. You start to believe you can save her from a marriage she claims not to want. So you become an addict of her smile, doing whatever it takes to see her teeth. You take her on long walks, picnics under the sunset, mornings tangled up in the way she smells.

You get so suffocated in her happiness that you forget — she promised herself to someone else. You forget she used you to break that promise. And you forget that, in the end, you’ll always be the regret.

Yes, any of us can fall into this cycle: becoming a cheater’s assistant, blinded by the connection and abandoning the principle. We watch a person lose focus of the crime, and we help them steal a heart — or at least steal honesty.

We could have waited until she genuinely expressed her desire to leave. We could have been a friend until she was fully free and ready to start again. But we wanted to be the hero. We told ourselves we were the good person saving her from a flawed one. We never stopped to hear the other side of the story. We never stopped to ask how we would want her to end things with us.

Seeing only our opportunity, we became our own worst enemy.

A cheater’s assistant.

The LoveSnobs