Yeah. Absolutely you can.
And I’d go further than that. Sometimes the cheating is actually evidence of how much you love them. Stay with me here, because I know that sounds like the most convenient bullshit a cheater ever heard, but let me explain what I mean.
When someone cheats, what’s almost always happening underneath is that they are terrified inside the primary relationship. The sexual aliveness, the ease, the feeling of being desired, the freedom from all that weight of attachment, of “am I enough, are you here for me,” all of that gets contracted and scared inside a deep love. And then someone else comes along who’s unburdened by all of that history and familiarity, and suddenly you feel alive again.
That’s not nothing. That’s not evidence that you don’t love your partner. It might actually be evidence that your primary relationship matters so much to you that it’s where all your fear lives.
I’ve seen this from the inside, not just the therapy room. My own wife and I have talked openly about the vulnerability that exists for both of us in exactly this territory.
Now. None of that is a free pass. None of it.
Because here’s what I also know, sitting with the person who got cheated on. The betrayal is not just one thing. It’s six or seven different injuries all stacked inside one. The lying. The gaslighting. The sex. The emotional intimacy with someone else. The shame of it. The reality getting pulled out from under you, having to rewrite every memory. That time you thought they were at their friend’s place. That text that didn’t quite make sense. All of it.
And the person who was cheated on has every right to never forgive. Every single right. No one, and I mean no one, gets to expect them to show up and work on this. The fact that they even sit in a therapy room after that? That’s one of the most generous things a human being can do.
So yes, you can love someone and still cheat. But loving them also means eventually you have to stop running from the terror inside yourself. The cheating, the affair, the outside relationship, a lot of the time that’s someone trying to escape the unbearable feeling of not being enough, of being a disappointment, of not being able to tolerate their own experience inside the relationship they actually care most about.
The real work, the hard work, is learning to stay in the fire of the primary relationship rather than escaping it. That’s where the real love actually gets built.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
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