Being dumped for someone else is a double punch: not only do you feel abandoned but also replaced. It’s a biological imperative to guard your mate – and now he or she is with someone else and you’re stuck with the harrowing, awful, alone feeling of knowing that the person you love is loving another. Being left for someone else can also bring feelings of great shame: you may feel inadequate or unable to “keep” your partner. You may feel expendable. And, whatever the characteristics of the new man or woman in your ex-partner’s life, you feel less special, less interesting, less attractive. The experience can feel like it has emotionally leveled you.
There are a number of ways you can be left for another, and while all are wrenching, some are more so than others. The following is a list of a few of the scenarios:
1. Underhandedness
Your partner was cheating for some time. He or she needed you as a safety net and hung onto the relationship until deciding it was worth it to leave. Or, maybe he or she didn’t plan to leave, but after cheating, it has come to that. Either way, in addition to feeling blindsided and betrayed, you feel used.
2. With Honesty
Your partner was up front about meeting someone new. He or she admitted to not being happy in the relationship and believes this new person will bring happiness. It’s a clean break (no one cheated), but despite your partner’s honesty, your betrayal and distrust now run deep. The fact that your now ex-partner had the opportunity to process this transition with you was likely more helpful to him or her than to you. While processing the experience can make you more aware of your anger with the outcome, your partner’s honesty can leave you feeling as if your anger is less justified. But here’s the thing: your feelings are your feelings and they don’t require justification.
3. Fighting
You can’t make it through the day without fighting. Is it your partner’s way of readying to leave the relationship? Or maybe you see fighting as a natural part of your relationship, but you think the relationship is strong enough to withstand the conflict. It’s likely a confusing mesh of feelings and experiences. Even with incessant fighting, you can still be blindsided and dismayed when your partner actually leaves for someone else. You can see the signs of decline more clearly in retrospect. But still the end is infuriating, hurts like hell and just feels wrong.
4. The “Someone Else” is Your Friend
When you’re dumped for someone you know or someone you’re close to, the experience adds another, complicated layer: that of a betrayal on top of a betrayal. You trusted your partner. You trusted your friend. Now, especially if there’s been cheating before the end of the relationship, you question who you can trust. This experience can significantly alter your comfort in the world. No matter your levels of anger with your partner and your friend, it’s an incredibly uncomfortable, bewildering, ugly scenario. You have to fight hard to earn back your ability to trust again.
5. Your Own Distance
Maybe you know your relationship has problems and maybe you even have one foot out the door. Still, when your partner beats you to the punch, it’s devastating. You wanted the relationship to end, but you also had doubts and weren’t ready for it to end. Since you were unable to control the way it ended, your feelings became even more convoluted. You may have had good reasons for not ending the relationship sooner: maybe you were scared of being alone or you just weren’t ready. You’ve been on the outside looking in at the problems in the relationship, but now you are confronted with the painful experience of being left for someone else. To confuse matters further, your partner’s distance can in turn draw you closer. It’s a see-saw effect, and like all the other scenarios, it is painful, uncomfortable, and disorganizing.
Whatever the reasons, ending your relationship because your partner is now with someone else is utterly devastating and can evoke a tremendous amount of anger, shame and self-blame. The complex doubts that accompany the betrayal can make it very difficult (but not impossible) to trust in future relationships. Add to that the horrific, sleepless nights spent envisioning your ex with another. Feelings of shame and self-blame have a way of making you feel so demeaned and unimportant – as if you’ve “failed” to hold onto your partner.
However, within all these emotionally wrenching scenarios, there may also be some positive lessons you can take away. First, being left for someone else may close the window of hope that can otherwise leave you desperately trying to reestablish connection and keep you holding on. In this specific kind of breakup there’s not as much room to reach out to your former partner to try to patch things up, and there is likely less incentive to cyber-stalk when you know there is someone else, unless you are in an extremely self-punishing space. Rather, as terribly nauseating as the whole experience is, when your partner has moved on, it can speed up the process that helps you move on.
Second, you may be able to recognize that because this is how things turned out with you and your partner, it’s better for you that your relationship is over. It makes room for you to be open to trusting again when the opportunity arises. You can harness your anger and indignation, which can be very empowering. The extremeness of the reason for the breakup can help you bring more certainty and resolve into your next relationship, and, again, help you hold onto or rediscover your capacity to trust.
And finally, after losing your partner to another, you’ve weathered one of the worst relationship-related experiences life can offer. When you come out on the other side of this experience (which you have no choice but to do – eventually), you now have in your repertoire the capacity to withstand a relationship challenge of this magnitude. Your strength has been reinforced. Having survived your worst fears can encourage a more resilient perspective in future relationships.
Do you have any advice for discovering that the guy your ex took off with showed up on the Ashley Madison hack release and she doesn’t know that? Should I tell her?
My ex was seeing an old friend for lunches and dinners without my knowledge for about two months. She and I together just over a year before this started to happen. I do believe her that it wasn’t a physical thing but emotional connection to happen. I should also point out that I knew very well that my ex never had a long-term relationship in her life (35 years old) and that just before meeting me she had juggled three men dating them. She did not meet them overlapping sexually it was one after the other and none of them knew about the other. She would meet someone knew and leave the other. I noticed that she seemed to want to change and she was in counseling so I took a chance to get into relationship with her in the hopes that we both could possibly get married because we both wanted that same thing it seemed. So in telling this I need to be honest she was honest with me about her dating past and I knew that she had dated quite a few guys in her life and never had a long-term relationship and had told me that sometimes she could just take off suddenly.
Anyway, eventually she decided to leave me for him. I did not know this was going on at all. I did not know she had left me for somebody else. Until the very last day of what would be the last time I saw her she acted like everything was just fine although the last few weeks together it wasn’t quite as usual and I had asked her if everything was OK and she said yes. She never actually broke up but I think looking back that’s because she just didn’t want to hurt me so she didn’t know how to be honest is guess – old patterns came back.
Here is where he gets really crazy and why I’m posting this.
She was actually blogging about it and somebody sent me the blog. The blog was done anonymous and she did not include anybody’s names or information so it was bizarre how anybody could actually get the blog or send it to me. She immediately thought she was being hacked. At first she thought it was his ex and so did he because she had kept this secret from me so from her perspective she didn’t think it was me initially. So she told him to take out a restraining order against his ex because this new guy she was seeing had been in a volatile relationship. So he went and filed a police report on his ex. Keep in mind my ex and this person are highly educated people with corporate jobs and my ex was not at all a volatile person or somebody who did unexpected things. When they realized it was not her ex they thought I was sending strange things to them because she was getting strange emails and both had to see her what a bad person he was and is and that he’s a cheater. She didn’t believe that into his side if you blame me for these emails. By then she learned that I knew about her blog and that’s how I found out about everything. . So in some ways I was a logical choice for these weird emails being sent to them but it wasn’t me. I could not convince them otherwise.
I was heartbroken to lose her is the truth and to find out she took off with someone else really did double punch just as your article says. I can’t even begin to tell you how I felt. And I’m gonna be honest I may even have read your blog year ago when all this happened and perhaps i may even have responded to somebody else’s relationship thing. I’m not really sure is the truth. But your website looks familiar and so I am sharing this right now.
About a few months after all this happened – and she and I had no contact at all because I’m smart enough not to reach out to this person who had hurt me bad and just let time take care of things – the Ashley Madison hack happened. And I verified that this new guy is on that database. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but that was a third punch in the gut that an Ashley Madison member was able to take my girlfriend so easily away.
I have no idea if she realizes he is on the hack release but my guess is she doesn’t or she would have put two and two together and realize that he was hacked, and she probably was too via Ashley Madison. and might then have reached out to tell me since they thought it was me.
I want to reach out and tell her I have verified that he’s on the Ashley Madison website and that the hacking came from that source. It’s just the only explanation because when this happened is just before and after the Ashley Madison thing me world news last year. .But I don’t know if I should do it. If I don’t do it she can get caught up to something that even I don’t want her to get connected to. As bad as what she did I don’t think she deserves to be caught up in the Ashley Madison website thing. She could get hacked very badly from it is my understanding of this hack and I don’t want to see that happen to her. Also I got caught up in getting blamed last year and I don’t want it to happen again she could blame me again if something starts up and she doesn’t know about this stuff. On the other hand, if I tell her it might bring up all kinds of stuff that I’m not even thinking about or could just be a bad thing even though I think it would be OK at this point since a lot of time passed with zero contact. it has been along time since any contact so I don’t think she would freak out if I contacted her to tell her this. It will upset her of course but I don’t think she will get mad at me personally or start anything bad with me because information I have is undeniable fact. I have not seen nor spoken with her in a year and the last bit of texting and email, which wasn’t much to begin with, is about eight months ago.
Would you think it’s a good idea if I reached out calmly and nicely as much as I can to tell her that he is on this act database that was released to the world?
Thank you.