It’s official: the infidelity gap has closed, with women now cheating on their partners at the same rate as men. But the reasons behind the transgressions are completely different.
We explore them all in marie claire series, Why Women Cheat.
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Lily* knows the pain of betrayal all too well. So, when she cheated on the man who would later become her husband, she almost saw it as a pre-emptive strike; hurting him before he had the chance to hurt her.
“I think about it more often than I’d like to admit,” Lily says.
“I wasn’t always prone to jealousy, but I can trace it back to my first serious boyfriend. He cheated on me when I was nineteen. I found out through a friend’s blurry Instagram story of him kissing someone else at a party. It was public, humiliating, and it left a mark. After that, jealousy became a habit. I’d check my partners’ phones while they slept, refresh their social media feeds late at night. It became the way I moved through relationships.”
Things changed when Lily met Harry*. They clicked immediately, began dating soon after, and Lily felt determined to work through her suspicion and doubt.
“Harry is calm, steady, generous with his affection, and he’s never given me a reason to doubt him. He is objectively out of my league and I often noticed other women looking at him, and it bothered me. A friend once joked that I was ‘punching,’ and though it was meant lightly, it really hurt. Still, he was thoughtful, reassuring, and consistent, and he had chosen me. Over time, I came to trust him — or at least trust that if something was wrong, I’d know.”
But despite Harry’s consistency, Lily began to feel a growing sense of inadequacy. She noticed that strangers complimented Harry more than her, and the imbalance festered into resentment. So, when a new colleague began paying her attention, she found it intoxicating.
“A new hire joined the office, and I noticed him right away, as did most of the other women. He was confident and charismatic, the kind of person who holds a room. He paid attention to me, and I found myself responding to it. I started taking more time getting ready for work, staying later than usual, finding reasons for us to be alone. My friends in the office all found him so attractive, and the fact that he had honed in on me made me giddy, I had never felt so desired.”
What started as harmless flirting soon crossed a line.
“We started getting dinner together and sharing Uber rides home. Before long, I was lying about where I was and who I was with. It was intoxicating and exhausting all at once. At home, life appeared perfectly normal, but at work I was carrying a secret that pressed on me more each day. I craved the tension — the charged glances across the room, the late-night texts, the way we made up meetings just to be in a room alone together. He consumed my thoughts entirely, and the sex was fevered, reckless, impossible to stop. The affair with my colleague made me feel better about myself and, strangely, more confident in my relationship with Harry.”
Eventually, Lily reached a breaking point.
“I realised that if Harry ever found out, I would lose him — and that possibility felt unbearable. My renewed confidence eventually allowed me to end things with my co-worker, and I refocused on my relationship. Harry never knew anything had happened and a year later, we got married.”
Now, three years into their marriage, Lily still thinks about what happened often.
“Sometimes the memory passes quickly, other times it lingers, and I can spiral for days,” she says. “I’ve chosen not to tell him. Instead, I focus on being fully present: planning trips, organising date nights, leaving notes for him before work and embracing how content I am. I try to be the kind of partner Harry deserves.”
The colleague Lily had the affair with has since been promoted and moved to a different department, though she still occasionally passes him in the building. He respected her decision to end things, and their interactions are now entirely professional. Still, she sometimes catches him looking at her and hates the part of herself that still craves the attention as reassurance of her desirability.
“Although I do regret the affair, I think it helped me feel more empowered and confident in myself. Maybe keeping the secret is my reminder of what I nearly lost,” she reflects. “I can’t undo it, but I can try to move on and work on becoming a better person.”
*Names have been changed
