Leah Reich was one of the first internet advice columnists. Her column “Ask Leah” ran on IGN, where she gave advice to gamers for two and a half years. During the day, Leah is Slack’s user researcher, but her views here do not represent her employer. How to be Human runs every other Sunday. You can write to her at askleah@theverge.com and read more How to be Human here.
Leah,
Not sure if this is still a good way to reach you, but I need some help.
Backstory: I’m a 10-year combat veteran with PTSD. I’ve lost a marriage, friends, and now my girlfriend of four years.
We’ve been on-again, off-again for the past two years. Every time it was her decision to break up, and every time I accepted her back. During a few of the breaks I started seeing other women because I wanted the attention. I broke them off immediately and tried to make things work with her.
The last time was another big break, and when we were together, I found some disturbing text messages to a cousin of hers stating, “I wish I was with his fine ass” (referring to a guy she spent time with between each of our breakups this year). Finding those messages made me feel really insecure, and I reached out to a girl who was completely into me, the one I left to make things work out with my ex again. Time had passed and I again was feeling lonely in the relationship, so I cheated on my girlfriend. Fast forward. The girl I cheated on her with told her everything. My girlfriend was devastated, disgusted, hurt, sad, and broken.
At first she found comfort in me, and we slept together twice after the breakup. I had a feeling of hope, that we could work things out. Then a switch flipped — she completely hated me and since then has wanted nothing to do with me.
I’ve tried reaching out to her, just to feel her out, but she keeps it short and cold. I don’t know what to do! I want her back, I helped her raise her daughter for the last four years, and I miss her just as much! It’s killing me. I deserve everything that’s coming to me, but I want to know if there’s something I can do to salvage my mistake and get her back in my life. Please help! Thank you!
What A Mess
Hey WHAM,
Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten a bunch of letters about cheating. Not that cheating is an unusual issue for an advice column, and I’ve gotten letters about them before, but it seemed like there were more of those sorts of letters coming in than normal, at least from people who had cheated rather than those who had been cheated on. Anyway, I bring this up because it reminds me how complicated humans are, and at the same time, how very simple.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about cheating over the years. I’ve talked to a lot of people about cheating — why they did it, why they do it, why they wanted to do it, why they forgave someone who cheated, why they didn’t. I’m going to paint with some very broad brush strokes here and say that people’s reasons for cheating tend to fall into roughly one or more of the following categories:
- Humans make dumb choices, rather a lot;
- Humans sometimes use a crutch or a wakeup call to get out of a situation, even though it would be better if they would figure things out without one;
- Humans have a hard time being honest with themselves and with others, which is why they think that crutch is necessary, even though in retrospect they realize it would have been easier to do something different, like talk about what they need or simply leave;
- Humans are often ruled by their dumb lizard brains because we are basically animals with credit cards and anxiety medication;
- Humans are capable of extraordinary selfishness and less good at remembering how that selfishness will impact someone else; and
- Humans like to think they’re the one who’ll get away with it.
I invite the writers of the other letters to think about which of these categories they fall into. You, WHAM, get to hear it from me: You’ve hit all of the categories. Bingo!