I Cheated Too: The Side of Infidelity I Have Never Fully Told

This content is shared for storytelling, educational, and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for professional counseling or therapy.

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The very first story I ever told publicly about my marriage was about the year sixteen and seventeen mark, when Kalief’s infidelity nearly ended us. That story is the reason this entire platform exists. But there is a piece of the full picture I have talked around for years without ever sitting inside it directly. So let me say it plainly. I cheated too.

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The Vow I Made Long Before I Broke It

When Kalief and I first started dating, I remember telling him, if you ever cheat on me, I am out. If you ever have a baby with someone else, do not even think about me staying in this relationship. I meant every word of it at the time. And now, twenty nine years later, I sit with a strange kind of irony. Because I am still here. I am the one who said those words, and I am also the one who broke that same rule myself, and I am also the one who is still sitting across the table from this man nearly three decades later.

Is that hypocrisy? Or is it growth? I have asked myself that question more than once, and I think the honest answer is both. The nineteen year old version of me who made that vow did not have the life experience to know how complicated love and betrayal actually are. The woman I am now does. That gap between who I was and who I became is exactly why I decided to stay, and it is exactly why I am telling you this story.

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Where We Were When It Happened

I will not be sharing the timeline of when my infidelity took place, whether it was before or after Kalief’s, or any of the surrounding details. That is a boundary Kalief and I have discussed and agreed on, and I will explain more about why toward the end of this post. What I will tell you is the emotional truth of it.

Kalief and I were at a weak point in our relationship. I felt ignored. I felt unimportant to him. And instead of putting my energy into repairing what was breaking between us, someone else caught my attention at exactly the wrong moment. That is not an excuse. It is simply the truth of how it started.

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How It Actually Starts

As hard as it is to believe, your partner does not wake up one morning and decide today is the day they are going to destroy everything. That is not how most infidelity actually happens. It typically starts as a friendship. Two people talking regularly, day in and day out, getting to know each other in a way that feels harmless at first. That is exactly how it happened for me. He and I just started talking. And it led to something that it never should have.

This lines up with what infidelity researchers actually find. Most affairs do not start with physical attraction at all. They start with emotional disconnection in the primary relationship, and the affair partner is simply the person who happens to be offering attention at a moment when someone feels chronically unheard or unseen. That was exactly my story, and I think it is a lot of women’s story, even if we rarely say it out loud.

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The Shock, the Guilt, and the Part I Do Not Love Admitting

The moment it happened, I went into a state of shock. My brain was moving a thousand miles a minute, because instantly I knew what I had done was wrong. Instantly I knew that if my partner found out, my relationship was in jeopardy. And instantly I knew something about the whole situation just did not feel good to me.

I want to be honest about something else too, because I think honesty is the entire point of this post. There was an evil side to it. Part of me, in that moment, felt like I was getting back at him for how he had made me feel. But there was another side of me that felt absolutely no joy from it. None. Both of those things were true inside me at the same time, and I think that contradiction is part of what nobody explains about infidelity. It is rarely one clean feeling. It is usually several ugly ones tangled together.

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Why I Chose to Cut It Off

The situation continued for about six months before I ended it. I chose to cut it off because I could not deal with the hurt I knew I was going to cause my partner. I could not sit with what this was going to do to him and how it was truly going to make him feel. So I stopped it.

The other person was not happy about my decision. They respected it, but it was not the decision they had agreed to. After I cut it off, he did reach out a few times, framed as just checking in as friends. But I already knew there were real feelings involved, and there had already been intimacy between us. I was mature enough to understand there was nowhere that connection could honestly go, so I made the choice to cut it off permanently. Completely.

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Telling Kalief

A few years passed before I told Kalief what I had done. He was taken back. He was shocked. But the way he handled it and the way I would have handled it were completely different, and I think some of that comes down to how differently we each process pain. I am a thinker. I dissect everything, the short term, the long term, the good, the bad. Kalief takes on responsibility differently. He told me he understood why I made the choice I did, because he had not been fully attentive in the relationship, and he had not been showing up the way he should have as a man in that season.

I respect him for saying that. But I want to be clear about something, because I said it to him directly at the time. My decision to cheat has nothing to do with him. It was a poor, awful decision that I made, full stop. There was not a lot of back and forth conversation about it either. Kalief tends to keep things quiet. If I brought it up, he would engage, but he never asked me a lot of questions. It was more, okay, you told me, we will get through this, and we need to work on getting past it. The complete opposite of how I process things.

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What I Believe About Cheating, and Why I Am Not Being a Hypocrite by Saying It

I have no shame saying this. Cheating is one of the most gut wrenching, awful decisions a human being can make. It might be the sleaziest thing one partner can do to another. To me, it is also a coward’s move. Instead of walking away from a relationship that is not serving you, or doing the harder work of trying to repair what is broken, you choose betrayal instead. That is a hell of a thing to do to someone who trusts you.

I can say all of that and still refuse to be judgmental toward anyone else who has done it, because I have been on the other side. I am not being harsh or superior when I say cheating is awful. I am speaking facts about something that is awful, that should never happen, and that has happened, is happening, and will keep happening, because this is the world we live in. Naming how wrong it is does not contradict having compassion for the person who did it. Both things live in me at the same time.

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What Accountability Actually Looked Like

I took full accountability. I cut the person off completely. I stopped talking to them. I focused on being a better version of myself and on rebuilding what Kalief and I had. I do not blame my husband for what I did, even though the reason I strayed was because I felt underappreciated in our marriage at the time. It was not his fault. Infidelity is never the other partner’s fault.

Now, I have said in other posts that there are often three parties who play some role in how an affair unfolds. That is still true. But playing a role in the conditions is not the same thing as causing the betrayal itself. No matter what is happening in a relationship, cheating is still a decision one person makes, and it is one that should not be made regardless of the circumstances surrounding it.

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Why I Kept This Secret for So Long

Outside of Kalief, almost no one knew. I mentioned it briefly to my sister in law once, and we never really spoke about it again after that. It stayed a complete secret until 2021, when I started this podcast and made the choice to talk about it publicly for the first time. Before that, you probably would have thought I was the perfect angel who could do no wrong. That is exactly why looks are deceiving, and why you should never judge a book by its classy cover. I am no better than my husband, and I am no better than anyone else out there who has cheated. I made the same poor decision, and I am fully aware of that.

One thing I have noticed in this world is that women rarely talk about the infidelity they have experienced, or the infidelity they themselves have put a partner through. You hear about men cheating constantly. You have to dig a lot deeper to find women talking honestly about doing the same thing. But having an affair does not care about your gender. Wrong is wrong, no matter who commits it.

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What I Want Women to Take From This

I cheated, and it has shaped the woman I am today. It expanded how I think. It changed how I look at infidelity, because I have lived both sides of it. I am not quick to judge what another woman decides to do in her own relationship, because if you had asked me this at sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen years old, I probably would have thought about infidelity completely differently. Going through what I went through matured me in a way I still do not have all the words for.

What I want you to take from this is simple. Do not be afraid to share your story. Do not feel shame around certain situations just because they do not fit the version of yourself you want people to see. I am the voice a lot of women never get to hear. The one who says, yes, I cheated too, and there is no shame in saying that out loud. I learned. I grew. I do better now. I built an entire platform out of a story I chose to share, even though I could have taken the easier road and only exposed what Kalief did, and left my own part out of it entirely. But that would not have been fair, and it would not have been honest.

Trauma is real. Human beings are prone to error. Our judgment is not always great, and pretending otherwise creates a false version of reality. Too many of us try to perform perfection, speak like we are perfect, act like we are perfect, when none of us actually are. I built this community because it is important for people to understand that.

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What I Will Never Share, and Why

I want to be clear about one boundary before we close this out. I will not be sharing the specific timeline of when my infidelity happened, whether it came before or after anything else, or any of the surrounding traumatic details. That is Kalief’s and my secret to keep. Infidelity is the one topic we have both agreed we are comfortable discussing publicly, because we have each experienced it from both sides, as the one who was hurt and as the one who did the hurting.

This is not me being fake or selectively honest. I have already written a full post about why everything is not for social media, and this is exactly what that boundary is for. Sharing my infidelity story does not mean every detail belongs to you, down to the exact day it happened. What I want you to understand is that Kalief and I are two imperfect people who went through a traumatic season, both of us making poor decisions in our own ways, both of us figuring out how to get over the hump and rebuild what we had. That does not mean every issue in our marriage since then has been made public either. There have been other things we have had to work through. Those, too, will never make it to social media, and that is by design, not by dishonesty.

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Key Takeaways

• Women rarely talk publicly about their own infidelity, even though wrong is wrong regardless of gender. This post is one attempt to change that silence.
• Most affairs, including mine, do not start with attraction. They start with emotional disconnection and a friendship that gradually crosses a line.
• You can believe cheating is one of the most cowardly things a person can do to a partner and still refuse to judge the individual person who did it, especially once you have lived it yourself.
• Full accountability means ending the outside connection completely, owning the decision without blaming your partner, and doing the ongoing work to rebuild trust.
• You are allowed to share your story without sharing every detail. Privacy around a timeline is a boundary, not a lie.
• Being on both sides of infidelity, as the betrayed and as the one who betrayed, tends to replace judgment with a far more honest kind of compassion.

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If You Are Carrying This Same Secret

If you are a woman sitting with this exact secret right now, ashamed and certain nobody would understand, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not the only one. You are not irredeemable. And you do not have to carry it in silence forever, even if the only place you ever say it out loud is to yourself, or to a therapist, or eventually to the partner you are trying to rebuild with. Growth on the other side of a mistake this big is possible. I am living proof of it, twenty nine years and counting.

If you are working through your own version of this, whether you were the one hurt or the one who caused the hurt, When to Leave vs. Stay After Infidelity and Deciding to Stay: Filtering Out Others’ Opinions go deeper into what real rebuilding requires, and Damn If You Do, Damn If You Don’t: Permission to Trust Your Own Relationship Decision is a reminder that whatever you decide, staying or going, forgiving yourself or still working toward it, that decision belongs to you and no one else.

And if you have ever wondered how Kalief and I got to a place where we could hold all of this and still choose each other, I go deeper into that in Why I Let Myself Think Realistically About My Marriage, Even After 29 Years, where I talk about what it actually takes to keep choosing someone through every version of who they become.

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Listen to More on Sherley’s Show

This post continues a conversation you can hear more of across Sherley’s Show. There are three ways to keep listening:

• Real Talk Series, where Kalief and I sit down together and talk honestly about the realities of a nearly thirty year relationship, including the parts most couples keep behind closed doors.
• Conversations, where Sherley and Kira go deep on infidelity, heartbreak, and what it actually takes to rebuild after crisis.
• Interviews, where guest experts and everyday women share their own perspective on love, betrayal, and healing.

You can find all three formats on the Sherley’s Show podcast page. If this gave you permission to stop hiding a piece of your own story, share it with a woman who needs to hear it too.

We are rooting for you. We always are.

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Sherley’s Show is learning and growing every single day. We aim to uplift all marginalized voices both on this podcast and in real life. Please note that we are always striving to change the problematic language that society has internalized in us. Thank you for your patience as we aim to strip certain phrases from our vocabulary.

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Sherley’s Show provides an atmosphere where every woman is comfortable growing into their best self. Sherley’s Show is a no judgment podcast where we discuss how to rise strong out of all types of obstacles that come with relationships. Through personal life experiences and discussions ranging from infidelity, trust, forgiveness, sex, heartbreak, self love, therapy and more, we offer words of empowerment as you strive to build and maintain all of the relationships in your life. You may be going through something that is unique and difficult. Sharing your story gives others comfort and could also be helping someone else. Let them know they are not alone. Everyone has a story, do not let fear hold you back.

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