Cheaters of All Kinds Part II

Why We Keep Falling For Them

Be honest with yourself. If a kind, stable, slightly boring person walked up to you at a party, would you notice them? Or would your eyes be glued to the loud, beautiful, magnetic one across the room?

We are drawn to these people because they are exciting. They make us feel like we won a prize. But here’s the truth they don’t want you to know.

Confidence is not the same as character. Charm is not the same as kindness.
Just because someone looks like they have it together does not mean they have a good heart.

They have a way about them that makes you feel seen. But you’re not. Not really.

Watch them when you talk. Their head nods. Their eyes wanders. They are playing with their phones in their hands. They say “Yeah” and “I know what you mean” at all the right moments. It looks like listening. It sounds like listening. But nothing you said made it in.

They are not hearing you. They are waiting for you to finish so they can get back to what actually matters. Or worse –  they are already somewhere else entirely, thinking about their next move, their next person, their next lie. You are background noise. You are a commercial break in the movie of their own life.

How to Protect Yourself

You cannot change them. I need you to really hear that.  They truly feel that they are perfect the way they are and if you don’t see that, F**k you, someone else will. You cannot love them enough, prove yourself enough, forgive them enough times to make them different. They are adults who have spent decades perfecting the art of taking and never giving back.

What do I mean by not giving back?

They take your time, your patience, your forgiveness. They take the benefit of the doubt over and over until you have none left to give. They take your stories and elaborate them, changing the entire narrative, but repeating it like their own. They take your trust and call you naive for extending it. They take your loyalty and treat it like a trap they finally escaped. They take your peace and leave you searching for who you were before you met them. And when there is nothing left for you to give? They don’t pause. They don’t reflect. They simply move on to the next person who hasn’t learned their lessons yet. That is what not giving back looks like. You pour and pour and pour into a cup with no bottom. And somehow, they still leave thinking you were the one who came up empty.

What you can do is stop giving them chances to hurt you.

You don’t owe them an explanation. You don’t have to convince them you’re right. You don’t need an airtight case with witnesses and evidence. If someone makes your life smaller and sadder, you are allowed to walk away. Full stop.

Surround yourself with people who are there for you in the best way. People who call when they say they will. People who apologize and mean it. People who don’t need to put others down to feel tall.

After You Leave

If you stay, they learn the lesson they always learn: lies are fine as long as you double down hard enough. They will get better at hiding. Better at weaving their story. Better at their secrets and deceit. Better at choosing new supply who don’t ask questions. If you leave, they tell everyone you were crazy and paranoid. They tell the story so many times they start to believe it. In their version, you left because you had issues. The lying was never the point. The lying barely gets mentioned.

And here is the part that will burn you if you let it:

They will do it again. To someone else. On another application. In another relationship. Behind another trusting face. They will not learn. They will not grow. They will not wake up at sixty or even seventy and wonder where all the honest people went.

Your Only Win

The only way to win against someone like this is to stop playing.

Not because you forgive them. Not because you understand them. Not because you hope they change, (because they never see themselves as needing to change… they are “perfect”).

You stop playing because there is no prize at the end. No confession. No remorse. No moment where they look at you and say “You were right all along.”

You stop playing because you have better things to do than argue with someone who rewrites history every time they open their mouth.

The Company You Keep

That old saying is truer than ever. You really are the company you keep. If you spend your life around people who cheat, lie, and take shortcuts, two things will happen. First, they will eventually do it to you. And second, you will start to think that’s just how the world works.

But it’s not. There are still people out there who work hard, keep their promises, and treat others like humans instead of stepping stools. They might not dazzle you at first. They don’t light up every room they walk into. But they will be there. They will show up. They won’t cheat.

And the strange thing is, eventually you stop needing the cheaters to admit what they did. Eventually, you start throwing away evidence, factsheets, or anything that relates to them. Eventually, you stop hoping for karma to hit them.

You just don’t think about them at all.

That is the real victory.

Not their apology.

Your peace.