Cheating with a cheater (why getting even never evens it)

You found out they cheated, and then you did the same thing back.

Maybe it was one night, and you told yourself the score was finally level.

Maybe you sent the message you had been holding back for months, because why should you be the only one keeping the rules.

Maybe you both cheated, and now neither of you can win an argument, and neither of you can leave it alone.

Or maybe the person sleeping with you is cheating on somebody else, and part of you has started doing the math on what that means for you.

"Cheating with a cheater" can mean any of those, and they all end up in the same strange place.

You expected to feel even, and you feel worse.

Most advice on this picks a side. One camp says they had it coming, so stop feeling guilty. The other says two wrongs don't make a right, and leaves you holding a slogan.

Neither one tells you what to do on a Tuesday night when you are lying next to someone you no longer trust, while hiding something of your own.

Revenge isn't a settlement. It's a second debt.

Below: what cheating with a cheater really does, why it feels justified, the 3 ways couples get stuck after it, and a 14-day plan for getting clear about what you want, without adding another lie to the pile.

One thing to be straight about. This site won't help anyone hide an affair or plan a payback. If you are here to plan one, you won't find it here. If you are here because the payback already happened and it didn't work, keep reading.

Cheating with a cheater adds a second betrayal, it doesn't cancel the first

Here is the direct answer. Cheating on someone who cheated on you doesn't erase what they did, and it doesn't make what you did free.

It changes the shape of the problem in 4 specific ways:

• You lose your clean grief – You had the right to be purely hurt. Now your pain comes with a footnote, and you may stop letting yourself feel it.
• You gain a secret – You were the person who was lied to. Now you are also the person managing a lie, which means you know how convincing a normal dinner can be.
• Every fight turns into a trade – When they say "I'm sorry", the reply in your head is "so what do I owe you?" Apologies stop meaning anything, because both of you are negotiating.
• Trust fails in both directions – You now know exactly how it's done, so you can't believe them. They may find out, and then they won't believe you either.

Here is how the three common versions differ:

The third version needs one more honest line. If someone is lying to their partner so they can be with you, you are watching the skill as well as the romance.

That doesn't prove they'll do it to you.

It does mean you have seen the tool, and you know where it's kept.

Why cheating back feels so reasonable at the time

You aren't strange for wanting this.

A study led by Dylan Selterman at the University of Maryland identified eight motives for infidelity, and anger, including seeking revenge for a partner's betrayal, is one of them. The other motives include neglect, low commitment and plain situation. Retaliation made the list on its own.

Think about what betrayal takes from you.

It takes your sense of being wanted.

It takes your read on reality, because you trusted a story that was false.

It takes your power, because someone made a decision about your life without telling you.

Cheating back seems to return all three at once. Someone wants you, you are the one with the secret now, and you are finally the person making a choice.

That's why it feels good for about a day.

But the fix is aimed at the wrong target. You needed to feel wanted, and a stranger can do that for a night. You needed the truth, and another secret moves you further from it. You needed power, and this kind of power depends entirely on the person who hurt you, because the whole act is a message addressed to them.

A follow-up analysis of the same line of research, summarized in Psychology Today, reported that when people cheated out of anger, lack of love or a wish for variety, their affairs tended to last longer than affairs driven by the situation.

Read that again if you were planning on "just once".

Anger doesn't burn off when you act on it. It tends to look for more fuel.

But what if they really did deserve it?

Maybe they did deserve to feel what you felt. That is a fair thing to want, and you can say it to a therapist without flinching. The question isn't whether they deserve it. The question is who has to live inside the result, and that person is you.

The Two Ledgers: why betrayals don't cancel out

Accountants have a rule that explains this better than most relationship advice does.

In double-entry bookkeeping, you can't erase a debt by creating a different debt to another account. Both stay on the books until each one is settled on its own terms. A business that "nets out" two unrelated obligations without paying either isn't balanced. It's just hiding the problem from itself.

Call this The Two Ledgers.

Your partner has a ledger, and it holds what they did to you. You have a ledger, and it holds what you did to them.

Couples who both cheated tend to treat those as one account. "You did it, I did it, we're even, let's never talk about it again."

That feels like peace, but it's really a shared agreement never to look at the books.

The cost shows up later, in the argument about the dishes that somehow becomes an argument about 2024. It shows up when one of you is late, and the other goes cold without saying why. It shows up when neither of you can comfort the other, because comfort requires somebody to stop keeping score first.

The Two Ledgers rule is simple: each betrayal gets its own truth, its own accountability and its own repair. You don't get to pay yours with theirs, and they don't get to pay theirs with yours.

It's less satisfying than a tie, but it's the only version that actually closes.

Why this matters even if you end up leaving

You might be thinking this doesn't apply, because you are done with them anyway.

It still applies, because the pattern doesn't stay in the relationship where it started.

Kayla Knopp and colleagues at the University of Denver followed 484 adults through two romantic relationships. People who reported cheating in the first relationship were three times more likely to report it in the next one. People who knew a first partner had cheated were twice as likely to report the same from their next partner.

That is a raised risk, and only a raised risk. It says nothing certain about you, and plenty of people in that study did not repeat. If you want the longer version of what those numbers do and don't mean, we broke down what makes someone a serial cheater.

Here is why the number still matters. If you never look at why you crossed the line, or why you picked someone who crossed it, the old pattern comes along to the next relationship without you noticing.

Cheating back can feel like a one-off, like an exception written just for this person.

Most people's first time feels like an exception.

The honest question to ask is whether this was a reaction or the start of a new rule for how you handle pain. If you can't tell what has really changed between you two, the assessment is a good place to get that on paper.

There are 3 ways couples get stuck after both people cheat

If you are still in it together, you may recognize yourself in one or two of these.

The Scorekeepers – Every conversation turns into a comparison. Whose affair lasted longer, who lied more, who started it. Nobody ever says "I hurt you" without a "but" after it, so nobody ever feels heard.

The Amnesty Couple – You agreed to call it even and move on. There are no fights now, and no real intimacy either. You are polite, and the distance grows, because nobody is allowed to mention the two things that happened.

The Roommates in a Cold War – You stay for the kids, the lease or the fear of starting again. Each of you is privately waiting for the other to leave first, so you can be the one who was left. Sometimes, one of you is quietly still in contact with someone else.

There is a fourth way, and it's harder. Each person looks at their own ledger before they look at the other's.

That doesn't guarantee you'll stay together. It does mean that whichever way this goes, you will know the truth about why.

How to spend the next 14 days getting clear

So what do you actually do with all this?

Run The 14-Day Two Ledgers Plan. You don't have to decide the future of your relationship in 14 days. You only need to stop making things worse and find out what you want.

Days 1 to 3: stop adding entries

End the contact with the other person. Do it clearly, once. If you are not sure how, here is how to end an affair without leaving the door open.

Do not start anything new as a statement, and do not send a message designed to make your partner jealous. Either one is a new entry in the ledger.

Days 4 to 6: write your own ledger first

Take a page and write down only what you did, with dates. No "because". No mention of what they did.

Then take a second page and write what you are angry about, in as much detail as you want. Keep them apart.

This is the whole method in miniature. Your pain is real, and your choice is yours, and they sit on different pages.

Days 7 to 8: find out what you are carrying

If you have spent months in suspicion, your read on the relationship may be foggy. Take the relationship assessment to turn the vague feeling into a clearer picture of what has changed across behavior, communication and connection. It won't prove anything about anyone. It will show you what you are actually noticing.

If your mind won't stop replaying what happened, this guide on how to stop overthinking after being cheated on is worth reading next.

Days 9 to 11: book a professional before you confess

If your cheating is still a secret, the question of what to tell, and when, deserves more than a late-night impulse.

Talk to a therapist on your own first. Confession can be an act of honesty, and it can also be a way of handing someone your guilt or winning a fight. A good therapist will help you tell the difference.

Days 12 to 14: have one conversation about the books

Pick a calm hour, and stay off the subject of who was worse.

"I don't want to keep score anymore. I hurt you, and you hurt me, and I don't think those cancel. I want to deal with mine properly. Can we talk to someone together?"

Then stop talking and listen.

If you get a real answer, the work can start. If you get mockery, more lies or silence, that's information too.

If this conversation feels unsafe, skip it. If your partner has threatened you, controls your phone or money, or you are afraid of how they'd react, your safety comes before honesty. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

How to make up for cheating when the other person cheated too

You will want a shortcut here, and there isn't one.

Making up for cheating is slow and boring work, and that's why it's convincing. You end the contact. You answer the questions truthfully, including the ones that make you look bad. You stop asking for credit. You let their anger arrive on its own schedule, even when you have anger of your own.

Then, separately, they do the same for you. If only one of you is doing this, it's not repair. It's one person carrying the whole thing, and our guide on how to rebuild trust in a relationship goes further into what the real thing looks like.

There's some real hope here. David Atkins and colleagues compared 145 couples dealing with infidelity to 385 other couples in therapy. The infidelity couples started out more distressed, but they kept improving through therapy, and at follow-up they could not be statistically distinguished from the others. Studies aimed specifically at couples where both people cheated are hard to find, so read that as encouraging, not as a promise.

Couples therapy is a strong next step if you both want to try. If your partner won't go, go alone. The work on your own ledger doesn't need their permission.

You were never trying to get even

Look underneath the revenge, and you will rarely find a wish to hurt someone.

You will find a wish for the hurt to matter. You wanted them to understand what it did to you. You wanted proof that you still count.

Cheating can't give you that, because it only sends the pain somewhere else.

The score was never the thing you lost. You lost the sense that you could rest in someone, and you won't get that back by making sure that nobody can rest.

Close your own ledger first, and you'll see what's left worth keeping.

Sources

• Why do people cheat? UMD research identifies 8 motivating factors, University of Maryland
• The 8 reasons why people cheat, Psychology Today
• Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater? Serial Infidelity Across Subsequent Relationships, Knopp and colleagues, PMC
• Outcomes of couples with infidelity in a community-based sample of couple therapy (Atkins et al., Journal of Family Psychology), PubMed
• National Domestic Violence Hotline