You’ve probably already made a snap judgment about me from the title, and I don’t blame you. Nobody thinks cheating is good, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I've done it before for two reasons.

One, it’s so far from the person I am today, that talking about it doesn’t bother me. Two, it happens a lot more than you think.

You probably know someone who’s been cheated on, or maybe you’ve been the "other" person or have cheated on someone, but don’t talk about it for obvious reasons.

I never have, and I never will try to defend what I did. I was completely in thewrong, and nothing justifies my actions.

To be clear, retribution was never my motive. I cheated because I felt unhappy in my relationship. And it’s no one else’s fault but mine for staying in it. The responsibility of leaving a bad situation always has and will fall on me.

So, just how bad was my relationship? I cried almost every day and we would break up and make up every week. Not to mention, my boyfriend had already cheated on me, but we continued to stay together.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an acquaintance of mine started talking to me. We connected, and I liked that the great conversations that we shared were never followed by exhausting arguments that were fueled by pointless things.

He started to become the perfect escape from my incredibly volatile relationship.

But as time went on, he increasingly became more flirtatious. Naïve, 18-year-old me had my suspicions, but wrote it off as him just “being a nice guy.”

He knew that I had a boyfriend, and he himself had a girlfriend. There’s just no way that someone in a relationship would flirt with me, I told myself.

I would sometimes even ask him if his girlfriend knew that he was talking to me. She knew but obviously didn’t know the details.

The rest of the story is your typical cheating narrative. Things escalated between me and the guy, his girlfriend found out and so did my boyfriend.

I felt even more guilty knowing that I made someone feel the same way that I had felt when my boyfriend had cheated on me.

I remembered the pain all too well and I still do. I remembered being afraid to close my eyes to sleep because whenever I did, all I could think about was my boyfriend with someone else.

The misery of not being able to ignore my own thoughts was unbearable.

After everything blew over, I reflected on my actions and seriously questioned my character. What I did wasn’t who I was.

That's practically the cheater motto but, I spent many sleepless nights thinking about what kind of person I was.

I realized that we all make regretful mistakes that we didn’t even know we were capable of, so judging people for their mistakes is wrong.

But I'm also someone who believes that after the first time, things are no longer a mistake, it’s a choice.

I don’t think mistakes should be indicative of someone’s character, rather it should be the recurrence of the same mistakes that should really be noted.