"You always get better advice from the con man than the dupe."

Well, I have a confession. I'm the con man.

Con woman, actually. A lying, cheating con woman.

I know I'm not meant to confess to being a cheater in my past. Many people think I should keep this a secret, pretending this side of my life didn't happen.

Whilst I understand this mentality, I'm not ashamed of what I did—another confession people don't want me to say.

But I decided a long time ago not to indulge in regrets.

Though I can't undo what I did in my former dating life, I can use the thing I'm not meant to talk about to help other people understand what the cheating conman does.

This is the cheater's playbook, as told by a cheater.

Volume

Cheating is like committing a crime. Once you've done it, you're stuck with the label. The problem with the 'cheater' label is that you can cheat once or a thousand times and incur the same label.

There are a few innocent people who genuinely have cheated just once and have no intention of doing it again. People make mistakes. These people aren't the fundamental cheaters those in relationships must worry about.

I would worry more about the people who did what I did. Volume. Repetition.

I've cheated on multiple partners. I've cheated numerous times on one partner as well. With my ex, who I dated on and off for six years, I don't think there was a year that went past I didn't cheat on him with somebody.

With that relationship, I had a secret affair with another man that lasted for nearly two years. I also cheated on the man that I was having an affair with. Triple cheating, if you will.

I'm not trying to brag at all. I'm trying to be honest by telling you the extent of my cheating.

It was multifaceted and complicated in many ways, yet so simple in others. But I know the volume at which I cheated makes me a confirmed cheater.

Revealing the extent to which I've cheated gives you a little insight into the pace and the extremes of infidelity.

I know most people will downplay the volume to which they have cheated. That's all in fear of looking like a bad person. In reality, most are capable of cheating at the level of which I did.

They're also capable of doing far worse things than I could imagine.

The first time

To me, there is a fine line between cheating and not cheating.

My fine line usually came at the start of a relationship. It was when I started seeing somebody, but we weren't official. Until the person asked me to be in a relationship or we discussed being monogamous, I didn't assume we were exclusive.

Assumption within relationships is the mother of all stuff ups.

Best not to have them.

Not everyone agrees with my actions, claiming I was cheating during my fine line time.

When I first started dating my ex Anthony, we started by hooking up during drunk nightouts. We were very casual about our rare daytime exploits, agreeing not to discuss what was happening with other people. We didn't know what our relationship was.

Best not to include other people's opinions.

With this in mind, I slept with a friend during these early days. I also kissed a guy on a night out. I also began a flirtatious relationship with a man I liked at university.

In many ways, I was hedging my bets. I was eighteen and wasn't sure whether Anthony was serious about me. If there were someone else I was interested in, I would pursue that.

But I know once Anthony and I made a relationship official, he would have considered what I did as cheating.

I know this because I overheard his conversation about this topic with someone else. He said he was a one-woman-at-a-time kind of man. And if he were seeing someone else at the same time, even at the start, that would be cheating.

Technically, this was my first time cheating, but I wouldn't consider it a relationship crime. Fine line.

A couple of months into dating Anthony, I made my first slip.

I went to a friend's house to pick up a piece of jewellery I had left behind. Well, calling him a friend is a stretch.

He was a man I met at a nightclub and spent the night with. It was one of those beautiful one-night affairs where he held me all night like we were in love.

But like a fool, I left something behind, an expensive bracelet I wanted back.

When I was rekindled with this man, it was impossible not to recreate what happened between us. It was also impossible not to escape that situation without resisting temptation.

I was like a kid in a candy store.

Getting away with it

Here's the thing about my cheating behaviours. There's only one time I ever got busted. I shudder to think how many times I should or could have been busted, though.

The only time I got caught was when I had way too much to drink and let everyone at a work Christmas party know I was sleeping with a man who wasn't Anthony. Everyone knew Anthony; I had insisted on bringing him to every work event but this one.

My colleagues knew I wasn't a single girl, and when they saw me in the arms of another man, the rumour mill was sent into overdrive.

I don't know if people called him that night to ask if we had broken up or whether they left me to do the dirty work. Anthony didn't tell me either way. But considering there were witnesses to my crime, I confessed to Anthony. And we broke up.

Getting caught cheating on Anthony didn't bother me. Without going into the complexities of our relationship, I was miserable. And I wanted someone else, the man I was caught kissing at the Christmas party.

I didn't care if Anthony found out. That demonstrates the miserable mindset I was in.

But from that day, I had all eyes on me when I was in a relationship and when I was single. People were either waiting for me to cheat or to interfere in someone else's relationship as the other woman.

This is the stigma that follows you around when you're a cheater. I'm not mentioning it for sympathy because even I'm not sympathetic to myself.

But once I knew this, when I next cheated on a boyfriend, I was like a ninja. I had all of my bases covered with lies and excuses.

I was discerning about where the affairs were happening and who could possibly see me do it. I was very rarely under the influence of alcohol. I kept records of what was happening and who it was with to manage my narrative.

It makes my cheating sound incredibly calculated. Whilst in many ways it was, a lot of it wasn't. It's like switching into cheat mode. You know exactly what to do. You know exactly what to say. You know what not to say. You're aware of who's around.

Like driving a car, skills are transferable between vehicles.

I hate for it to sound this cold, but it's the reality of a serial cheater. Once you learn, you know how to keep repeating.

I'm not a cheater who grew sloppy. Romance novels and Hollywood storylines perpetuate the idea cheaters get sloppy. As they get away with it, they push to see what they can get away with.

The storyline doesn't make sense because it goes against what we know about practising a task. The more you practice, generally, the better you get at it. For me, the more I cheated, the better I got it.

If you ask me to do it now, I think I would suck at it. It's been way too long.

How

You might be interested in some of the nitty-gritty of how I cheated. Some of it was glamorous. Some of it was the stuff of fairytales. Other times, it was crude and unpleasant.

The easiest place to have an affair with someone is are there in a hotel or at someone's house.

The hotel is accessible because you can book a room and arrive when it suits you, and you're around virtual strangers who don't care what you're up to. The only issue with hotels is the cost involved with them and putting your name and credit card details to your sins.

Once, when I used a hotel, I asked the man to put it on his card because he was single, and I wasn't. It didn't matter if he had the records on his card. He arrived before I did and checked us in, allowing me to slip into the hotel lift without speaking to a single person.

Staying overnight at the hotel wasn't an issue because my boyfriend was overseas then. He didn't know if I was at home, at someone else's house, or a hotel.

How would you get away with it now? We have tracking on phones and house cameras, and social media everywhere baffles the form of a cheater in me.

It would be too easy to get caught spending the night at a hotel.

Going to someone's house was only feasible if anyone else who lived there was guaranteed not to show up. This usually involved checking if the person were where they said they would be.

The man I had a two-year affair with was living with his girlfriend, and before I arrived, he would call her work phone and check she was in the office. Before I thought about leaving his house, he would call her again and double check she wasn't on her way home to bust us.

I've cheated in the back of someone's car, or at a park, or some random location you wouldn't even think possible to be intimate at.

The one rule I had for these affairs was never involving a third person. It was hard enough to find a location where people didn't know you or you weren't likely to get busted. But a third person helping you manage the affair would be putting your trust in too many people.

Sometimes, I didn't even trust the person I was having an affair with to keep their mouth shut.

Remorse

While talking about things I'm not meant to say out loud, I didn't experience a lot of remorse. It wasn't that the people I cheated on deserved my behaviour.

But I knew it was young and dumb behaviour. I began at eighteen and finished at twenty-four.

I wasn't married.

I didn't have children.

And I wasn't ruining marriages with children.

I was living my life and doing what I wanted to while still young enough to do it. It's hard to feel awful about having fun with people and finding out what you want.

I feel some remorse about the way I went about having fun. This remorse has been enough for me to stop cheating and not want to do it again.

Now, I know you don't have to experience life by hurting other people along the way. Again, that's a very immature way of living your life.

I'm not going to pretend that the men that I cheated on were saints. They weren't men who made me feel adored and loved. They weren't physically abusive, but in the ways that they treated me, they were emotionally deceiving me.

They always made me feel like I was lucky to be with them. It's hard to feel sympathetic when they treat someone with disrespect and expect respect in return.

I didn't expect engagement rings from these men. But I did expect to be treated like an equal. I thought I deserved respect. And when they didn't show me this respect behind their back, I didn't show them respect either.

I will stress this is not the case for every person who gets cheated on. I don't think ninety per cent of the people who get cheated on deserve what happened to them.

But I reserve some doubt for those unsure why karma isn't kind to them.

In life, you reap what you sow.

Why

I'm not telling this part of my story hoping to gain sympathy. But it's incredible what traumatic experiences and heartbreak can do to a person and the way they approach life.

When my first boyfriend, who I love and adored with every fibre of my being, cheated on me, I was destroyed.

My life imploded as I discovered how long he had been lying to me and how many people knew about his deception.

I was young and foolishly bought into the idea that I could spend the rest of my life with him. I now know that's completely irrational and immature, but at the time, I believed it.

I made a secret pledge as the dust settled on our break-up.

I promised myself I would never be put into a situation where a man could break my heart, or where I was out of control in my own relationship.

It's why I vowed to be the bad guy in relationships. I promised myself to be the one who broke off the relationship first. I vowed never to let a man cheat on me.

Being the bad guy seemed better than being the dupe.

I took this mantra of being the bad guy too far. I always felt like a man was about to hurt me, and in my secret way, I made sure that I could get there first.

These men didn't know this was what I was doing. Yet, somewhere in my secret heart, I could inflict the pain on my terms. I had control somewhere in my life.

It's an immature way of looking at relationships that I don't hold to this day. But almost every cheater has some reason for doing what they do.

Some people will claim there is no reason for their infidelity. Whilst they can maintain their stance, from my experience, it's never so straightforward.

Ascertaining why someone has cheated is an impossible task. There is no way I would have divulged this to any of my partners. I would've rather lied and kept looking like the bad guy than expose my trauma.

I'm confident my duped exes would believe my "sob story". They would assume I was trying to justify my actions by playing the victim.

Even though that's not the case, I understand the optics of the situation, and being honest would never have gone down well for anybody.

Dealing

I don't want to be dismissive if you're dealing with a cheater. But sometimes, only a cheater can outplay a cheater.

If you don't have a cheating bone in your body and you can't understand being in the position to be unfaithful, you're never going to know what they're going to do next.

It's an entirely different mindset from anything else. In a lot of ways, it doesn't make sense. As I've written this piece, so much of it baffles me, and it's my behaviour.

I couldn't expect someone who's never been in a position to understand what it's like and appreciate why it's happening.

All I know from my experience is you don't have to put up with a cheater. Suppose one of my exes caught me and dumped me straight away, fair enough. I would've expected nothing less.

You don't have to respect the cheater's playbook, either. But as hard as it is to hear, you're better off knowing what life is like on the other side.

I'm here to use my wins and losses in life, business and relationships as your cautionary tale | Come on the ride https://linktr.ee/ellenjellymcrae