Jessica Hayes, 32, never had any time for cheaters. She believed that the cheater is always the bad guy and the victim will always be better off without them. “I had always identified as someone who would never get back with someone who did that to me,” she says. “Anyone who knew me would say that it was a core part of my identity.”
Jess first met Sam in 2019 when she moved to Scotland for work. They started dating in December of that year, and, like many others, had their relationship accelerated by the pandemic. “I’d decided to go back to Essex, and because we all thought the lockdown would only last three weeks, he came with me. It ended up being three months living together.” After that they moved in together officially.
By 2021, they were ticking all the conventional boxes. “It very much looked like a successful relationship on paper: we both had good jobs with high incomes, we had our own property, we had a dog, and we had the very generic kind of life that is supposed to make us happy.”
While she said the good parts were beautiful (“We got on so well and we laughed so much”) there were problems too,. “We didn’t realise it at the time but it was actually quite toxic between the two of us.”
