If you've ever been cheated on in a relationship -- and I imagine a fair amount of you have -- you know what an experience like this can do to your self-esteem.

Even if you weren't emotionally invested, the question remain: Why? What's so wrong with me that you couldn't even take the time to end things before starting things with someone else?

Quit wasting your time. The answers to those questions don't lie with the person that hurt you.

Blaming yourself for a cheating lover is natural, even though it's completely ass-backward. You feel kicked in the stomach and completely unlovable and the truth is your only fault was getting involved with an untrustworthy piece of garbage.

Fool me once... but never, ever again.

When you're betrayed like this, whether you know it or not, you learned a valuable lesson. At least you better have! Trust isn't something that should be easily gained or given away. People are incredibly self-serving.

It's our nature to want what we want, when we want it. The difference between people who act on this when it comes to cheating and those who don't, is self-control, selfishness and let's face it, much of the time, a fair dose of alcohol.

There never is a good reason to sleep with someone else if you are in what you've led your partner to believe is a committed, monogamous relationship. So justify all you want cheaters, just know you're still wrong.

Unless that person has been cheating on you and you want revenge, I'm all for that. But don't fall under the impression that it will make you feel better. It will, but only for a very short while.

If you can't tell from my tone this week, I've been betrayed. Recently enough that I still wait, watchful of the signs of cheating and lying in the guys I've dated since. You know what I'm talking about; stories that don't add up, what were once phone calls are now awkward text messages and slowly, you begin to decipher this load of BS. Or at least, for your sake, I hope you do.

I've seen first-hand the devastation of cheating, both in couples that choose to ignore the elephant in the room and those that are the one and done type.

Either way, when this level of trust is violated you'd better believe lines are drawn and people end up hating each other.

I want to believe that I can again trust those I date. The guy that cheated on me wasn't worth the rollover minutes I wasted on him and once I was done crying about it, overanalyzing it and making out with his friends (told you I favored payback), I had a wake-up call and realized I could ask myself the same set of questions a million times, but I was never going to get the answers I wanted.

All I really needed to know was right in front of me. I made the mistake of trusting a loser, I learned my lesson quickly and the silver lining was he was now someone else's problem.

This time, rather than jumping head first into the deep end, I'm slowly wading in and doing my best not to instantly assume he's cheating, but it's not easy.

Let's face it -- the divorce rate isn't 50 percent because we're all being honest with one another. Temptation has always been there and will always be there and, frankly, what you do about it is your business and likely soon to be your problem. Of course I'm not completely innocent in all of this, I've made mistakes in my past, but just as I learned my lesson when I got hurt, I learned another when I realized how much I'd hurt someone I claimed to love.

I was never that big a believer in karma, but I think there are two valuable rules of thumb when it comes to life and relationships. All's fair in love and war, but never forget that what goes around comes around. If you are a cheater, don't kid yourself; the lies you so easily tell someone else can just as easily be fed right back to you.