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Infidelity: Mending your marriage after an affair
Marital recovery
Recovering from an affair is a difficult and ongoing process. But it's possible to survive an affair. Marriage counseling can help you put the affair into perspective, explore underlying marital problems, learn how to rebuild and strengthen your relationship, and avoid divorce — if that's the mutual goal.
Understanding why an affair happened is crucial to recovering your marriage. Affairs can happen in happy relationships as well as troubled ones. The reasons vary:
- The involved partner not getting enough from the marriage relationship or, conversely, not contributing enough to it
- Low self-esteem
- An addiction to sex, love or romance
- Fear of intimacy
- Immaturity
- A life transition, such as the birth of a child or an empty nest
- Acting on impulse while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs
- Retaliation
- A means of ending an unhappy marriage
Moving on: Steps to help recover your marriage
Although every relationship is different, often these steps are necessary to help mend a broken marriage:
- End the affair. First, the affair must end. This includes any and all interaction and communication with the lover. True reinvestment in your marriage can't happen without this.
- Be accountable. If you've had an affair, take responsibility for your actions. If you were cheated on, consider the role you may have played in your spouse's unhappiness and reasons for straying.
- Determine your shared goal. Be sure you both agree that you want to mend your marriage — but don't make this decision in the heat of powerful emotions. It may take some time to sort out what's happened and to see if your relationship can heal. If you both arrive at the goal of reconciliation, it's important to realize that recovering the marriage will take time, energy and commitment.
- See a marriage counselor. Find a marriage counselor who will help you restore your marriage if that is the mutual goal. Seek help from a licensed counselor who's trained in marital therapy and experienced in dealing with infidelity. Avoid therapists who see an affair as the end of marriage.
- Identify the issues. Infidelity often points to underlying problems in your marriage. Examine your relationship to understand what has contributed to the affair, and what you need to do to prevent it from happening again.
- Restore the trust. Make a serious commitment to rebuilding your marriage. Go to counseling together to help visibly confirm the commitment and to prevent secrecy from continuing to erode your relationship.
- Talk about it. Once the initial shock is over, discuss what happened openly and honestly — no matter how difficult talking or hearing about this may be. Know that you might need the help of a marital therapist to be able to talk constructively about it.
- Give it time. If you were the one cheated on, you can set the timetable for recovery. Often the person who's been unfaithful is anxious to "put all of this behind us" to help cope with his or her guilt. Allow each other enough time to understand and heal.
- Forgive. For many people, this is the hardest part of recovering from an affair. Forgiveness isn't likely to come quickly or easily — it may be a lifelong process. Talk to a counselor or spiritual advisor about what forgiveness really means. Don't use forgiveness to cover uncomfortable issues that you think are too hard to face. If you're committed to your partner and your marriage, forgiveness tends to become easier over time.
- Recommit to your future. What you're going through is emotionally devastating. But times like this can make people and marriages stronger than ever before.
The end — or not
Not every marriage touched by infidelity can or should be saved. Sometimes too much damage has been done, or both partners aren't committed. Painful as it is, it's important to acknowledge when this is the case. But if both of you are committed to rebuilding your relationship and you have the strength and determination for the task, the rewards can be great — a partnership that grows in depth, honesty and intimacy.
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