Options to Save a Marriage After an Affair
There may have been a time when you firmly proclaimed that if your spouse ever cheated your marriage would be over. Things change on the other side of the affair, when you have invested years into a marriage, have a family or possibly care more about your spouse than the indiscretion. Marriages are living entities that grow and evolve, and as such can survive a betrayal. It depends on the willingness of each partner to recommit back to the marriage and rebuild broken trust.
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Seek Professional Help
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Infidelity can hit your marriage like a bomb, leaving you both clueless about how to navigate through the debris. Many times you cannot do it alone. Professional marriage therapists help you organize your healing and renegotiate the rules of your marriage. An affair demonstrates the weaknesses in a marriage, and trained professionals help you focus on how to turn this devastation into steps to rebuild a stronger union. If you are spiritually minded, your clergy can provide guidance and instruction.
Approach Healing as a Team
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It would be easy to expect the person who betrayed the marriage to do the bulk of the work repairing the damage, but marriage is a team effort. Your choice to stay in the marriage means you're willing to do what is necessary to make things work, and often this can address the weaknesses that the affair served to expose. Build the relationship from the ground up by spending time with your spouse and working to bind all the cracks in your marriage.
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Establish Priorities
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If both of you decide to move forward in the marriage, you will need to establish rules that help rebuild the trust. Your spouse should cut all ties with the person with whom he had the affair. Complete transparency may be necessary in those days immediately following the affair. Share passwords and all financial transactions, and be accountable for any time apart to demonstrate the affair really is over. Be accountable to each other, and put the relationship first.
Forgive
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Possibly the hardest step in any betrayal is mustering the courage to forgive what has been done to you. Because of this, it is also the most crucial step. Without true forgiveness it is impossible to move forward past the affair, because this will keep you both bound to a painful past event. If you have decided to save your marriage, forgiveness is the cornerstone of rebuilding the love you once shared. It shifts your position of victim to one who is strong enough to move forward.
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References
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Comments
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I am hopeful that I will be able to trust my husband again even though he had an affair. I am willing to forgive and move on...
