How to survive infidelity in marriage is a question that many couples never expect to have to ask. The discovery that your spouse is cheating is a serious psychological blow that can destroy your trust, weaken your self-esteem, and potentially destroy your marriage. If your spouse has cheated but you are both commited to trying to make your marriage survive the affair, repairing the emotional connection between yourselves is a key to keeping your marriage together and restoring its health.
For many marriages, surviving an affair without getting help from outside the marriage is almost impossible. Forgiving infidelity is a possible goal of counseling, but coping with infidelity is an even more crucial skill to learn if your marriage is to survive. Infidelity in marriage does not have to spell the end of the union, but it takes a lot of hard work on the both of both parties to survive infidelity.
A marriage bond can break when both spouses aren’t committed to continually working to maintain, strengthen and build their connection to one another. And if your spouse has cheated, this connection suffers a devastating rupture. Re-establishing lines of communication and working to rebuild trust are necessary if you are to repair the emotional connection between you.
Here are three rules to help you begin…
Rule 1: Observe 100% Honesty and Transparency
The first rule to implement is communication will, from this day forward, be based on 100% honesty. Create an open-door policy, meaning—you won’t keep any secrets locked away in an internal mental closet.
Have you ever had the feeling that someone you know, and this includes your spouse, wasn’t telling you the whole story about something? Or you felt that something was bothering them, but when you asked, their reply was ‘It’s nothing’? You knew there was more, and yet, this person won’t share what this more is, and so you question their secrecy and doubt their honesty.
By following a guideline of 100% honesty and transparency, neither you nor your spouse will be left in doubt. Otherwise, building trust will never be successful if you always have a question in your mind about what you are hearing (or not hearing) from each other.
Rule 2: Set Questioning Ground Rules
Following on the heels of advising you to use 100% honesty, it’s also fair to caution that honesty can have some bite to it if you’re not careful. If you ask questions that you’re not sure you want the answers to, it’s better not to ask until you’re sure you do.
Also, if honesty is being used as a bludgeon to beat the cheater with more guilt, understand this is not constructive if your long-term goal is healing. The goal is to survive infidelity and move forward, not stay caught up in a wash-and-spin cycle of emotional backlash.
It helps if you and your spouse decide on a list of what types of questions are okay, and which ones are not. Also, when answering a question and trying to employ honesty, both spouses must use common sense and good judgment and know how to answer honestly—but with diplomacy.
Rule 3: Arrange a Talk Date
When going through the after-effects of an affair, it’s a challenge to communicate on many levels. If the victim wants to bring up the topic, but the cheater happens to have had a bad day at the office, the cheater may snap at their spouse because of bad timing. This can stifle the type of communication needed that moves you forward, creating yet another marital setback.
What a couple in crisis can do is set an appointment, a time and place to meet and talk, with total focus on each other. It may seem odd at first, but if your marriage needs help, and your relationship is strained, your conversations need structure until they can feel natural again. By pre-arranging a time, both spouses can prepare themselves emotionally and psychologically, clearing their mind of other matters and giving their full focus to their partner for a block of time.
These rules will take time and patience to implement, but each one helps move your marriage forward, away from the period of infidelity and on toward a stronger, more powerful emotional connection.