How To Keep The Cheating Out Of Your Marriage

A relationship can only withstand so much pain, hurt, anxiety and anger. But it can also grow stronger than ever before if the affair experience is properly managed. In fact, even if you're not reading this post due to an actual or suspected affair, it's essential that you do affair-proof your marriage anyway.

Why? Because the chances of your marriage surviving an affair are only 31% without an effective divorce prevention plan.

In my experience counseling hundreds of individuals and couples, the number one source of cheating is the dreaded emotional affair. Emotional affairs are the rocket track to sexual cheating.

Activating your relationship's affair force field means cutting off all ties with any actual or potential affair partners. If there's been an emotional affair, the affair partner outside of the marriage needs to know that it's over for good — period! The communication strategy your partner uses to stop the affair needs to be clear simple and point blank.

3. Write A Cheat-Buster Letter :One of the most effective ways to end an emotional or sexual affair in a way that strengthens your relationship is to write an affair ending letter. This means having your cheating partner write a letter to that affair person ending the relationship and explaining why.

If you are the one who was cheated on, the letter must be written to your complete satisfaction. But, you may need to speak to a counselor if you're still too emotional to think clearly during this process. And it's not critical the letter be sent. Just make sure to clearly express your feelings and the boundaries you are setting up.

Creating healthy marriage-protecting boundaries also means knowing the difference between emotionally intimate relationships and zero-intimacy, formal and online or work relationships.

The vast majority of affairs start at work or grow like a virus online. Close, informal emotional relationships belong in your marriage or with with close family members only. They have no place at work, on the internet or on social media. Especially not with the opposite sex.

This can be difficult with so many organizations using peer to peer relationship building and engagement straegies to build solid work teams (i.e. the recent work team "happy hour" trend).

Finally, affair-proofing your marriage means that you both fully commit to and practice complete relationship transparency. This means no hiding emails, texts or cellphone logs from one another ever again.

Full relationship transparency is especially critical if saving your marriage depends on overcoming an affair and preventing one from ever happening again. Make sure you always know each other's social media passwords so you can both check if you ever start to suspect any kind of affair.

It's totally normal to worry at times. You and your partner have a fundamental responsibility to reassure and emotionally soothe each other when ever those worries surface. This keeps high levels of trust alive in your relationship.

My advice: Don't say or do anything at work, online, when out with friends, via text or social media, that you would not do, say or text directly in front of your partner.

Are your experiencing a relationship crisis? I'm online now to listen to you via secure chat. I'll answer your most pressing relationship questions