Your Marriage Can Survive Adultery — But Only With These 7 Tiny Things
If you want to save your marriage from infidelity, here's what you need.
Timur Weber | Canva If your world has been thrown off its axis by an affair, you may wonder if surviving infidelity is possible for your marriage, if it's possible to even move on from such a gutting of the intrinsic trust in a marriage. And your doubts won't be unfounded. After all, nothing more completely undermines the most foundational premise of marriage than infidelity. When your life has been turned inside out by a cheating spouse's betrayal, it’s only natural to feel confused, ungrounded, and unsure of your future. And that’s true for both the betrayed and the partner who strayed.
If you aren’t ready to sign divorce papers, knowing which marriages survive infidelity can help you assess the prognosis for your marriage. Simply knowing that marriages do survive infidelity — and can even come out stronger than ever — is a ray of hope. In a Psychology Today article, psychotherapist Dr. Joe Kort, Ph.D., states that the frequency of infidelity is much higher than the numbers often cited. He also says that infidelity is the number one reason people come to him for therapy. In his experience, these clients genuinely want to work through the trauma of infidelity and come out the other end together.
And he would be the first to say that after learning when these couples do reach the other side, their marriage is even stronger than before the affair. That may sound all well and good in the land of fairy tales. But, if you’re in the throes of emotional trauma from an affair, you may not have the stomach for such in-a-nutshell positivity. You understandably want answers. You want to know which marriages survive infidelity and how to save your marriage from being broken forever. Will yours be one of those that survive? Infidelity expert Dr. Shirley Glass emphasizes three qualities that are the strongest determiners of which marriages survive. But, in addition to them, there are more.
If you want to save your marriage from infidelity, you need these 7 things:
1. Empathy from the unfaithful partner
Is the unfaithful partner able to empathize when the partner they betrayed comes unglued, emotionally? Can the unfaithful partner step into the woundedness of the betrayed and bear compassionate witness to the pain they caused? And how does the unfaithful partner express that empathy? It sounds like a no-brainer to expect an unfaithful spouse who wants to repair the marriage to tolerate the emotions of the one betrayed. But even the offending partner can have a breaking point. It takes a firmly staked commitment to heal the marriage to remain empathetic, especially if your spouse wants you to suffer. Even the most mutually resolved marriages will experience their share of unpredictable emotions, crying, obsessing, hypervigilance, and flashbacks. The unfaithful partner has to exhibit tireless empathy while also not playing into a perpetrator-victim dynamic.
2. Acceptance of responsibility by the unfaithful partner
How much responsibility does the unfaithful partner accept as theirs for the choices they made? There are multiple and mutual areas of responsibility that will have to be accepted and dealt with if the marriage is going to survive. What is unequivocally imperative, however, is that the unfaithful partner accepts full responsibility for the choice to have an affair. Problems that existed in the marriage before the affair matter and must be remedied. But they don’t absolve a spouse of cheating as a way of dealing with or avoiding them. There is no room for blaming the betrayed spouse for the affair. S/he may have accountability for behaviors and actions that weren’t in the marriage’s best interest. But they did not cause the affair to happen.
3. Understanding the vulnerabilities that made the affair possible
Why do people cheat? There can be many reasons why. But, if both partners are willing to examine where they left their marriage vulnerable and exposed, they have a high chance of surviving the infidelity. Consider a house that isn’t properly sealed. A roof tile is loose, there are cracks around the windows, and small holes punctuate the foundation. Now, think about what can get in when the weather gets bad or a critter gets curious. Affairs happen in the context of opportunity. And the office is the most common breeding ground. Think about it. You show up in the morning, showered, nicely dressed, ready to take on the world, and reel in the profits. You’re focused, cooperative, and on your best behavior.
Perhaps, you have to travel for business and you travel with an attractive business partner or you meet an attractive client at your destination. Perhaps, an old high school flame reaches out to you on social media after their divorce and you form an emotional attachment. Perhaps, you are getting too comfortable with your trainer at the gym. Part of taking responsibility for your marriage is "sealing up the house." That doesn’t mean you hide from the world. It simply means you take control of what comes into your house. When you understand the vulnerabilities in your marriage, you can address them head-on. What will you do and not do? Share or not share? How and where will you spend time with members of the opposite gender outside your marriage, even at work? How can you strengthen your spouse’s sense of security and trust by addressing and reducing vulnerabilities?
4. Commitment to honesty and rebuilding trust
Believe it or not, the responsibility for this doesn’t rest solely on the unfaithful partner. Yes, the nature of honesty will be different for both partners, as will the roles in rebuilding trust. But both partners will have to be equally committed to transparency about their feelings and the affair. The unfaithful partner will have to accept that their life will be lived in a fishbowl for some time. Being proactive in assuring the betrayed partner of trustworthiness is a huge sign of taking responsibility and commitment to heal the marriage.
5. Openness to counseling
Recovering from infidelity is difficult enough, even in the safest environment. It’s exceptionally difficult to do with only the polarized partners. Emotional safety is non-negotiable if there is going to be honest disclosure of vulnerabilities and feelings. The unpredictability of flashbacks, painful feelings, and obsessions can make it difficult to put parameters around dealing with the affair. It needs to have boundaries to be safe and effective while leaving protected time to actually "live."
6. Willingness to work through the perpetrator-victim mindset
It’s all but inevitable. The unfaithful partner will be seen as the guilty one who "did this" to their spouse. And the betrayed spouse will take on a "victim" stance. While this is understandable in the early stages after an affair has been discovered, it’s not conducive to your marriage coming out stronger. Healthy boundaries are incredibly important, especially during this delicate time of reconciliation and healing. There’s a difference between taking responsibility for a damaging choice and being punished as a perpetrator of intentional cruelty. And there’s a difference between expressing the pain of betrayal and playing the role of a victim who has no responsibility for the marriage. No matter who has done what before or during the affair, no one can build or heal a marriage alone.
7. Willingness to work together on a new marriage
When a couple enters therapy with the resolve to make their marriage better than it was before the affair, their marriage has great promise. They know that the marriage they once knew can’t exist anymore. And it probably shouldn’t. Will they still keep certain qualities of their "first" marriage? Of course. But for them to forgive one another and themselves, they have to feel the infusion of new life into what the infidelity destroyed.
The question of which marriages survive infidelity is best answered by the mutuality of determination in the partners. They both have to want the reconciliation and healing of their marriage. They also have to be willing to faithfully take on their respective responsibilities to make that happen. Marriages broken by the betrayal of infidelity can come back together. And those with the greatest success are those in which both partners decide that their reconciliation won’t be in vain.
Dr. Karen Finn is a divorce and life coach. Her writing on marriage, divorce, and co-parenting has appeared on MSN, Yahoo, Psych Central, Huffington Post, Prevention, and The Good Men Project, among others.