After The Affair: Should I Save This Marriage?

What is the best response after your spouse has had an affair? Should you ignore it? Should you forgive your spouse? Some marriages can be saved after an affair and some can’t. Every situation is unique. Here are two very different responses to these apparently similar situations. See if you agree with my assessments.

Sue wants to save a marriage that's been broken for over three years and wonders if ignoring her husband's affair and showing that she is a loving wife will do the trick. The problem is that even though he keeps talking about reconciling, he has yet to end the affair with the other woman. For two of the past three years he refused any intimacy with his wife. Recently Sue has let him back in her bed, but she's tired of sharing her husband with the other woman. She's wondering whether she can win her husband back by switching from being a nagging wife to a loving wife.

Sometimes you can be so blinded by your vision of what you wish could happen that you can't see what really is happening. Instead of basing future expectations on past experiences you keep on hoping for the outcome you desire. Even if Sue wins her husband back for a while, I think he will continue the pattern he has shown twice. He stays with one woman until he finds another who is more interesting.

The first time Sue’s husband was committed to one woman, his wife. This ended when he started an affair with the other woman. The second time her husband had an apparently committed relationship with the other woman for two years. He continued to string Sue along with promises that he would return to her.

His hidden message is he will only come back if she promises to be more interesting than the other woman. Now, from the other woman’s perspective, Sue is the intruder. And Sue is playing right into it by letting her fantasy of a happy marriage interfere with the strong likelihood that he will stay with her for a year or two until he meets another (or the same) other woman and has another affair.

Throughout this entire drama, Sue is planning to ignore her anger and disappointment in her husband and her marriage and act as if nothing is wrong. Can she get her husband back this way? Probably! Should she? Absolutely not! He is a narcissist and will continue to ignore everyone’s feelings but his own. If she follows her proposed plan, it is only a matter of time until he leaves again.

It's hard to know whether or not to forgive your spouse and try to save your marriage after past infidelity, especially since it seems as if so many people have affairs. You should first seriously consider whether YOU want to save your marriage. If you really do want to do save your relationship you need to know how to decide if the marriage is worth another try.

Wanting to proceed is just the first step. There is work involved. Of course there's also work involved in ending a marriage so no matter which way you go, you can't go back to believing that things are just fine the way they are. You know they're not. This work starts with your introspection and proceeds with a series of conversations.

You must take a good hard look at your own part in this. It's always easy to blame the cheating spouse for an affair but there's usually more to it than that. Did you suspect things weren't going well in your marriage before the affair? Did you attempt to do anything about it then or did you choose to ignore signals and pretend everything was okay?

The next factor is whether or not your spouse wants to try to save the marriage. You must have conversations about whether or not he or she accepts responsibility for disrupting your marriage in this way. Does your spouse acknowledge responsibility or blame you or circumstances for the current mess? Is your spouse aware of previous problems? Has he or she tried to communicate them to you and been ignored?

Sometimes one spouse becomes vulnerable to having an affair because he or she is extremely frustrated by trying to find satisfaction in a deteriorating marriage. This spouse may or may not have tried to call attention to the problem. Whatever he or she did was ineffective. If that's what happened you have a good chance of repairing your marriage.

As long as you can each accept responsibility for whatever made your marriage vulnerable to this infidelity and are ready to continue to have conversations that will help you repair the underlying problem, you'll probably be successful. If you're really serious about having these conversations then get a copy of The Being Happy Program http://www.BeingHappyProgram.com as soon as you can. You can use it as a guide to the conversations you need to have in order to repair your marriage.

Hey, by the way... Here's something I think will really interest you. It's a *very* meaty Free Special Report all about 5 frequently asked questions about troubled relationships. It's titled "How To Save Your Marriage: Insider Secrets For Anxious Wives and Frustrated Husbands " and you can grab it for free here www.BeingHappyProgram.com/getmarriagereport1.htm