In my professional carrier, I have been asked many times “Can my marriage survive an affair?” And in short, “Yes, anyone marriage can survive an affair.” An affair can happen in any marriage or relationship. The key it not to identify the event as an affair, but to identify it as a wakeup call for your relationship.
All marriages and relationships go through hard times that required the ward work of the couple to mend and heal the relationship. A marriage can survive an affair if there are specific characteristic’s present your marriage.
Why affairs happen
The first question that a spouse will ask the cheating spouse is “Why?” And the initial response is normally to blame themselves, their partner, the relationship, or a third party. But the fact of the matter is that there are three factors that work together that lead a spouse into the arms of another.
1) Factors of attraction that pull an individual towards an affair. These are forces that have to deal with attraction (sex, companionship, admiration, and power), novelty, curiosity, and love.
2) Factors of the individual that push them towards an affairs. The big word that comes to mind is “Desire”. These individuals desire an escape or relief from a painful relationship. They have a desire or have a need to fill gap in their existing relationship, or they just desire attention.
3) The last factor is the social influences that are glamorized in movies, romantic novels, and TV shows. An affair is a normal event that if not really a big deal in today’s society. I have heard it said, “You are a no body unless you are having an affair.”
So now that we know what drives people to have affair, we can look at how to treat a relationship that has been affected by an affair.
For an ease of explaining, we will assume that the husband has had the affair.
The wife must be able to communicate her feelings and know that they will be understood by her husband. This will be a difficult time for the wife. Her mood will shift feeling sadness, anger, betrayal, and a verity of other emotions that are identified with being in general emotional pain. The husband will just need to step back and let the natural healing take its course.
This may be a difficult time for the wife to lay out everything on the table, so it is important for the husband make sure that the wife is comfortable getting all her feeling off her chest during any conversations that are dealing with the affair. If the husband is not able to allow the wife to communicate freely, the wife will not be able to get all her emotions out and her feelings will continue to be bottled up. And this will also identify a husband that is not being understanding of his wife’s feelings, and this will keep the couple from being able to move on in the healing process.
The husband needs to take responsibility for his action during the affair and be held accountable. According to a case study, married men have affairs for emotional rather than physical reasons. In the case study, a poll of 248 men where taken where almost 80% of them advised that they had an affair for emotional needs. Only 12% of the men said that the reason was for physical needs.
Now I am not making a case for the cheating husbands, but I do want to identify that these 80% of men are going to be feeling a sense of failure when it comes to their marriage. They have let their wife down.
Putting up walls and shutting him out is not the answer to the problem. He has been affected negatively by this bad choice. The best course of action for the wife is to make sure that he understands that she is going to need him to be forthcoming about where he is going and be reassuring and affectionate.
The affair has got to be identified as a wake up call for the marriage. The truth is that marriages that survive affair tend to stronger than those marriages that never gone through the event.. It may sound silly, but affairs force couples to evaluate the marriage, and get couples to start communicating on a higher level in an attempt to save the marriage. These coupes will develop skills that will bring the couple closer together and these skills will help the couple identify problems in the marriage before they escalate to another affair.
