An affair can help your marriage, but I don’t suggest having an affair to save your marriage!
Infidelity can reconnect couples and build stronger relationships – if both partners are willing to dig in and get to work. In the past week, two readers have shared how their husband’s affair made their marriage better and stronger.
“My husband had an affair almost 10 years ago now and it was the best thing that ever happened to our marriage,” commented Traci on my article about cheating husbands. “I was forced to take a good hard look at my behavior in the marriage and I came to realize that I was partly to blame for his affair.”
If your spouse cheated on your marriage, take heart. You can rebuild trust and reclaim your marriage – though it takes time and dedication.
For help, read After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful.
Do you regret the break up? It's not too late... How to Get Your Ex Back
And, here are four ways infidelity can strengthen your marriage…
Can an Affair Help Your Marriage? How Infidelity Reconnects Couples
An affair can remind you how important emotional connection is for couples. “I had become emotionally unavailable to my husband,” said Traci. “When something good or bad happened in my life, I called my friends instead of my husband. I had stopped allowing him to love me and to support me and he felt as if I no longer needed him.” Emotional disconnection is not a reason to have an affair…but an affair can help your marriage by encouraging you to reconnect on an emotional and spiritual level. Reconnection can be deeper than your original connection.
An affair can affair-proof your marriage. “[After a husband has cheated], given all he’s been through and learned, what are the chances that he’ll cheat again?” says marriage coach Mort Fertel. “If his wife gives him another chance, what’s the likelihood that he’d make the same mistake that almost caused him to lose his family? In my opinion, it’s dramatically less than 50%. In fact, I think it’s slim to none.” Fertel says husbands who cheat on their wives are less likely to cheat again. It’s possible that an affair is one of the best ways to guarantee fidelity!
If you and your spouse are both contributing to the affair, read Co Dependency in Love – How to Untangle a Codependent Relationship.
Infidelity give you a depth of self-awareness and insight like nothing else can. “It hasn’t been an easy journey and I have learnt a lot about myself along the way,” says Sue on my article about emotional affairs in marriage. “I learned what I will accept, what I am not responsible for, what I can change and what I can’t change. From feeling miserable and powerless, I now am stronger for what has happened, even the difficult and scary parts of it.” An affair can help your marriage by making you strong as an individual. The stronger you are, the better able you’ll be to reconnect with your husband and be a healthy couple.
An affair can reveal your spouse’s strengths and weaknesses, which can strengthen your marriage. The best marriages are between best friends. And you know what best friends do: they spend a lot of time together, exploring each other’s minds and souls. Often, couples lose that desire – or they just don’t have enough time to deepen their friendship. Infidelity can help couples reconnect by forcing them to work on their marriage.
Traci says, “Today, we have a beautiful son, another on the way in a couple weeks, we own our home, and have a fuller, happier life than we ever imagined that we could, because we chose to stay together to work on it!”
And Sue says, “We still have a way to go. However, I hope our story gives others some encouragement that it is possible for a marriage to survive an affair. And, even painful lessons are worth learning and can ultimately make couples happier and healthier.”
If an affair is ruining your marriage, read Should I Leave My Husband? Help Deciding Whether to Stay or Go.
What do you think – can an affair help your marriage? I welcome your comments below.
Do you need marriage help? Get free marriage advice from Mort Fertel. He's good.
I am so sick of reading about forgiving your cheating spouse and trying to reconcile. There are 10,000 crappy sites like How to Affair-Proof Your Marriage… and Jesus Thinks You’re a Failure If You Divorce compared to the much needed “leave the jerk already” site. To begin with, there are people far better than the one that cheated on you. Actually, you could walk into any bar in the world, swing a cat, and hit someone that is better than your current spouse, simply by virtue of the fact that that they have not cheated on you.
I don’t believe people that say their marriages are stronger than before. If you lost a leg, you would not argue that now your body is stronger than before. You’ve lost your trust in your spouse. Your security. Your ability to ever love your spouse unreservedly again. Your spouse can’t unring that bell or unf*** that other person. And while you may be one of the rare couples that reconciles successfully, you’re over selling it when you tell people your marriage is BETTER. It endures. Affairs don’t make marriages better, no more than spousal abuse and hurling your spouse down the stairs once, makes a marriage better.
For every day of your life you have to live with the knowledge that this person cheated on you and gutted you emotionally. If it didn’t gut you emotionally, you weren’t that connected to them in the first place and your marriage has never been “great.” They are capable of betrayal. And while you may be able to do the mental gymnastics to live with that, I can tell you from experience, that it IS better on the other side. Either being independent and alone not living with the drama (BTDT) or happily partnered up with a person who loves you right and doesn’t need therapy and 12-steps to be faithful. Cheaters often cheat again. Who wants to live waiting for that shoe to drop?
I know that wives cheat on their husbands – my husband reminds me of that all the time! I say that men cheat more than women, but he keeps telling me about his friend whose wife cheated on him and left him with nothing.
I don’t think women cheat more than men, though. And I do think that a man should leave his wife if she cheated – if, of course, he doesn’t want to try to work it out.
How about a cheating wife? Is it the same? There is very little out there on the other side of things. Wives cheat just as often (if not more) should a husband put up with it? Should I leave my wife who’s cheated on me and is now in an affair?
Thanks for your comment, Kitty. Different marriages have different sources of strength and courage…and some affairs make marriages stronger.
An affair can make your marriage tolerable. It can provide a sweet escape from your troubled marriage. If I were not having an affair I don’t think I’d have the will to stay married at all.