The bond of matrimony is supposed to prevent the moment when your entire world falls apart and you find yourself on your knees trying to breathe. It’s a shock to see how everything you’ve based your life on can easily fall to pieces with an affair. In order to survive infidelity and restore your relationship, you will need the coping skills you’ve developed throughout your life. Doing so will test what you’re made of. It’ll make you question the strength of your values. And it will require tremendous courage, loads of resilience, and take enormous faith.
Losing faith in Santa Claus may be a lot easier in retrospect, than losing faith in your spouse. But life prepares us over time for the big losses we’ll eventually be forced to face.
I don’t think any of us are protected from life’s lessons. Fortunately, infidelity may not happen in your marriage. However, over time, all of us learn the truth about who and what we believe in. When that happens, you may be left feeling unbalanced. Lost. Your body, mind, and spirit desperately trying to hold on to any thread of truth to right yourself again.
Marriage and fidelity are first and always, a choice. Every day, every moment even, being faithful and true is a decision each person in the pair makes.
Every couple has their own agreement and their own rules they follow for the sake of the union. We are uniquely required in this lifetime to grow and to change. Whether in a marriage or not. Without flexibility and communication, a couple can’t possibly stay happy together. Even when they feel they must stay together, without communication and change, they are rarely happy. Or still in love unless they have strong communication skills and a willingness to be open to change.
Most relationships break down along the lines of disrespect and feeling like a victim.
Disrespect – the “I’m taking you for granted” poison that seeps in and makes people forget that it’s always their decision. When that happens, we forget how incredibly fortunate we are to be able to choose whom we love. We are lucky to be able to make love to, support, and stay with the person we want to share our life with. Or not. This is a choice we all have.
Too often, people turn themselves into the victim of their lives and forget they’re always in charge. Every excuse used keeps you stuck in unhappiness. Whether it’s a financial reason, parenting or even a religious reason. If those are your reasons for staying, you’d better make darn sure you show up in your marriage. Be sure to make some noise and learn how to communicate so that you don’t stay married by default. Otherwise, your life is a long time for you to possibly be miserable or risk an affair.
To survive infidelity and restore your relationship go back to basics.
The tough part is to make the relationship more important than your ego. You may want to beat up the scoundrel or you may want to harm your spouse and you can’t. No matter how justified, unfortunately, your temper can’t get the better of you. Instead, you use the pain and the feeling of betrayal as a lesson for your own growth. Find your own support system. When you begin to grow from the pain, the reasons the infidelity occurred within your marriage will make more sense.
Additionally, no matter how tough, you’ll have to start courting one another again. Too often, married couples stay together but don’t even like one another. If you still have anything in common and if you like having sex with one another, it’s important to become interested and interesting again. When you remember they are separate from you and your needs, you won’t take them for granted.
In order to restore a relationship after cheating, you have to remember who you are.
This does not mean that you become self-involved or selfish, pulling away from the relationship. On the contrary, it means putting your needs at the forefront of your mind and making sure you show up for yourself, in your marriage. You ask for what you want and remain open to what your partner needs in order to grow.
Typically, I have found that the reason there’s an affair is because, usually, one partner or the other forgot their own self-worth. Honesty, integrity, and truth are core values many of us share. We don’t like to believe we would hurt another human being. But living in denial or forgetting who we are is a big reason why infidelity occurs. Life becomes boring and routine without change and growth.
To restore your relationship after infidelity, will take more courage than you’ve ever experienced in your life.
In order to restore a relationship after cheating, you have to remember who you are. You are important, valuable, loving! You’re also worthy of growing, changing, and communicating. Those default marriages – the ones where you go along to get along – usually don’t work, especially after infidelity.
Tolerant marriages happen because individuals in relationship forget their own needs. Too often, we are the ones who go against ourselves. We tolerate the disrespect or put up with the lack of interest. Mean-spirited conversations and belittling, boring dinners are not fun. As a result, we forget to make love to one another or be tender and kind. If you forget to participate in our marriage wholeheartedly, you can’t restore a marriage after infidelity.
In order to restore a marriage after infidelity, you have to pull on the coping skills you’ve gleaned over the years.
It’s your choice to rediscover why you fell in love with your spouse in the first place. Fortunately for most of us, it’s always a choice to remain in a marriage. If you choose to restore your relationship after infidelity, it will take more courage than you’ve ever experienced in your life. More resilience. It’ll call on every life lesson you’ve ever faced. If you decide to fight, to pick yourself up off your knees, you will discover a whole new future.
