Infidelity

3 Personal Tips For Coping With Divorce Due To Infidelity

November 3, 2017

The experience of coping with divorce due to infidelity is hard to do. Infidelity can eat at our psyche. Even long after a divorce decree is signed. Too often, it makes us question everything: our sex appeal, our judgment, our willingness to open our hearts and minds to love again. Infidelity makes us feel less-than easily harming self-esteem and self-worth. Here are 3 personal tips for coping with divorce due to infidelity.

It’s the lies more than anything when coping with divorce due to infidelity.

Sometimes, it’s not so much the actual affair in and of itself that hurts, as much as the on-going betrayal and lies that occurred. As adults, many of us have had transactional sex and many marriages are salvaged and made better even after short-term affairs. The difficult part with infidelity is coping with the betrayal – the lies and manipulation that one’s most intimate friend and the supposed partner created to sustain the actions and justify what they were doing over a long period of time. This is when infidelity cuts deep and hope for a happy future is left behind.

We are fascinated by other people.

We’re deeply involved with the lives of our spouses. I’ve found that after infidelity and divorce, there is this on-going, obsessive thinking loop about what and why and how and when the cheating partner broke marital vows and broke up a marriage. This thinking and ensuing feelings go on a really long time without intervention and perspective. It becomes it’s own self-perpetuating habit and affects everything like binge-watching Netflix in the family kitchen during dinner.

It’s important to put things in a big perspective and pull your attention back from them. They are gone. He was a cheater. She lied, wove stories, manipulated, and controlled. It was for a lot of reasons including for the rush of power and control. Sometimes it verges on being sociopathic. Oftentimes it’s narcissistic. Usually, it’s simply mean or the only way to end something that wasn’t working on a very deep level.

For those left in the wake of infidelity, I encourage seeking good help.

Your future self-needs some hope and optimism. It’s time to stop the anger, worrying, and righteousness. The habitual self-criticism doesn’t help. You have to shift the focus back from them to your own heart, mind, and spirit. Back to your life. Which is a lot easier said than done. There’s no shortcut to healing a broken heart and the loss of trust that infidelity creates. Part of your healing has to be the development of self-discipline over how you think about yourself. You will need to relearn how you talk to yourself. What you do to yourself and to others, as a result, is part of the healing.

Daily, consistent, sustained effort is part of coping with divorce due to infidelity.

Every day you’ll be plagued with questions of how they did it and why. You will obsess over what it meant or means about you as a lover, a person or a co-parent. If you’re not disciplined, you’ll obsess for hours on end. Maybe even wanting to seek revenge (even if you don’t do anything about your fantasies) and you’ll want to use your children to get even. To punish. If you’re not careful, you’ll be asking, “why should they see your kids when they broke up the family?” The self-righteousness will eat at you if you let it. This is an important reason why caring for yourself is so necessary. And giving yourself a safe place to process, critical.

You matter:

Pulling the attention away from them and back on to you while you’re dealing with a new life is difficult. You won’t feel worthy of being important. You’ll make excuses about how much work you have to do and how you have to do everything for your kids. Remember, you matter. You’re entitled to have fun, to laugh, and to smile. Hope is available even when you’re having a tough day!

You have a right to a great life.

Don’t be embarrassed (or ashamed) to admit you’re grateful. You have a new chance at life. At love. Regardless of how you’re feeling, it’s true. You have a right to a great life with someone, if you wish, who can respect and cherish you more than they care about themselves.

The quiet moments are tough when you’re coping with divorce due to infidelity.

It’s easy to say the right things to your friends and family on a good day when you know how to get them to leave you alone. Anxiety usually creeps in during the quiet moments. Mostly, late at night or when the kids are with their other parent. Those are the moments you’re going to have to be extra careful and kind to yourself. Just when you’re trying to relax, you’ll start to be alert to negative habitual thoughts or feelings that find their way in.

I worked extra hard to develop my self-discipline at those times. It wasn’t easy to learn how to manage my thoughts and feelings so they wouldn’t take me down. But I processed by writing, giving myself permission to feel the things I didn’t want to. It wasn’t ever easy. The work gave me a good understanding of the parts of my belief system that needed attention.

There’s nothing wrong with you:

You will mend and you will love again if you want to. But unfortunately, it doesn’t just happen. You won’t wake up one day and fall in love without putting in the effort to heal. And it also, usually, doesn’t happen all at once either so don’t panic! The fear which is slowing you down is important and justified at the moment. But I also don’t want you to think there’s something wrong. Nothing’s wrong with you! Those tears are normal. Your anger justified. Your fear warranted. It’s staying stuck in these emotional states for a long time (like years and years, and years) that becomes the problem. I call it Post Traumatic Divorce Disorder™.

Feel Your Feelings:

While you’re in fear or crying, please feel those feelings. You are simply processing. Sometimes I find people think they need to be matter-of-fact about the infidelity, too embarrassed to admit it. It makes perfect sense not to spread gossip about yourself in your community or at the office. But then, if you don’t feel safe in your community, you’ll need to find safe support elsewhere.

Furthermore, you owe this to yourself. You need to know you’re not alone. Eventually, you will learn a new way of thinking about it all (that big perspective) and you’ll want to have a new group of friends. Over time, you’ll even have the courage to step back out into the world with more self-esteem, proud of the work you’ve done for yourself.

Love is worth it:

Hopefully, you may even want someone next to you in your bed at night. (Animals don’t count.) At that point, knowing what you know, you’ll have a better picker. You’ll be more open to dating, more transparent about your needs, able to communicate your boundaries. There is value in being seen and heard, respected and loved. I know love is possible.

With scars, it takes courage, time, a system and a good mentor. Your heart, mind, and spirit need you to focus on you. Your new partner – the one who matters – needs you to focus on you for the time being and then to make the courage to meet them. To trust again. The hope I speak of is real and attainable when you focus on yourself and your healing after infidelity.

Laura Bonarrigo is a Certified Life Coach and a Certified Divorce Coach. Laura’s a writer, public speaker and the founder of The Better Divorce and doingDivorce™ School – online coaching programs for those ready to shed the pain of breakups. For empowering and practical ways to lose the identity of your past, visit www.doingDivorceSchool.com

3 Tips For How To Survive Infidelity And Divorce (Of Your Friends)

August 22, 2017

Your friend calls deeply upset, shaken declaring, “they had an affair.” The air leaves the conversation as you try to reconcile how to survive infidelity and divorce around you. The stilted dialogue becomes upsetting and the questions swirl. How do you handle this kind of news? How do you hold your friend’s news amidst your own anxiety and fear? You know it could happen so easily to anyone who’s married. You mumble a few choice words, offer apologies and your condolences, ask what they’re going to do. And hang up as soon as possible.

So often, when news of a friend’s infidelity filters into our conversations, the reaction is personal fear. You end up concentrating on your own marriage, your relationship, and what’s happening in your marital bed. You try to recall the last time you made love to your spouse, your lover and you wonder, if you haven’t in a while, “will it happen to me too?” How you survive infidelity is a deeply personal decision. Its roots in religious beliefs, political views, and often the size of your bank account.

How to survive infidelity and divorce is a deeply personal decision.

There’s a common misperception that a set of rules that blanket religious dogma will keep you safe. Or you wrongly imagine that your community of friends would never have an affair. You consider how you grew up, your dad, uncles, and aunts – would they have had an affair? Did they step out of the marriage? Is that what that fight you overheard as a kid was all about?

The news of an affair brings up power imbalances in all relationships – including yours.

The story makes you look at how your default behavior has been playing out over the course of your marriage. The news will hopefully, make you consider what you need to do differently, better.

Have you ever noticed how each time you hear about an affair, you begin to focus almost entirely on your spouse? Perhaps, mentally chastising them for all the mistakes they’ve made? Are you aware of how you immediately begin the dance of “if I do this, they’ll love me…” forgetting that you too have a vested stake in keeping yourself whole, fulfilled, and respected in your marriage?

Below are 3 tips on how to survive infidelity and divorce whether you’re the one directly experiencing the news or not. These tips are about you – not your lover and this time around they’re also about your reactions to the news of others’ heartaches. One of the biggest mistakes in marriages is putting your partner first over and over again.

Take back the focus for a while and take care of you.

Wouldn’t it be nice to take back your power and focus on your own well-being and happiness? Selflessly giving, giving, giving =’s exhausting, resenting, and no sexing… (couldn’t resist). When you over give to the point you’ve nothing left to offer, it’s almost impossible to show up generous, desirous or even wanting to make love. No adult needs another child – they need a partner. They need reciprocity. Everyone needs mutual adoration, acceptance, conversation, fun, and intimacy.

The moment you find yourself over-sharing, over-giving, over-indulging and catering to the adult in your bed… you’ve become, essentially, their mother or father. And we don’t make love to our parents.

You’re allowed to take time for yourself – to do things that recharge your energy and drive.

Things that turn you on so that you have something to share and something new to talk about. You’re allowed to ask for your spouse to uphold his or her marital agreements to provide intimacy. You’re allowed to play as two consenting adults.

This is how you survive infidelity – you make sure your needs are met so there’s no need for an affair.

Put up those mental boundaries when you hear about others’ infidelity and divorce.

Your friend’s relationship truly has little to nothing to do with your lover, your relationship, and your marriage. It has to do with them and theirs. If you’re the kind of person who loves living their own personal reality TV show, you’re making a huge mistake. That story you’re watching has nothing to do with what’s really going on.

Like a reality TV show, there’s been an entire life happening behind the news you’re hearing about. When you indulge the story of others trying to survive infidelity and divorce, remember, you’re simply getting the highlight reel!

Don’t fall prey to the machinations of an angry and hurt partner. If you do, you’ll start making up dialogue and question your own partner’s behavior. You’ll follow along blindly and neglect your own self-care that includes enjoying and adoring your lover. It’s important to keep your thoughts clean and focused on what you want. Not on what your friend is dealing with. It’s actually not a healthy friendship when or if your marriage begins to fall apart because you’re not keeping a healthy boundary.

Equalize the power in all your relationships.

Just as important as it is to make sure you have boundaries with your friendships, it’s equally important to maintain the same footing with your lover. Whether you’re married or not. When power imbalances begin to occur – due to status, personality or health worries and fears begin to creep in. You wonder if your relationship is on an even keel asking: “Are they being faithful?” “What are they doing when they travel for work?” “Do they need me now that they’re earning more money than I am and I’m staying home raising the kids?”

When there’s a power imbalance between lovers, there are many parts of the relationship that are too easy to blame.

A spouse making more money or a lover able to travel are opportunities to break agreements at home. When status changes, it’s important to have a frank conversation. You may want to reevaluate the agreements and make sure the two of you are on the same page. Whether you’re comfortable renegotiating the terms and redefining the roles or not, doing so has to happen in partnerships. None of us have great relationships just because. Most of us have to spend time communicating not doing marriages by default. If you are just doing it by default, know you may be inviting trouble.

There’s no reason to invite in trouble! You can survive infidelity and divorce (of your friends!)

As those around you struggle with their relationships, reevaluating your own requires the willingness to own up to what’s not working. While also being able to keep others’ stories from affecting your commitments to one another. You can survive infidelity and divorce – especially when you don’t make others’ issues something for you to worry about.

Which Marriages Survive Infidelity And Which Don’t Re-Ignite The Passion

July 24, 2017

When passion is missing, we pull in, retreat, and hide from our lives. We hide from our deepest desires including being with the person we say we love. How often have you found yourself hiding from your lover, your spouse? How many times have you retreated in boredom and exhaustion instead of tending to the fire of your relationship? We wonder which marriages survive infidelity and which don’t. It all depends upon understanding your degree of passion.

Passion makes it all worthwhile.

Passion! The expansive energy that lights us up and fuels our days. Passion is the feeling that defines being alive. The sense that we’ve got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The force that keeps our love-making full and our relationships important.

Falling out of love with a partner can chip away at self-esteem and erode the foundation of our lives.

There’s no easy way to deal with the loss of passion. It has little to do with the thoughts you think and everything to do with the feelings you create. The difference between those who know how to survive cheating and those who don’t is grasping this rite of passage. Let’s dive into which marriages survive infidelity and which don’t and how to survive betrayal to restore your relationship’s passion and love.

The moment of boredom.

You know which one I mean. It’s the one when you realize you can’t sit across from them another minute. You simply don’t care about their day. You don’t care about their boss, their workload, the kids’ issues, their problems. You’ve no more to give and it’s torturous to pretend you’re interested. The boredom washes over you. You know how you’re feeling is normal, natural but wrong. You think, when you finally wake up to where you are, that you’ve had it, it’s over.

The new interest who’s caught your eye and your attention.

The one who’s exciting and good looking. They’re the one who listens to you with fresh eyes and a beautiful smile. The one who hangs on every word you say. They see something in you your partner hasn’t seen in ages. How long has it been since your lover (the one you’re committed to by word or law) has thought you were the boss? How long has passion been missing?

Infidelity begins so innocently. It creeps in when we’re not looking.

But when it occurs, it’s as if lightning has struck! The passion of feeling alive is seductive. You want more of being joyfully adored. Your soul screams of pleasure and delight (as long as you don’t consider the lover at home). You try not to waffle between feelings of intense excitement and fear. (Not because sex or being loved is wrong, only because you’re going against the commitment you’ve made to another person, never mind yourself.)

Reconciling your need for love with your need for integrity, respect, attention.

You and I both know you’ve thought about ending your relationship many times. Every day even as you rationalize that, “marriage contracts were put into play when humans didn’t live to 80 years old.” “We all outgrow one another.” or “Everyone’s having an affair.” The cynicism is exhausting. You blame them for not being the kind of person who lights you up. You rationalize staying because of the kids but you skulk around and are intimate with others because you can. Especially when you travel for work. And then you wonder, how can my marriage survive their / my infidelity?

You choose to re-ignite the passion for marriages to survive infidelity.

The opportunity is right next to you day in and day out. At a certain point in life, you have to realize that your relationship is your greatest teacher. It has nothing to do with how old you are or what kind of work you do. Choosing to survive infidelity is about stepping into being your word. And re-igniting your interest and passion in the person who is your spouse. It’s not about being a martyr or “doing it for the kids.” (News flash: they know what you’re up to frankly and don’t really care about your feelings anyway.) Those child-centered marriages usually lack the very passion and fun you’re craving, so no wonder you wouldn’t want to stay living like that.

Doing the right thing is about making sure you respect yourself enough to remember your dreams.

Why bother having desires if you’re not going to commit to them? Ideally, the person you’ve committed to has your best interest in mind. They know what you want. They knew you when. You commit to making your marriage a place of intimacy and love again by examining your own beliefs and the story you’re telling yourself. You decide to find the passion again.

When you feel passion, you have the energy and heart to remember what you love about that person in your bed.

You become curious about what lights each other up. Then you step out of the ego’s need to be right and you decide to put your family in its entirety first. You make your life fun again, together. Not for them, for you. Yeah, you’re going to suck at this at first. It’s not going to feel as good as that attention and orgasm you just had with your new lover. And no, you can’t keep both.

Even though you won’t know how to come clean about the secret life you’ve been living, you get back into alignment with what lights you up. The inner conflict isn’t there for you to unburden yourself and tell the truth. Instead, use it as a tension that challenges you to get with the program. To rise above the longing for passion with someone you don’t know and figure out how to have rapture again with the person next to you.

If you’re out of love with your partner, the commitment to reignite your passion will most likely be a mental choice at first.

The rational choice in the face of emotional emptiness will be difficult. Especially if you and your partner never had the passion, to begin with. Especially if you’re telling yourself that your life needs rapture before it’s too late. Finding the spark that lights up a life takes time. You won’t feel it at first, at least not until you put in the effort. You may not even feel it for some time. At least not until you stop blaming them for disappointing you. After all, it’s your life to live, not theirs. Chances are, you forgot to take care of yourself long before your marriage got stale.

The very thing you’re seeking – that heart song that you yearn for – is the gateway to what you want and need.

It’s the energy that will create what you want because when you know you’re refueling your passion within your partnership, you show up bigger and better. You’ll have a sense of pride and accomplishment that no one can take away.

Just because the past hasn’t turned out the way you wanted, does not mean the future can’t be better than today.

You are made of more than you realize. The sum total of your life isn’t just the stories and excuses you’ve told yourself. You’re made up of so much more. Including how you show up with your marriage partner. The way you make love to one another and what you do together creates excitement. Believe in the possibility of passion again. Because how you treat one another, how you spend time together color the novelty. When you figure out what they’re thinking about or mix things up you’ll find them interesting and unique again.

When you’re being your best, you know where your values are.

Building upon those values (the ones that had you marry in the first place) means honoring yourself and your goals. When you know yourself and have the confidence to show up for yourself, instead of hiding out of shame and embarrassment, it gives you the chance to believe in falling in love again. Let your heart tell your ego that it’s got this and allow yourself to dream again. Put aside any anger and resentments and fill up with hope and passion. The marriages that survive infidelity and restore their relationships are those who do just that. They seek a new way of doing things and hold themselves accountable to loving one another.

Can I Survive Infidelity? Yes, And Here’s How You Heal Your Broken Heart

June 27, 2017

At first, you don’t think you could ever survive infidelity. When you first learn about betrayal, your entire world order is rocked and your trust barometer gets severely messed up. You may find yourself incredibly present to the here and now – changing the locks on the doors, throwing their stuff into a dumpster. But you may also find fear creeping into every aspect of your life. You may not recognize yourself amidst the jitteriness and the innate, almost primal need, to be on guard. The weird thing is, you may logically understand that you can survive the infidelity.

You just might not realize how deep the lies cut until the feelings overwhelm.

Friends, those you like and trust, may have seemingly glib responses like, “Just dump them already.” Or your friends may rush to your defense and smoother you with their over-protectiveness. (Which is thoroughly needed in the moment of discovery!) This sort of in-the-moment reaction helps you feel as if you’re not so alone.

Usually, however, those who love you simply don’t understand why the pain cuts so deep.

Your family may suggest you “get over it” and I bet, you want to scream. But adding guilt to hurt to shame to confusion doesn’t help. It will instead, make you want to pull in when you may have to face a divorce or a trial. It may also feel as if your wounds show. Infidelity is utterly embarrassing.

Surviving infidelity takes a strong mind and a solid heart.

The hard part is, a broken heart isn’t solid. While a mind twisted from pain can’t think clearly, and friends and family really don’t get what it feels like to be hurt by the person who made you soar with love. Infidelity is the kind of pain that puts you on your knees.

The problem for you may now be, whom and what do you trust?

How can you talk to someone about the betrayal when they’re full of their own opinions and advice? They may know your lover, your boyfriend or your spouse. When that occurs, you’ll be unsure of whom to confide in and question just how much your children’s teachers know. Lonely, aching, you don’t know where to turn.

It’s your heart to mend after all.

Your marriage and your relationship. Who are the friends to tell you what to do? It’d be great if you could turn back time and just pretend yesterday didn’t occur. Or last week, last month or last year. Your marriage would still be fantastic if “they hadn’t taken that job” or “sold that business” or if you’d “just had had a little more sex in your relationship.” Or they hadn’t lied to you for your entire relationship. Life would be perfect. But life isn’t perfect and we don’t get to turn back time or change our past, unfortunately.

It is tough to survive infidelity by thinking your way toward healing.

You can’t think your way toward feeling better. This is a feeling life. There are two options that I know of – it’s your choice – go deeper inside than you’ve ever experienced or become bigger than you’ve ever had been before.

1) I suggest you find strength from deep within-deeper than the love they had for you or the agreements you made with them. Possibly deeper than agreements you’ve made to anyone really. In fact, you’ve probably never made such a deep commitment to yourself before now. It’s an inner core strength that’s always been there just for you.

2) And find strength from something way bigger than you and where you are in your life right now. In order to rise above the pain and hurt, to come out the other side of this kind of betrayal, you may have to go bigger than you’ve ever imagined believing. I’m talking about things like hope, faith, God even.

Imagine being able to trust yourself completely.

What would it be like to have a man or a woman fall so deeply in love with you that you trusted them enough to let them in? While you also knew when it was time to let them go? Without pain. Free from becoming someone whom you didn’t want to become?

How about being so in tune with your own needs – your gut – that you know whom to trust even before they do. You can tell. You just know. That would be amazing wouldn’t it?

That’s what survival offers. That’s what getting healed is all about. No more pain. No more fear. Total confidence, love, intimacy, and trust. Bliss really. And you can do it.

That’s the kind of healing required to overcome betrayal.

Unfortunately, that kind of thinking doesn’t come from the level of thinking where you are today. This normal, everyday level got you into trouble, to begin with. You can’t stay here and survive. When you decide to go bigger or you go deeper, you find strength and hope outside the way you normally perceive the world. You make the decision to grow through this pain, not hide. In fact, you make a pact with yourself, above and beyond the lover who hurt you.

You are the one who is doing the healing to survive infidelity. Not them.

This is more your soul’s journey than your head’s, really. No amount of logic (from those dear friends) truly helps. Know that you’ll survive infidelity in your marriage or in your relationship if you choose to stay together or not.

Caveat: your partner also has to make the same sort of commitment. (If you’re in a couple and they want to stay together.) Unfortunately, you can’t do their work for them. The couples who survive infidelity choose to work on themselves individually and then work on their relationship together. Agreements need rewriting. Their hearts, time to mend. And new thoughts and perspective added to the mix.

That broken heart, the buckled knee are the keys to your healing and surviving. In their own way, they’re broken, unguarded, and vulnerable. They’ve been cracked wide open and your knees, unable to hold you up on their own. This is the moment to ask for help. To reach out to someone you trust.

Surviving a Wife’s Infidelity: It Is Really Possible To Trust Again?!

May 24, 2017

No matter who cheats in a relationship, surviving and restoring a marriage after infidelity isn’t easy for either partner. When a wife cheats, it leaves a particularly nasty taste in a husband’s mouth for all those sexist beliefs we have about infidelity. Most people assume, wrongly, that only men cheat. When a wife commits adultery, it messes with a man’s ability to trust anyone but especially themselves. It definitely affects his ability to trust within his own home. In order to survive a wife’s infidelity, it is possible to trust again but there are growth and independence to get back again.

Regardless of how modern some marriages are, infidelity only occurs and is labeled as such, when a couple has the spoken agreement of monogamy. An open marriage does not experience infidelity.

In order to restore your monogamous relationship and overcome your wife’s infidelity, you will have to true up to what’s really going in the bedroom. A new agreement – spoken and unspoken has to be put back into your relationship. Along with a commitment to personal growth, the growth of the partnership, and the growth of the family.

It takes a lot of work to rectify broken trust and the ensuing pain of a wife’s infidelity.

Doing so is going to take more courage than you’ve ever had to muster in your personal relationships before now. Because infidelity doesn’t occur between two people who are working on their monogamous relationship with humility and openheartedness.

There’s the courage to admit you cannot go through this alone and the courage to restore your marriage to some modicum of what you want or thought you had. Doing so takes two mature adults willing to take a good look at themselves. Infidelity occurs because spoken and unspoken agreements are broken.

Recreating agreements before or after infidelity cannot be done by just one partner.

Too often in my line of work, I hear from someone getting a divorce because their wife has cheated on them. The pain is evident and heartbreaking to learn. The effects and ramifications for this kind of pain can affect everything. It costs a lot of money to become divorced. Self-esteem can suffer. Then as the concentric circles move outward, one’s job, relationships, career prospects, and lifestyle might be changed. It’s not easy to deal with all these changes by oneself.

You can’t DIY or simply, “deal with it” minimizing the impact cheating does to your psyche and to your heart.

It’s hard to face the double life.Usually, an affair is quite hidden, often occurring over a great deal of time. (Women don’t usually go from bed to bed.) She’s going to be defensive and frightened of your response. (Understandably.) And you will want to be careful – the confession isn’t going to be easy to hear or to understand.

Most people initially feel as if they can’t possibly survive their wife’s infidelity. You don’t know who to hate more – her, her lover or yourself for not seeing it. You’ll probably be filled with conflicting thoughts.

Unfortunately, you can’t hate her into loving you. You can’t hate him enough to destroy yourself and there’s no way you can’t punish yourself into forgiveness.

It becomes a series of tortuous moments. The powerlessness and overwhelm can drive a person crazy. As you try to navigate this particular emotional storm, one minute you’re in love, trying to forget. You’re driven by the fear of what the future looks like. Another, you’re willing to forgive but not forget. While all along, you want to turn back time and pretend none of it happened, to begin with.

When you’re surviving a wife’s infidelity, first, do no harm.

Go someplace safe for a while. Leave, so that you can cool down before you say or do something you’ll regret. Take some time away from the partnership to give yourself a safe place to process. Unfortunately, betrayal cuts deep and it’s not easy to reclaim trust if you don’t take time away for yourself for a while.

To rebuild trust, face facts and reestablish healthy independence within your marriage.

This takes some time. You’ll have to take a hard look at whatever lack of sex or emotional disconnection you developed. As you face your naiveté, you’ll naturally begin to protect yourself and feel as if everything is unsteady. This is the time to question what’s been going on.

It’s funny how growth seems to never happen during the good times.

I am not a big fan of keeping a cheater in your life. But I’m also not in your shoes. My belief is that a cheater is a cheater until the day they decide not to cheat any longer. You cannot make that decision for your wife.

Marriage in our day and age is about free choice. Every monogamous couple wakes up and decides if this is another day for putting their lover at home first. Every day. Without making that decision, it’s tough to create happiness and harmony in your home. We are all inundated with distractions like pornography, flirtations and many opportunities to cheat.

If you don’t opt-in to creating a loving relationship, monogamy doesn’t stand a chance.

As you work to survive your wife’s infidelity, you may be tempted to blame yourself. Sometimes you’ll think that’s your only option. You do play a part in the dynamic you’ve created, but you are not responsible for the cheating. Ever. No matter what is thrown in your face. Most likely a lot will be thrown in your face.

Love alone cannot save a marriage. I wish it were that easy. So you’re going to have to do your work to become an individual again within your partnership. Unfortunately, for right now, she’s proven not to be trustworthy with your heart.

The marriages that survive a wife’s infidelity depend upon two people, committed to recreating everything together. Without that kind of commitment, it will not work. So your first test… will she join you?

You need her undying commitment to being in a couple with you. Again.

You can’t continue shouldering all the burden of the relationship by yourself any longer. When a wife has had an affair, you realize that you’ve been doing most of it without her full support for far too long. It will eat at your self-esteem and self-respect going forward.

With the right kind of support and guidance, you have a brief window to heal the shame with forgiveness. When you decide to become the bigger person, you put your healing into the realm of possibility. It’s a harder journey than just sitting down and discussing what’s not working with a spouse. It is truly stepping into a new commitment layered with generosity and trust.

After a wife’s infidelity, it’s time to understand what marriage and monogamy truly mean.

To play with your enemy again takes stamina and strength. Along with inspiration, hope, and optimism. Perhaps even a bigger faith than you might have at the moment. As you do your part and take on your growth, you’ll be surprised by your courage. I suspect, based on the clients I’ve worked with, you won’t regret any of your efforts. Your growth will justify the time or money. Life is, once again, teaching you a great deal. As you strive to thrive because of your wife’s infidelity, you will know you’re capable of anything and that true love is possible!