Does Infidelity Have To Mean Divorce?

The most common cause of divorce is infidelity. It causes a lot of pain and embarrassment and is heartbreaking for the person cheated on. If infidelity occurs, it may mean the marriage has unresolved issues that need to be dealt with. Usually, people choose to have an affair when there are serious issues in their marriage. Thus, infidelity is not the reason for the problems in the relationship but is a symptom of those problems.

It is not easy for a spouse to understand this. The immediate reaction is to put all the blame on the spouse who cheated for the problems in the relationship. If your spouse goes outside of your relationship to find love and affection, your marriage already has serious issues. That is not to say an affair is ever justified, but if you look at the situation this way there is hope of rebuilding the relationship.

You will never figure out how to work things out in your marriage if you put all the blame on your cheating spouse and you refuse to accept any of the responsibility for what went wrong in your relationship. You won't get anywhere if you simply blame and accuse your spouse of causing all the problems in your marriage.

How to Survive Infidelity

Even if an affair is never discovered, there will be damage to the marriage. If you are looking for love and affection from someone other than your spouse, you are not focusing on building a strong marriage. A cheating spouse usually distances  himself or herself from the relationship and this can be confusing for the spouse who doesn’t know what is going on.

Does infidelity mean that the marriage is going to end? You may be surprised to learn the answer is no! A lot of marriages can be saved and become stronger than ever after infidelity. However, it takes hard work and a lot of time. Couples have to want to focus on fixing the relationship and not the infidelity, though. This is not easy to do because the spouse who was cheated on is going to initially want to focus on blaming the cheating spouse.

In order to get over the pain of your spouse's infidelity, you need to learn to forgive and forget. You also have to learn to trust your spouse again, and this can be a difficult thing to do. The focus needs to be on rebuilding the marriage, though, which involves working through the many emotions you feel after learning about your spouse's infidelity. Your hurt, anger, and distrust won’t go away instantly and you can’t just ignore those feelings. If you try to ignore them, they will take over and make it impossible for you to see anything but negativity in your marriage.

Your spouse, on the other hand, needs to do some work on himself even if you are not aware of his infidelity. He has to figure out why he looked outside your marriage for love and affection. He needs to understand this if he is going to refocus himself on the marriage. Attending counseling may be the best way for the cheating spouse to deal with the issues in the relationship and end the affair so he can rebuild the marriage.

Choose Forgiveness

It is hard to rebuild your relationship after infidelity but it can be done. The first step on the road to a better marriage is to forgive your spouse for cheating and reconcile your emotions. It is hard to trust your spouse again after an affair. It is understandable that you will hold a lot of distrust and suspicion. You are always going to wonder about who your spouse talks to and who he is with when he is not home with you. You may even accuse your spouse of cheating again even if he isn't. Your spouse needs to earn your trust again.

Working with a marriage counselor helps a lot of couples figure out what the problems are in their relationship that caused the infidelity to occur. Counselors don’t take sides. He can help you and your spouse focus on what went wrong in the marriage and how you can fix it so you can both heal. You need to recreate your marriage so it can be a strong and healthy relationship from then on.

Infidelity is a sign that your marriage has some very serious issues. The issues in your marriage could be about money, kids, physical intimacy, or a host of other things. Many couples are able to rebuild their marriage after infidelity and go on to be very happily married for a long time. An affair is not necessarily going to lead to divorce as long as both spouses want to fix the relationship.