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How Do You Rescue Your Relationship After An Affair?

Article by Toby Green

Seventy five percent of the counseling business involves infidelity. That’s not hard to comprehend if you believe the statistics. Approximately seventy eight percent of men and forty eight percent of women are unfaithful during their married lives or committed relationships (although the female numbers are growing at a faster rate then men’s).

Although infidelity constitutes a large population of therapy clientele, it also accounts for a highly successful therapy result.

There’s an order to things. Firstly he (using ‘he’ for the sake of simplicity and numbers) has extramarital sex. There seems to be as much damage inflicted whether this constitutes a one night stand or a long-term affair. The emotions and experiences at issue are breach of trust, rejection, agony, jealousy, treachery, homicide, doubting one’s ability to know another human being, humiliation and feeling a loser. Pretty much the full gambit of negative emotions.

So in they come, Harry and Sally.

Harry is writhing in guilt, embarrassment, fury at his stupidity, fury at being caught, confused that there can be so much “air-time” over what was “just sex”, frustration at having already said “I’m sorry” a hundred times, wondering why “we have to go over this again” and not understanding why saying to his spouse “you won”, isn’t working.

Sally is writhing in agony, fury, wondering how this could have happened to her, questioning her intelligence, doubting her attractiveness, her hair, her breasts and wanting to know what restaurants they went to, what kind of underwear the other woman wore and what perfume the other woman used.

The first step is that Harry is going to have accept that there is nothing in the female vernacular that equates to ‘just sex’ any more than ‘oops I accidentally totaled your 1922 Bugatti’. He has to be willing to experience the most profoundly wrong moment of his life. If he’s going to have a hope in Hell of salvaging his marriage, he has to get that there is no excuse, no minimizing, and no side stepping the issue. He has to be able to let in and really acknowledge the massive degree of pain his partner is in (similar to a richter 10 earthquake). AND that he caused it!

Next he’s going to have to prove that he’s understood the massive pain by paraphrasing what he perceives her experience has been like. It is this that will create the bridge of intimacy between them. Strange as it seems, Sally who’s been hit by a train, needs to download and share her train-wreck experience the way most people who are violated and in shock need to use catharsis to heal. And even though he’s the one who’s betrayed her, he’s the closest most meaningful person in her world. It is from him, the transgressor that she turns to for comfort, support and understanding.

Why would Harry be willing to put himself through this? Because he really wants his marriage to work and secondly, I promise him that this is a process and that processes have endings.

Ultimately it is Sally who must decide whether or not to proceed with the marriage. At the end of the day, Harry can apologize with the appropriate level of intention that matches her pain. He can demonstrate that he’s developed commitment, that he’s learned intimacy and has come out the other end of this a better man and husband in many ways than he was going into their marriage years ago. That’s the best it gets.

However, Sally has to know whether she can integrate the affair into the fabric of their relationship. There’s no frontal lobotomy and no erasure of the tapes that will for a long time play in her head. There will be bad days, songs, smells and reminders that will catch her completely unawares and take her breath away. And she’s going to have to wear this and ride it out. Otherwise Harry will feel defeated, judged, forever “sin-binned” with no hope of exoneration, forever condemned.

Treated properly, infidelity either becomes a thread woven into the tapestry of a relationship OR it becomes the tapestry. It’s up to Sally.

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