Although infidelity is an extremely difficult issue to cope with, it doesn’t need to be a marriage dealbreaker. You should anticipate the ups and downs associated with the road to recovery when dealing with infidelity. However, once you and your spouse fight through to the other side, many times your marriage can be stronger than where it was prior to the affair.
Michele Weiner-Davis, MSW is an internationally renowned relationship expert, best-selling author, marriage therapist, and professional speaker who specializes in helping people change their lives and improve important relationships. Among the first in her field to courageously speak out about the pitfalls of unnecessary divorce, Michele has been active in spearheading the now popular movement urging couples to make their marriages work and keep their families together. She is the author of seven books including her best-selling books, DIVORCE BUSTING: A Step-by-Step Approach to Making Your Marriage Loving Again, and THE SEX-STARVED MARRIAGE: A Couple's Guide to Boosting Their Marriage Libido.
Michele's work has been featured in major newspapers such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and magazines such as Time, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Essence, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Woman's Day, Men's Health, New Woman, and McCall's. Michele is a marriage expert on Redbook's advisory board, ClubMom.com and iVillage.com. She has made countless media appearances on shows such as Oprah, 48 Hours, 20/20, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, CBS Evening News, CNN, and Bill O'Reilly. Michele's Keeping Love Alive program aired on PBS stations nationwide. She recently completed a reality based show for the BBC about helping couples save their marriages.
Michele maintains that her true expertise in helping couples have great relationships is derived from first-hand experience. She and her husband have been married for more than thirty years.
Isn’t the sacred marital covenant broken by adultery? How can it possibly ever be the same? And how can it be better? I hear this all the time, but I never read or hear any actual empirical, hard proof of marriages being better after infidelity. This always seems vague and related to “hopium” to me. How can a precious vase be better after being shattered into a thousand pieces? It will always be missing vital physical matter and will be weaker, no matter if you manage to glue it back together and stand it back up again. The odds of it holding any water are very slim, aren’t they?
Anonymous
Unless a betrayed husband or betrayed wife is given a frontal lobotomy or has an accident that induces severe amnesia, there is NO WAY they will ever feel the same about their wayward spouse again. Full stop. They can forgive. That doesn’t mean they should stick around for the sh*t show the adulterer deliberately created with a cost-benefits analysis that put their marriage low on the totem pole of priorities. Only people who are particularly adept at self-delusion would be able to sleep next to a wayward (or “former wayward” whatever that distinction without a difference means) spouse and not think of the trauma of the betrayal. We read and hear about SO MANY betrayed spouses who have a recurrent surge of trauma 5, 10, 15 years later and realize they made a tremendous and tragic mistake by trying to reconcile with an adulterer.
