Control

So, if you need him to be more open, you expect him to talk when you want him to. If you think he should spend more time at home, you demand that he accedes to your request. If you feel he should go with you to do your shopping, he must follow. It’s like a small price to pay for having cheated on you to do what you want him to do. To you, fixing the marriage after cheating has taken place should be more of his responsibility than yours.

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Perhaps, it’s a form of control. Because you have been betrayed, you want to take back control of your life and one way to do that is to start controlling your spouse, the one who has hurt you. Through exercising such control, you feel more in charged, which is a defense mechanism for further pain in the marriage after cheating seems to have wreck your happiness.

Willingness To Change

Sometimes, cheaters change and do what is being told because of guilt. But they change, not because they want to, but because circumstances are forced upon them. So, be aware that your spouse may be listening to you to change his behavior because he needs to do that to keep the marriage, not because it comes from within to want to do better to make you happy.

The difference between a willingness from within and external pressure to change is it can turn into a form of resentment for the latter. Imagine you are constantly being pressured by your spouse to change. Would you feel more disconnected from him rather than becoming more intimate? To save a marriage after cheating requires rebuilding intimacy and trust, not pressure on one or the other to change.

You Too Should Change

If you think your spouse should change, you should also look at yourself and see where you can change to make your relationship better. No doubt, your spouse may a duty to work harder to save the marriage after cheating but the reality is in a marriage, it takes two to tango. If you demand your spouse to change without evaluting your own weaknesses, you are not improving your relationship in any way. Remember, it may be your own weaknesses that pushed your spouse to look for warmth elsewhere in the first place.

The other good reason why you should change first before you demand your spouse to do the same is because you must take the lead to encourage him to move in the same direction. Your actions can influence your spouse. If he sees that you are serious in improving the marriage after cheating has taken place and you are changing in a positive way, he will be more likely to follow. For instance, if you make a change from being bitter to be more understanding, your spouse would be encouraged to get closer to you rather than the other way round. This will help to strengthen your marriage, all because you took the first step to change first.

Therefore, if you really think your spouse should change, always look at yourself as well and identify all your weaknesses, baggages, faults and insecurities. They too can be contributing factors to a lousy marriage overall.

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However, you need to remember that an important decision such as should I leave my spouse, needs to be decided with a clear mind. If your emotions are still raw, you should take the time to lessen the pain first before making the decision to stay or go. You should not let emotions to cloud your judgment, especially when you have kids and a future to think about.

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One common mistake is to think that cheating alone is enough to justify saying goodbye. That should not be the case. Because cheating is almost always a symptom of other problems in the relationship. It is these other problems you need to evaluate with equal or more importance when making your decision of whether to stay or to leave your marriage.

Look Behind The Cheating

If the problems at the foundation of your relationship has been long-standing and there is no compromise that you can see, then perhaps a divorce is an option. In other words, you need to look at the bigger picture and see whether the existing problems in your marriage can be resolved, apart from the cheating that has taken place. Can both of you work around these problems? Is there a willingness to make the marriage work? Is there room for compromise? These are tough questions you need to ask whenever your mind is focused on the issue of should I leave my husband or wife.

Sometimes, what it takes is to resolve those problems that have been left to fester in your marriage and the cheating issue will resolve itself. Focus on the root causes and problems and if they can be overcome, then your marriage can still have a chance to thrive. It is not merely the cheating you should concentrate and base your decision on to decide whether to stay or seek a divorce.

On the surface, because the cheating is the one that hurt you directly, that automatically becomes a good reason to leave. But if you go one level deeper, you will see all the cobwebs of your relationship lurking in dark corners. These cobwebs are the ones you need to seriously look into and decide if they can be cleared away. They are the ones that would give you a much better basis to decide it is still worth it to keep your marriage or otherwise.

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Communication Breakdown

If you think that there is little reason for your spouse to cheat because no big problems are present in your relationship, then you may be badly mistaken. Sometimes, your spouse may be dissatisfied and unhappy, but he chose not to tell you for some reason or other. There is a lack of communication there and as a result, there are a lot of things affecting your spouse that you may not be aware of.

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Improving marriage in such a case requires you to avoid the same mistake that you have made prior to the cheating episode. That is you need to work on the communication between you and your spouse. To do that, you will need to find out why your spouse made the choice of not talking to you but chose to seek comfort from someone else instead.

A Common Reason

For example, one of the common reasons why your spouse might choose not to be honest with you is because it often leads to quarrels, disagreements or simply coldness. Whenever an issue is brought up, he cannot be direct and truthful because you will become angry, cold, defensive or rude. It leads to much negativity that your spouse rather disconnects and shuts down than communicate further.

As time goes by, the dissatisfaction gets buried within although on the surface, everything seems normal. To your spouse, keeping quiet is simply a way to maintain peace, giving the impression that no major problems exist although improving marriage is already necessary and critical then.

Of course, there may be other reasons why your spouse may choose not to communicate with you. If you want a healthier marriage, you will need to find out why and fix this communication issue so that the risk of future cheating can be significantly reduced.

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One of the reasons why many people find it hard to rediscover the happiness in their marriage after cheating has taken place is because they lose sight of the goal. It becomes too hard as feelings are overwhelming.

So, you give in to the feelings of anger and betrayal that the language that you use to communicate with your spouse is reflective of these negativities. Once you use negative language, your spouse no longer has the incentive to talk and communicate as he becomes defensive, ashamed or guilty of his actions. However, for infidelity recovery to take place in a marriage, open channels of communication is vital to thrash out underlying problems and issues that led to the unhappiness in the first place.

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How To Reconnect For Infidelity Recovery

If you want to reconnect and reestablish communication with your spouse to improve your marriage, you have to understand that there are a few rules you should abide by:

1. Don’t judge. Judging what your spouse has done will cause you to use words such as should, shouldn’t, never and always. Try beginning a sentence with a “You” and then followed by those words mentioned. You will end up with a tone that creates distance rather than understanding.
2. Be alert to your own emotions. When you are angry, take a time out and calm down first. Know what you are feeling inside prior to opening your mouth. Being cheated on doesn’t mean you can say what you want without considering how your spouse would feel. If you are angry and you don’t control yourself, you will end up saying hurtful things that don’t do the relationship any good and thwart the process of infidelity recovery.
3. Learn to listen. Listening not only means hearing what your spouse is saying, but also truly understanding. Try to put yourself in his shoes and see things from his perspective. You will learn why he cheats and what makes him unhappy with you and the marriage, if he can be encouraged to express his deepest thoughts.

The above is just a few things you can do to reestablish the connection with your spouse and begin the journey of infidelity recovery to save your marriage. It may seem unfair that you have to do all the hard work and give in much although your spouse is the one who is in the wrong when he cheated.

Your Goal

That is why you have to always keep sight of your goal. If you want to keep your marriage and make it better than before, you need to take that first step. You cannot always keep score of what is fair and unfair in a marriage. The irony is the more you try to force things to be fair, the more unhappy you will feel because your marriage is not going to improve.

Sometimes, what it takes is a little grace on your part and your spouse will respond accordingly. Human nature is such that if you stand firm, the other party will also dig in. No doubt, your spouse has cheated. You don’t have to agree with his actions but it doesn’t mean you can’t listen to his point of view and seek understanding. Reconnecting with your spouse and infidelity recovery in a marriage is all about opening the dooors of communication and you can only truly reconnect when you keep an open mind and learn to emphatize.

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Whatever your feelings are on the state of your marriage, being able to sit down and communicate rationally about the situation is important in order to learn from the experience. This is more so if you are planning to have a better relationship with your spouse after this difficult phase in your relationship. If you don’t seek to understand why the cheating took place and what motivated your spouse to do it, you won’t be able to improve whatever is ailing your relationship and work on rebuilding your marriage after infidelity.

Communication Tips On Rebuilding Marriage After Infidelity

So, what can you do to rebuild a marriage after infidelity? How do you talk and communicate in a way that can reestablish trust and connection? For a start, don’t get defensive. Usually, when a spouse expains why he cheats, he will bring up your shortcomings. Because of your behavior, he becomes unhappy and seeks comfort elsewhere.

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Avoid Being Defensive

If you start being angry and defensive when your spouse brings up your weaknesses, your discussion will get you nowhere. It’s hard to agree with what is being said, but you need to understand his unhappiness is real and it contributed to the cheating. The moment you become defensive, you deflect from the real issue. So, start by listening and refrain from offering your justification and resorting to counter-blaming. You will shut down further heart-to-heart discussion if you become defensive.

Refrain From Criticism

If you can’t be defensive, neither can you be judgmental. Being judgmental will usually lead to criticism. You can disagree about the action of cheating, but if you start being critical about your spouse’s character, you are making him feel bad about himself. Most people experience guilt when they have an affair. Magnifying that guilt by being critical will not make your spouse any happier. It won’t encourage him to talk when all you are doing is to make him look and feel bad. That is not the way to rebuild a marriage after infidelity when what you should try to achieve is reestablish trust and two-way communication.

It is also incredibly easy to be overly emotional when you are discussing about the cheating. This can lead you to say things you don’t mean and with a purpose to hurt. You tend to lose your rationality when you are suffering emotionally. As a result, everything your spouse says will seem unacceptable and wrong. Your response will be indicative of your feelings and this negative vibes will cause the whole communication to break down. So, if you don’t want a bitter discussion, control your emotions and reactions to open the gateway to better understanding so that both of you can start to rebuild the marriage after infidelity has happened.

Don’t Play The Blame Game

One last tip when rebuilding trust and intimacy is to stop the blaming and counter-blaming. There will be times after the affair that you and your spouse will bring up the many problems in the marriage. The tendency will be to blame each other for the disintegration of the relationship. For instance, your spouse explains that your behavior made him unhappy which is why he cheats. So, you start blaming him as a reason for your behavior. Next, he will start counter-blaming you for giving rise to that reason. What happens is the cheating discussion has turned into an exercise in blaming and counter-blaming. Rebuilding a marriage after infidelity requires maturity and restraint, not childish blame games that achieve little.

Remember that in every issue, we will always like to see things only from our own perspective. It is when you make it a point to take off your lenses and see things from your spouse’s perspective that you will understand him better. Having a cheating spouse is devastating. But even more devastating is if you don’t try to learn from it and make use of the experience as a lesson for personal growth and to rebuild your marriage after infidelity.

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It is not a book specifically about infidelity and cheating, but if you are thinking of saving your marriage, it is a good book to read. We recommend it because it is written in a way that is easy to digest and we think the points raised will help you towards recognizing your own attitudes and weaknesses that may have contributed to the problems in your marriage.

Basically, Rescue Your Love Life brings up eight dumb attitudes that will put a strain on your marriage and make it fall apart. With those attitudes also come some pointers on how to avoid them or improve your current situation. We find those dumb attitudes are pretty common in most marriages and many people simply tolerate them until it comes a time when the opportunity to seek comfort elsewhere arises. The extent of those dumb attitudes and how we deal with them daily also differ and these partly determine how toxic a marriage can become.

The authors espoused some Christian values in most of the chapters to reinforce universal concepts such as grace, which is necessary for a happy marriage. Their idea is you should always look at yourself first and take the first step to encourage a positive change in your marriage. If there is cheating going on right now, you certainly need to change when it comes to saving your marriage. Once you change in a positive way, it will influence your spouse to also work for the betterment of the marriage. This is similar to the concept of ‘give first, receive later’, which many find difficult to practise nowadays since it runs contrary to our need for instant gratification.

Anyway, if you are looking for a book on how to improve your marriage and want to take a look at your own attitudes that could shape the future of your relationship, then this book is for you.

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