If your spouse has cheated on you
by Mira and Charles on July 14th, 2009We think it can’t happen to us, but it can. There’s about a one in three chance that we’ll find out our spouse has cheated on us in on way or another. And then what do you do?
It’s one of the most upsetting things that can happen. Actually it’s more than upsetting. It’s so painful and confusing that it makes us crazy. And it’s because we’re so upset that we’re liable to overreact and do stupid things. But now is the worst time of all to act impulsively or imprudently. If you keep your head, you might save your heart, your marriage, your whole future.
Here are the do’s and don’ts if you should ever find yourself in this situation:
1. Give yourself time to cool down. When you find out you’ve been cheated on, the demons of anger, fear, and hurt pride come flying out. You are, in a very real sense, temporarily insane, understandably so. This is normal and it will go away. But until it does, you shouldn’t do anything or say anything to anyone other than your closest confidant or a skilled professional. Do not make or announce any decisions. Plenty of women who wanted to kill the lousy SOB who cheated on them were still happily and gratefully married to him 5 years later.
2. Keep the children out of it. When you’ve been hurt, there’s a part of you that wants the world to know about your pain, and to know who caused it. This is why people that in effect tell the kids, “your father is a no-good, rotten SOB.” But saying this hurts everybody. It makes healing the relationship harder. It puts your kids in a painful, anxiety-producing position, and it hurts you, because your kids are very likely to be more angry with you for saying bad things about their dad than they are with their dad for doing bad things to you.
3. Don’t torture yourself by asking for every agonizing detail. We’re all tempted to do this. But all it does is make it all the harder for the marriage to heal. As you find your way back to each other, those details will haunt your brain and make things much harder.
4. Don’t give up on the marriage, at least not yet. Your anger right now is no gauge whatsoever of whether the marriage can be or should be saved. It’s just a sign of how hurt you are. Only when your pain has died down will you be able to see the marriage clearly and decide if you want to stay in it or not. And that’s going to depend on 2 things. Whether your spouse is willing to go through a healing process with you under professional guidance. And whether you can see that the marriage, on balance, is one that meets most of your needs or not.
5. Find a good marital therapist. At this point the only way you can regret-proof a decision to stay or leave is to work with an experienced professional to try to heal things and make the relationship as good as it can be. It’s only after 6 months of such work that you will have enough info to make a solid decision you won’t regret later. This is one of the areas we specialize in here at The Chestnut Hill Institute.
What about you? If you’ve ever been in the situation of discovering that your spouse has cheated on you, what do you wish you’d done differently? What are you glad you did? Your comments would be helpful to lots of people.
September 9th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
I found myself being the other woman when I was the one he loved first. That part was a mistake. My man of 4 years moved out & got his own place. so he wasn’t really cheating on me as much as with me. My mistake was rushing back in every time he said he was done with her. Then he was confused again. Because he missed the one who wasn’t there. Give the situation time to cool off but not neglected. I should have made him wait as long to get back into it, as it had taken for him to miss me again & do something about it. When he had gone back to her for 10 days I should have insisted he stay without either of us for 11 days. Yet staying in slight contact. Don’t let the “fear of losing” the other let you rush back in. If you don’t really have them back it’s better to find out while you are still getting by - day by day/ one breath at a time - without them then to start all over’ again in short period of time. Never let someone cut you off from the friends you had before them. you’ll need your friends to keep you strong when rough waters hit. Or when you decide to start over new. It’s hard to make new friends when you’re sad about what’s gone.
September 10th, 2009 at 6:06 am
thank you — these are wise and important words. And this, of course, is exactly why in When Good People Have Affairs Mira and I made SUCH a strong appeal to the cheater to choose. the temptation is always to stay up in the air, but all that does is hurt everyone and drive them crazy, as roadtripblues says. now that book was written from the point of view of the cheater. thank god we have helped so many people sort of their lives with a minimum of pain. but it’s starting to look like we have GOT to write a book for “the other woman.:” What do you think??