What to Do After Your Partner Has an Affair
Let’s start this conversation by acknowledging that learning of your partner having an affair is devastating.
Many people wonder: what did I do wrong? am I not enough for my partner? Some people can feel angry and demand answers. Others can feel sad, hopeless and needing reassurance. Any and all of these reactions are normal. There’s no one right way to feel or respond to your partner having an affair.
Here’s the thing, affairs don’t usually sink relationships- it’s lying that typically ends or halts progress on affair recovery.
So your partner had an affair…now what?
There are a few steps to keep in mind while processing an affair:
First, be careful about the questions you ask.
You may feel like you want to know everything about the affair. That’s a normal reaction. However, once you know you can’t un-know and that can cause you to want to avoid certain places, positions or possessions.
I highly recommend seeking the support of a counselor to help you process the questions you have. It’s my experience that by the time couples reach a counselor, the questions have been asked and we then have to sort through how to heal. As hard as it is to wait, I encourage trying to process your emotions, take space from your partner and seek counseling support from a LMFT (Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist) immediately.
Second, many people want reassurance or make threats after learning of their partner’s affair.
Sex is complicated and healing from an affair using sex with your partner to gain reassurance can sometimes cause more damage in the beginning.
Now, every couple is different and so is their healing process. I’ve also seen couples make threats about child custody, finances and ruining a partner’s career. Why does this happen? So that the hurt partner can gain back some sense of power in the relationship. However good that might feel at the moment it doesn’t help a couple heal in the long run. It’s a short-term win and potentially a long-term loss.
We want to rebuild a relationship with our partner in which both of us feel like we want to be together and are willing to work through the hard things as a couple, not staying together out of fear of retribution or coercion.
Third, the injured partner will often experience post-traumatic stress symptoms after learning of an affair.
That can look like avoidance of certain places or hyper-fixation on certain questions. It can also look like recurrent and intrusive thoughts. This is normal but very uncomfortable and is a sign that a couples counselor needs to get involved sooner rather than later.
Why do affairs happen?
Our brains seek answers in order to fully process and put behind us an event of this magnitude. It’s hard to heal from something you don’t understand and especially heal with someone you no longer trust.
But the truth is, most people don’t wake up saying, “I think I’m going to hurt my partner today”.
Most often, a partner meets someone that sparks something inside of them they didn’t know was missing. It starts out harmless with conversation and slowly but surely more and more information is shared and a bond forms.
Often, the partner having the affair will voice feeling disconnected or unimportant to their spouse/partner for a long time. There have usually been communication and intimacy issues that haven’t been addressed in productive ways leaving the affair partner susceptible to getting their needs met elsewhere. This in no way makes the affair okay. The hard part is, once you’ve built that connection and bond with someone it’s an itch that oftentimes feels so overwhelming that you keep going after it to scratch it even though you know irreparable damage can happen.
If I could give any piece of advice, I’d say get a marriage counselor if you're starting to notice things are missing in your relationship. The person we have an affair with represents something to us but in my experience rarely is it what we’re really seeking.
In fact, research indicates that 70% of couples whose relationship began as an affair don’t make it! That indicates that the affair was actually only filling a gap in the short-term and not truly lasting love.
The truth? Having an affair will never get you what you’re really looking for. It may feel like this person is all you ever wanted but in my experience it’s short-lived. If you’re considering having an affair or have had an affair it may be helpful to do your own individual counseling to assess the unique variables in your life that you may be looking for.
Here are some key takeaways:
Couples can heal from affairs and often have a better relationship than the one they had prior to the affair.
Get a counselor involved as soon as possible. Both for you as a couple and individual therapists for each of you if possible.
An affair partner will most likely not be able to give you the life you’re looking for in the long-run. Only you can provide the happiness for yourself that you seek.
If something is missing in your relationship with your current partner, then you need to fix that and talk through that before adding other partners.
Are affairs ever a good thing?
By definition, affairs are a secret you withhold from your partner and that causes a serious break in trust. Going behind your partner’s back will only cause hurt and pain that’s very challenging to recover from - so basically, no. Affairs aren’t ever a good idea.
However, if you never got the chance to explore love and sex in healthy ways in your early adulthood and you feel like you missed out, then I can understand why you’d want to open up your marriages. Couples who successfully open up their relationship do so with a lot of communication, boundaries and expectations. So it is possible to open your marriage to other partners in a healthy way, if you’re both on the same page from the start.
How do we heal after an affair?
The first step in the Gottman Method for affair recovery is what we call atone. Atonement provides the injured partner a safe space to process their feelings and have their questions answered.
In order to move through this stage productively, the injured partner needs to feel their partner’s remorse and willingness to make things right.
Sometimes the questions, feelings and thoughts are on repeat as a partner tries to make sense of what happened. The injured partner doesn’t feel safe and may not trust anything you say. Consistency is key here. You can’t rush through this part of the process to get to the other side. Stay patient and be willing to stay close to your partner as they process. Answer the same questions as often as they need you to.
I know it's frustrating but the more a partner feels like they can’t do this the longer this process will take.
The second step in the Gottman Method for affair recovery is: attune. Attunement is where the therapist will have you start going back through the history of your relationship and rebuilding the way you communicate with one another.
This is where we begin to dig through what setup this relationship and the needs of both partners to make the relationship healthier. This whole step focuses on training the couple to develop new communication dynamics that allow for both people to work through conflict from the past that hasn’t been addressed or healed from.
The third and final step in the Gottman Method for affair recovery is: attach. In this final phase of the process, Attachment is when the therapist works on rebuilding intimacy and friendship. Modern sex therapy techniques and rituals of connection are built to help the couple feel a sense of connection that reduces triggers and encourages healthier and more frequent intimacy.
Tips for the injured partner:
Remember, that the healing process takes time. You may never forget what happened but you can heal from it.
Don’t try to rush through this process and just “get over it”. In order to get over it you have to go through it.
Grief is a large part of this process. Grieving the trust and sacredness of your relationship. Grieving a sense of security and feeling like your whole life imploded.
You will get through this and heal. Don’t try to go through it alone and be careful of the choices you make as you deal with your grief.
For the partner who had the affair:
You experienced a loss too. You may have felt really connected to the person you had an affair with. Many people feel like they can’t grieve what essentially is a breakup.
You may need individual counseling to process this loss outside of couples counseling to heal your relationship.
Don’t rush your partner to just “get over it”. I know you feel bad and you promise you’ll never do it again. This affair didn’t come out of nowhere. There were issues in your relationship that weren’t being dealt with and now it’s time to deal with them.
Tell the whole truth, not partial truths. Healing after an affair is possible, healing after more lying and withholding information is often very challenging if not impossible.
Final thoughts
You and your partner have a road ahead of you to recovery. Make sure you have the right people there to support you and both of you agree on who information is being shared with.
If the goal is to stay in the relationship and work through it then you need to have resources and support that help you do that. If you want to end the relationship then you may need help from an attorney and co-parenting coach to help you walk through the process without being vindictive.
You need to be able to heal. It’s important and necessary to but healing before the need to get even.