How to cope with a cheating spouse

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There are different factors that influence your capacity to trust other people, including your spouse. Social scientists have explored these factors and they found out that if these factors were shown by another person, trust will be granted to him more. Understanding these factors can also greatly enhance the process of rebuilding your trust on your spouse who has gone through an affair.

It matters that the person being trusted has the ability to deliver his promises. No matter how many dialogues you go through, no matter how many activities you do together, and no matter how you assure each other that everything will be alright, without the ability to trust, these will all be senseless.

You should also check the integrity of your spouse. Integrity is largely based upon past actions being completed or delivered. With an affair, integrity has been tarnished but if your spouse who went through an affair is willing to work it out, then such integrity will help build trust between you and your spouse.

You and your spouse should also display benevolence, which refers to your care and concern for each other. When both of you display affection and care, the process of rebuilding your trust will proceed at a much faster rate.

When these factors are enhanced between you and your spouse, you will be able to see results and your marriage will move towards reconciliation and healing.

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No matter how much social scientists and psychologists talk about trust and its bases, you have first hand experience at how it works through your relationship with your spouse. If your spouse had an affair, then surely, no amount of scientific explanation could explain and heal the pain that you are feeling.

Your trust towards your spouse is built upon love and interdependence with your spouse. Your need to be loved and your need to feel important can only be given by another person—the person you love and trust deeply. Trust, however, is risky. There is always the possibility that the person you trust would break such trust. When this trust is frustrated, then you would feel immense pain and disappointment.

In response to such an affair, you need to sort out and settle your differences. When you know each other—your personalities, your characters, as well as your quirks, then perhaps, you can better arrive at a better understanding of how you can settle your love and your trust.

Trust is important in resolving conflicts between you and your spouse. Hence, you need to affirm your love and your trust so that you can easily talk about your differences and the lessons you have learned with the experience of going through an affair.

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Love is always mentioned in pop love songs, in movies, in novels and short stories as well as in the lives of the people around us. Yet, it seems that for some people, love does not last long. Without a healthy level of trust, romance will not flourish and doubts and problems will arise.

If you have recently survived an affair, you need to deal with your hurt. The good thing, however, is that you can decide for yourself to go beyond what you have gone through. You should have a deep talk with your partner and assess how you can work things out.

Remember that love does not grow very easily; you should be able to make sacrifices. If you make sacrifices, however, you also expect the same thing from your partner. Unconditional love rarely exists in this world and your partner should also display the same level of commitment in rebuilding your marriage. Without this level of commitment, your marriage would not be rebuilt.

Trust is always necessary in ensuring that your marriage will once again become better. Rebuilding your trust is also anchored in the romance that you both enjoy. When you cultivate the love between you and your spouse, you can be sure to take the road to healing on a faster route. Go out on dates again and live a life of love. Before long, you will be able to feel the love and the trust between you returning.

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Trust is a decision. It does not occur automatically or by instinct. Remember the first time you trusted your partner? What did it take? Probably, your love enabled you to trust your partner. Yet, deep within yourself, trust is a major decision in your life.

With this love, you felt like you can achieve anything and you can easily deal with your partner. As you fell deeper in love, you became even more attached and felt a deeper level of trust with each other.

You might have been shocked when you learned about the affair that rocked your marriage. For a time, you could not think clearly and you felt like you can no longer trust your partner.

Love cannot be easily forgotten. If you and your partner are willing to work it out, why don’t you work on your marriage and rebuild your trust with each other? It is not easy to do that but it is a decision. With such a decision, you can hold on to your love and your partner can also start earning your trust again. The process may be difficult and may take some time, yet, if you decide to trust again, everything else will follow if you would work things out. 

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Broken trust is very difficult to rebuild. It is not impossible, however. Whether in friendships or in marital partnerships, trust is very important. With every trustworthy act done by either party, the trust gets stronger everyday. In marriage, if one of the spouses enters into an extra-marital affair, the relationship would be broken and trust would be put to severe strain and in a lot of cases, it breaks beyond mending.

When such extra-marital affair occurs, the couples need to reassess their love for each other. Trust does not come back at the snap of a finger or after a talk of the couple over a cup of coffee. It takes time. Such time, however, is not the kind of passive waiting. Rather, the couples should also be willing to lay down their own claims and let go of some of their rights.

Rebuilding trust also requires healing. The heart has to find healing first if it were to be capable of loving and trusting again. After undergoing a very difficult situation, it would have to feel once again that it is whole and not only a part of what it once was. If you give it time and work on healing, forgiveness will come in time.

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One of the steps necessary in healing a marriage after an affair is to stop all lizard talk. What is lizard talk. Lizard talk is when communication sounds more like it is between a master and slave rather than a husband and wife. Lizard talk is dangerous whichever spouse is speaking it. When such talk occurs, it indicates that ‘reptilian’ type thinking is occurring. Such thinking is often unfeeling and cold. When you and your spouse talk. Try to listen rather than react. Listen for not only what is said, but how they say it. Does it sound like communication between two partners or where one is the master and the other is in the subservient slave role? This is beyond having one person being the head of the family, in lizard talk, there is an objectifying in the talk as well. This is where the ‘slave’ spouse is often talked to as if they were a thing rather than being treated as a human being.

Best Regards,

Jeffrey Murrah

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