Some of you may struggle with the question of whether or not to tell your spouse is you cheated. I have heard many arguments on both sides of the question.
Some ‘experts’ say yes, some say no, and some say, ‘it depends‘.
What I can tell you is that not telling them about the affair limits the intimacy in your relationship. The secret becomes a wall of distance between the two of you.
Not telling insures you keeping a certain amount of distance in the relationship. If you want intimacy and closeness, you will need to tell them about the cheating.
When you disclose such information, there are risks. You risk rejection, you risk emotional vulnerability, you risk them getting upset.
There are some spouses who consider maintaining the status quo more important than taking risks. They want to avoid conflicts, even at the cost of severely limiting the closeness of your marriage relationship.
The will keep things shallow in order to avoid conflict.
When you limit the intimacy in your marriage, there will always seem to be a wall that you can not move past. Some part of the relationship is always shut off from you. It may be that your spouse has shuts it off from you or you may be shutting if off from them.
The thing with such secrets is that they keep you sick. They also contribute to weight issues. Yes, I did say that keeping secrets is connected with weight issues.
It could be that that obstacle keeping you from your ideal weight could be some secret that you are keeping inside. You will have to consider which is more important, keeping the secret or achieving your ideal weight. Your body has a way of telling on you, especially regarding keeping affair secrets.
I also realize that there are times that you WANT that distance. If your life or safety is at risk for telling about the affair, you may want some distance between you and your spouse.
Letting them get too close may be at the risk of your life or safety and perhaps the life and safety of the lover. Although that seems extreme, there are some extreme spouses out there.
When a spouse goes into a homicidal rage, most often it is directed at the lover, although there is likely plenty left over for their spouse as well.
For this reason, I say it is always best to tell, unless there is a safety concern. There is a principle of saving human life. That principle is an over-riding one. Since safety and preservation of human life trumps many other issues, including affair secrecy, it is the only exception I consider.
I have also encountered the situations where a spouse says that national security was at risk if they told about the affair. This is a problem with marriages where one of the spouses is military or government.
Those agencies often want your primary loyalty to them rather than to your spouse. Such demands put an unnatural pressure on marriages. Those pressures can be so great that the loyalty to the job or nation becomes a lover. It can trigger all the dynamics of an affair, even when one has not physically occurred.
Such affair dynamics are triggered by the misplaced loyalties. You may be mistaken about an affair actually happening in such situations, but you are not wrong about feeling those dynamics.
In such cases, you are being shut out and forced to accept a secondary role. You become a secondary wife to the primary wife of the job/national security.
If you are the one with the government or military job where secrecy is a way of life and loyalty to the nation/company/mission is primary there will be fallout. You will need to discuss how such dynamics impact your marriage. You will need to make sure of your marriage relationship and nurture it as much as you can. In such situations a little neglect can easily be magnified and turned into a major issue.
I address the issue of cheater recovery and the necessary steps in the video “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery“. It guides you through the crucial actions needed in starting your recover.
Keeping an affair secret is a sure way of limiting if not damaging the intimacy in your marriage. You may have to consider how close you want to be your spouse.
If you want closeness, then the secrecy has to go. If you want the distance, keeping the secret is a sure way of limiting what your marriage can be.
Best Regards,
Jeff
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