One side effect of your spouse’s affair is the weakening of the moral fiber of your marriage. Once there is an affair, many spouses engage in behaviors that they would not have otherwise considered doing. You may wonder if your spouse is now doing things they would not otherwise do. When they compromise their values in an affair, other compromises come easier. Once the affair happens, it opens the floodgates in many other areas.
Affairs seldom occur in isolation. There are often other compromises as well. You will notice changes in the amount of drinking, cursing, drug use, willingness to take risks and declines in moral behaviors. Part of cleaning up after the affair will need to include shoring up the damage to the moral foundations of their lives. The hard part is often choosing which moral compromise to repair first. The cheater likely compromised their morals in other areas besides the relationship between the two of you. This is another one of the reasons for when you find out about your spouse’s affair to intervene as quickly as you can. Delaying in intervening only allows the damage to spread.
There are cases where the only compromise is the affair, but those are rare. Rare like unicorn rare. In most cases, the affair is accompanied by lies and deception. The extent of the lies is often the only thing that varies from person to person.
What I can tell you is that whatever compromises occurred, they all start with the thinking of “I want what I want when I want it and how I want it”. That mindset is a common factor with all the moral compromises.
Best Regards,
Jeff Murrah
