Healing After An Affair - Will Our Relationship Ever Be The Same Again?
Healing after an affair is hard work. And Yes, you wish it had never have happened. You wish you could go back to the good old days, to the way it used to be before the affair when you thought that your marriage was pretty okay. If you're injured by an affair, it is not uncommon to want to go back to a seemingly carefree time in your relationship where you did not have to think of the betrayal and its aftermath day after day. The truth is that you don't want your marriage to be the same as it was before the affair. Here's why:
Going back to how it was before the affair might have given your spouse the justification or motivation that lead to the cheating in the first place.
You can't go back because in some way there was something wrong with the marriage before that led to the cheating.
We may not be perfect, more than likely we made mistakes and/or caused our fair share of problems but there is no excuse for infidelity. It is pure selfishness. There are always better ways to deal with our relationship struggles, disappointments, etc. than cheating. But thinking that everything would be okay if you just went back to the old days is a fallacy and is not going to move you toward healing after an affair. You will always cherish certain memories of your past together, but you will never forget this ugly situation. No matter how hard you try, you can't undo the affair. It happened, it's now in the past, we can't go back in life, only go forward.
You can't press reset and just go back to where you were, no way, it doesn't happen like that - actually your entire life changes for ever. You will never forget the affair. You will be haunted by it as long as you live, but less and less with each passing day as you work toward healing your marriage. What you really want to be thinking about now is what kind of marriage you want to create in the years to come. You have to abandon the idea that you are going to go back to how it was before the affair, only then will you be able to commit to rebuilding a better marriage. Once you've decided that what you want is a better marriage right now and every day for the rest of your life, start working to make it happen.
Restore the love
An affair strangles the love and squeezes the life out of a marriage. Rekindle your love for one another. Without love it is impossible to have a deeply connected relationship with your spouse and repair your marriage.
Commit to making your marriage work
It takes two to tango, so both of you need to make a commitment to each other and to do the necessary work to save your marriage.
Work to repair your broken marriage
Staying married is indeed a blessing, but it takes a lot of hard work and effort. Healing after an affair also takes time, a lot more time than you ever thought it would.
Get marriage help
Having love, commitment and the willingness to work hard in place is all well and good. But you still need to know how to go about making your marriage better. There was no marriage manual given to you on the day of your wedding, so you have to actively educate yourselves on what is required to build a strong committed marriage.
Sad as it is, sometimes it takes a crisis to make people stronger, but both people need to be 100 percent willing to do the work needed and go forward without bitterness. None of us are perfect, we just need to be willing to learn from our mistakes. Healing after an affair can and does get easier if you both really work on it.