How Long Does It Take For Your Marriage To Get Back To Normal After An Affair?
By: Katie Lersch: I often hear from people who are wondering for how long things are going to feel so tense and awful after their spouse has cheated and had an affair. I often hear from these folks weeks or months after the affair has been discovered and many of them had hoped that things would have improved more than they actually have. I heard from a wife who said: “I found out about five months ago that my husband had an affair with a coworker. He did tell me the truth about it and he has worked with me to save our marriage. We are both trying really hard but things are just so awkward. He tells me he feels as if he is constantly walking on egg shells around me and I fully admit that I very often feel angry and hurt. In short, things are just not the same. They are not even close to the same. Things feel forced, weird, and just off between us. How long does it take for your life and your marriage to get back to normal after the affair? Because I’m getting very tired of waiting. And if this is the way my marriage is going to be for the rest of my life then I’m not sure if it’s worth it to save my marriage.”
I understood how this wife felt because I have felt the exact same feelings. After your spouse has an affair, it can feel as if someone as stolen your normal life and replaced it with something that is completely foreign and undesirable. And when time goes by so slowly with no real improvement, it can begin to feel as if this is how your life, and your marriage, is always going to be. It’s very easy to make these types of assumptions, but I can tell you that they are often wrong. It’s my experience that things do get better and that life does eventually return to normal. How quickly this happens often depends on how hard you are working to heal. Often, if you don’t fully address and fix the underlying issues, then they will remain. And when they remain, that’s when the awkward and unnatural feelings continue to hang around. I will discuss this more below.
The Sooner You Work Through The Issues And Restore The Trust, The Sooner Things Will Feel More Normal: As I alluded to, often is a lot of time has passed and things still feel weird between you, then you need to look at your healing process. You can’t expect for your marriage to heal if you don’t examine where it might have been vulnerable and where you need to now fix it. And even when this process is complete, you will need to restore the trust until you can both feel at ease once again. If you try to skip over either of these steps, then you’re bound to have that feeling of unease that we’ve been talking about. You feel a little out of sorts and paranoid because you’re wondering if he’s going to cheat again. Or, you find that you’re still angry over little things because you still aren’t satisfied with his answers or you still haven’t fully resolved the issues.
Having these feelings doesn’t mean that things won’t get better or that you won’t even feel normal. It just means that there is more work to do. I know that it can be frustrating, but the upside to this is that if you give the issues the attention they deserve and you are then able to restore the trust, your reward is piece of mind. And believe me when I say that after you have been through something like this, the normal, boring and ordinary days will seem so very precious by comparison. You will value your marriage and your husband that much more when they are restored. And also, you aren’t as apt to take your marriage and your family for granted because it becomes obvious that things can change in the blink of an eye.
So to answer the question posed, how long it takes to feel normal again varies depending on many factors. It really helps if both people are very committed to fully addressing and solving any problems. And it helps if the cheating spouse is very motivated to take responsibility for restoring the trust. If these things don’t happen immediately, it certainly doesn’t mean that they will never happen. It just means that you may have to be more proactive and you may have to ask for what you need. Because your spouse likely feels that things aren’t right also and, even though he is the reason for the unease, he probably wants to get things back to normal as badly as you do.
I know how frustrated you feel. I would say that it probably took us around a year to begin to regain what had been lost. Part of this was I could not let go of my anger. Once I began to heal, things picked up. Now, I rarely think about the affair anymore. I have just moved on and our marriage is actually better. If it helps, you can read my story of recovery on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com
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