Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: One of the biggest obstacles that you have to overcome when trying to evaluate or even save your marriage after your spouse has an affair is determining if you can believe his claims. Often, you truly want to believe him, but you can’t help but doubt some of what he is telling you. After all, he very easily and effortlessly lied to you while he was cheating, so what is to ensure that he is telling you the truth now?

An example of this type of concern is something like: “I only caught my husband cheating because I left my lunch at home and I swung by to get it. My husband has been unemployed for four months and he has been having an affair with one of my neighbors. This woman was at our house and when I walked in and as soon as I saw her, I knew that something was up. A quick check on his phone and facebook account showed me that I was right. Because my husband has lost his job, we can’t afford to move and the other woman has lived in our neighborhood for twenty years. My husband swears that he hasn’t seen the other woman and that he won’t see her. He says he will only take our dogs for walks when I can be with him. He says that he doesn’t go outside or have any visits from her while I am at work. He hasn’t given me any specific reason not to believe him. But since I’m not home and I can only call him, I have my doubts. What is to stop him from sneaking her in there and just answering the phone like he is alone? I’d like to save my marriage, but I have my doubts as to whether or not it is possible. I just don’t have the trust. And since there is no way for him to prove that he is telling me the truth, I’m not sure how to restore it either.”

I am sure that you already suspect this, but most women in your situation have the same doubts. Unless you are with your husband twenty four hours per day (which isn’t possible or desirable for most of us) then there is always going to be some mystery as to exactly what he is doing. And it is only normal to suspect him of wrong doing when he has just recently cheated on you. In a sense, as the faithful spouse, you can get a little paranoid.

I can only speak for myself, but after my own husband’s affair, if he was even five minutes late or he didn’t call me when I thought he would, my mind would automatically go to places where he was doing something wrong or even being unfaithful again. These assumptions weren’t correct. And they only eroded our trust that much more. But you can only do so much to avoid this. In time, as the trust is rebuild and as you begin to see that, time and time again, your spouse comes through and ends up doing exactly what he has said, then you begin to back away with these assumptions.

But until then, you can try to work it out so that the circumstances allow you to trust as much as is possible at the time. For example, perhaps it would make you feel better if you dropped by unannounced a time or two just to reassure yourself that she isn’t there. Or, you could arrange for him to meet you for lunch regularly. Alternatively, you could arrange for him to do something very regularly outside of the house like networking, training, or something that would lessen the tension and give him confidence with his job search.

Frankly, people can become quite depressed and hopeless when they are unemployed, and this could well have contributed to his cheating. That’s why I believe it’s vital to aggressively pursue anything to do with improving his employability to keep his self esteem high.

That’s why I also don’t think that counseling is a bad idea here. A man who is willing to go with you to counseling gives you just one more indication that he is serious about making his marriage work. And if this is true, you have to ask yourself if he would jeopardize that same marriage by continuing on with the same thing that almost ended it in the first place.

I know that you feel like you are being asked to just blindly trust him.  That is why I would check in at times and why I would try to keep him extremely busy in his job search.  But, at the end of the day, you can’t be with him all of the time.  And there comes a point where you have to decide if you’re going to assume that he is being truthful until he gives you a reason to think otherwise.

This was my strategy.  I told myself that I would give my husband the benefit of the doubt until he gave me a reason to stop doing this.  He never gave me a reason. He made good on all of his promises. You can read more about my experience on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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