Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: It’s understandable to be full of questions after your spouse has an affair. After all, you need to know exactly what you are dealing with in order to determine if your marriage still stands a fighting chance. You need to know whether you should trust your husband eventually and whether or not he is vulnerable to doing this again. And you need to know what left you vulnerable in the first place.

Unfortunately though, we don’t typically limit our questions to these topics. We tell ourselves that we want to know EVERYTHING. So we’ll ask him to give us ALL of the details, even when some of those details don’t really offer us anything in the way of useful information. And although he may be patient at first, this “asking him absolutely everything – multiple times – strategy” can start to cause a lot of conflict. This might lead some wives to compromise by deciding that they will limit themselves to asking the ‘right’ questions, but it can be hard to know what, exactly, the right questions are.

Someone might talk about a scenario like this one: “I admit that I can not stop asking questions about my husband’s affair, but he is losing patience with this. I admit that sometimes my questions are silly. I’ll ask him to recount every conversation that they had. I’ll ask him what she smelled like. And he will almost get angry because he says that he doesn’t understand why I want to know all of these minuscule little details, unless I am only trying to torture myself. One of my friends says that before I frustrate both of us, I should only focus on asking the ‘right’ questions, but I honestly don’t know what the ‘right’ questions are.”

What I’m about to give you is only my opinion. I’m certainly not an expert. But below are what I think are the most important distinctions to make – because all of these give you what I think is the important information. Because these questions tell you what you’re dealing with and whether or not there’s a workable plan to get you out of this.

Is The Affair Truly Over? What Are You Willing To Do In Order To Prove That It Is?: I think that it is important to establish this quickly. Because it’s very hard to rehabilitate anything when the affair is still active or when one party is still trying to reach out to the other. So not only do you want him to reassure you that it’s over, you also want to know what he’s willing to do to ensure that it REMAINS over. Questions along these lines are: “when is the last time you communicated with her in any way?” And “What are you prepared to do to discourage her if she tries to contact you?”

Do You Understand Why You Did This? Or Are You Willing To Keep Digging Until You Find Out?: This is so very important. A husband who doesn’t understand why he cheated is a husband who can’t fix this and who may just cheat again. People cheat because they are trying to fill a void. Your husband should be willing to try to identify that void and learn to fill it in another way. If he can’t or won’t, then you are always going to worry about this vulnerability because it means that he might cheat again.

Questions meant to determine this information are things like: “can you pinpoint why you cheated? What lead you to this point? Can you identify any conscious thoughts you had that might give you some clues as to why you did this? If not, are you willing to try to find out? And once you find out, are you willing to work hard to fix it?”

Are You Willing To Do The Work Necessary To Help Me Heal?: This really is the million dollar question. Many husbands will talk a good game initially. They will promise you patience and rehabilitation, but then they will get angry at you if you are not showing progress on their timeline. They will start to insinuate that something is wrong with you because you can’t just ‘get over it.’

This isn’t what you want. Ideally, you want a husband who realizes that this is his fault and is mostly his responsibility to fix. You want him to be willing to participate in counseling, self help, or whatever you are comfortable with and prefer. You want for him to be more interested in results and less interested in excuses.

Questions along these lines are things like: “I’m going to be researching what I think might help us the most. I am going to need your full cooperation in trying to fix this. I anticipate that it’s going to take some time and effort to put us back on track. Are you willing to fully support me in whatever I need? Are you going to be game with whatever avenue I want to take? Even if the going gets tough?”

Knowing this going into it can be important. Because people are usually pretty agreeable when they are caught. But recovery can be a long road. And sometimes you need help to get over the bumps along the way. It’s very helpful to know that he’s committed to taking the full journey with you so that when you do come out on the other side, you have a healthy marriage where you’re not having to worry about this happening again.

As I said, anyone can say anything.  It is a person’s actions that define their true intent.  So the questions you ask your husband really should be geared toward discovering his true intent.  The rest just frustrates you both.  I learned this from unfortunate experience.  There’s more on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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