How Do I Prevent A Revenge Affair?
By: Katie Lersch: I often hear from people on both side’s of the affair who are trying to prevent “a revenge affair” from their spouse. You might hear from the faithful spouse (who is now tempted to cheat themselves in order to show their spouse how it feels to be betrayed in this way.) Or, you might here from the spouse who cheated and who now feels sure that their spouse will cheat to get back at them and is looking for a way to prevent this by any means necessary.
So, from the faithful spouse, you might hear a comment like: “I will admit that I still feel a lot of resentment toward my husband for cheating on me. Even though we have tried to make it work and in some ways we are succeeding, I still feel so much anger some days. There are times when I am not sure that staying with my husband was the right decision. I have to admit that sometimes, I wish I had chosen the man I was dating before my husband. He would never have cheated on me. I had more chemistry with my husband. But now I realize that was stupid. Because chemistry obviously fades. I see that other man all of the time. And honestly, I could start a relationship with him anytime that I wanted to. How do I keep myself from cheating? How do I tell myself it’s so wrong when my husband has already done it to me?”
From The Perspective Of The Faithful Spouse: I am going to address one concern at a time in this article. I will get to concerns that come from the cheating spouse in a moment. But for now, let’s address the situation from the point of view of the faithful spouse. I know that it’s hard not to want to retaliate. I have been there. Often, you doubt your own attractiveness after your husband has cheated on you. So when someone shows interest and an attraction to you, this understandably feels quite good. It’s just human nature to gravitate toward that. And it’s also human nature to be tempted to justify your behavior with the knowledge that he has already done the same to you.
However, you probably already know in your heart that cheating and adding yet another affair for your marriage to overcome is just making the situation worse and just making all of this more difficult to deal with. Not only that, but you have to ask yourself if doing what you truly know is wrong is going to make you feel much worse and heap on even more pain. I firmly believe that no matter what the circumstances, you never want to pursue a relationship outside of your marriage until that same marriage is legally and completely over. If you do, this tends to follow you around mentally and emotionally and it also can haunt that additional relationship.
If you are having trouble avoiding temptation, then examine your behaviors. If you don’t trust yourself to see the other man and remain in control, then it’s a good idea to not see or talk to him for a while. There is no good reason to put your fidelity in jeopardy. Also, I can say for certain that healing yourself and your marriage is the best deterrent to hurting one another in the future. Because frankly, when you are connecting with your spouse and successfully rebuilding the intimacy, then you have no desire to cheat or do anything to jeopardize the progress that you have made. You are feeling empathy for them, so you wouldn’t want to hurt them on purpose. So the short answer is that if you truly do not want to strike up a revenge affair, then turn your attention away from temptations and put it on your marriage.
From The Perspective Of The Cheating Spouse: Now, let’s focus on it from another perspective. I might hear from a husband who says: “I am so paranoid that my wife is going to cheat on me to get back at me for having an affair. My wife is a beautiful woman and a number of men chase her. She has always resisted because she loves me and is committed to our marriage. Now that I have ruined everything, this may no longer be the case. How do I make sure that she doesn’t cheat on me to get revenge?”
Well, there’s nothing that you can (or should) do to try to force any behavior on your spouse. She has free will, after all. But, as I said before, the very best detractor of any kind of infidelity is to have a strong marriage while at the same time you remove the temptations. If you are showing your wife that you are serious about your marriage by going to counseling and by spending as much loving time with her as possible, then she isn’t as likely to have the time or the inclination to attempt revenge through cheat. She needs to truly believe that you are sorry and she needs to believe that your marriage is going to heal. You need to do everything in your power to make sure that you are moving toward this and you need to make it your business to spend as much quality time with her as possible so that she doesn’t have the desire or the opportunity to cheat.
I will admit that I enjoyed the attention of other men after my husband’s affair. But I was never tempted to revenge cheat. I knew how much pain the infidelity had caused. And I was never going to willingly bring on more of it through actions that I had criticized in him. However, I knew from the beginning that healing was my primary goal. You’re welcome to read more about my experience on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com
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