How Do I Show Him I Love Him After His Infidelity?
If you’ve not ever dealt with infidelity, you might not understand how you can still love your spouse but be gravely disappointed in his cheating. I did not understand this until my own husband had an affair. Before this discovery, I thought that if he ever cheated on me, we would be done. And right after I discovered the affair, I still thought this. But what I didn’t consider was that the thought of denying my kids a full-time life with their dad and the idea of letting go of my life partner was much more difficult than I ever imagined. What you don’t understand until you have gone through this yourself is that the love doesn’t diminish instantaneously because of infidelity. You can’t just stop loving someone out of principal, at least I couldn’t.
But many cheating spouses assume exactly this – they figure that once you find out about the affair, you are automatically going to hate them. Many figure that they’re going to end up divorced no matter what. This isn’t all that surprising, since many of us have been telling our spouse exactly this for our entire marriage: We state that if he ever cheated, we would be done with him. So it’s understandable that our hatred is exactly what he’d assume. Both of you might be shocked when you find out that you don’t exactly hate him. But explaining what you do feel, and getting him to believe it, might be a different story.
A wife might say, “this is a weird situation, but my husband thinks that I hate him after he had an affair. He says that I should hate him because he hates himself. He willingly moved out and every time he comes over to see the kids, he acts like he doesn’t deserve to be here. He rarely makes eye contact with me. He said that he’s assuming that we’re going to get a divorce because he knows that I won’t ever look at him the same way again. I haven’t made any decisions about our marriage and I do not want to rush things. So it’s annoying that he’s immediately going toward a divorce. He swears that he’d do anything to maintain our family, but he can’t imagine how I could manage this. Here is the truth. I still love my husband and I’ve told him so. I’ve laid out to him that I’m very angry with him and that I’m not sure about our marriage. But my underlying love for him is not gone. I’m very disappointed, but I can’t just not love the father of my children. My husband has done so many kind things and so much good for me while I’ve known him. I can’t just forget about that. I’ve told him that no matter what, even if we divorce, I will always love him and want a good relationship with him, but he seems determined not to believe me. How do I make him believe that I still love him? Or is that even important?”
I understand where you are coming from. I was a little shocked myself that I was able to separate my fury with what my husband did with my husband himself. That isn’t to say that I was not enraged by the affair. But I never lost sight of what a good man my husband had always been. I could not just ignore that. And I knew that I still loved my husband. I just didn’t know if that would be enough to overcome the infidelity. Ultimately we made it. But not without a lot of work and effort. I was always clear with my husband that I was not out to ruin his life. I told him from the beginning that it was never my intention to keep his children from him or to punish him financially or otherwise.
On the flip side, though, I never felt the need to prove or to “show” him that I still loved him. I figured that as we did the work to try to recover, this would become obvious. And I think that I was right about that. Because once you go through all the rehabilitation and recovery after an affair, you realize that you wouldn’t go through all this hassle, pain, and inconvenience if you didn’t love the person or didn’t want for it to work out. That just becomes fairly obvious with time, so I never felt the need to spell it out.
I think that what you can do is to keep treating your husband with mutual respect. With time, hopefully he will come to realize that you’re still there and still committed to working with him no matter what happens. I don’t think that you need to overcompensate or put yourself in a position where you’re trying to convince him of your love. You are not the one who did anything wrong, so generally speaking, your giving your spouse access to yourself and the family is a good faith effort to show him that you’re still committed. In time, if the two of you make improvements and progress, he should eventually believe that you are still committed to and loving toward him. It is probably hard for him to understand how you feel because we all assume that we’re going to hate our spouse when something like this happens. It’s not until you walk in the actual infidelity shoes that you learn that things are not as you’d always assumed. In time, as you improve and do the work, the love that remains for one another should become apparent. But things are raw and fresh right now. Just continue to be as patient and transparent as you have been and eventually, the reassurance should start to sink in with your husband. Loving him does not mean giving him a pass. It just means that you’re not turning your back on your feelings while you give him a chance to make this right.
As you may have guessed, not everyone understood that I still loved my husband. But that’s okay. My marriage, and my feelings, are not anyone else’s business. I DID NOT allow my love to cause me to give him a pass or to excuse his behavior. Love was not enough. There were many things that needed to happen before I would commit to my marriage again. You can read more at http://surviving-the-affair.com
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