Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: After your spouse cheats or has an affair, things can feel tainted. You can feel as if the life you thought was yours wasn’t really yours to keep. It can start to feel that it was all a lie or that you were the only one who was truly in the right kind of love and actually committed. The marriage you thought you had is now in question in multiple ways. And it can be hard to look at that same marriage with anything but scrutiny.

What used to be fond memories now make you unsure. It may actually be painful to think back on memories that used to bring you joy. A wife might say, “Everything I see in my house causes me pain right now. I love photographs, and I have them in every room. So I regularly see pictures of my husband and me from when we were dating until now. The pictures always show us smiling, having fun, and looking in love. They used to bring me comfort, and I rarely walked into a room without looking at them and smiling. Now, they make me want to cry. Because I recently found out that my husband has been cheating on me. So now I look at those photos, and I think that at least one person in them was living a lie. I wonder if those loving looks were all fake and if he didn’t love me in the way I thought. He says that I am being ridiculous about this and that of course he loved me then – and he still loves me now. But if that is true, why did he cheat? I used to always like to remember back to memories my husband and I have shared over the years, but now I feel like all of that is completely ruined. My husband is begging me to try to look at this in another way, but I don’t think I can.”

The uncertainty you are feeling is very common. I felt it very deeply. I don’t think the question is how to stop feeling it because, in my experience – at least initially – those feelings are going to come. I think the real question is, can you eventually stop feeling it if you are open to saving your marriage despite the affair? For me, the answer was yes, but I have to be honest. The process took a while. And I’m not here to knock anyone who doesn’t want to wait or put in the work. This decision is very individual, and there is no right or wrong answer. Nonetheless, I’ll share some ways of thinking that eventually helped me overcome this below.

One Mistake Doesn’t Necessarily Negate Everything Else: I wasn’t able to have this thought until I’d done a good deal of healing. I could have never thought like this initially. But today, I look back at everything we went through, and I realize that although my husband made a horrible mistake, he is still the man who never waivers when I need his support, and he is still the man who has been there for me through some very hard times – despite what it has cost him personally to do so.  

He’s still the man who makes me breakfast on Sundays and who dresses like Santa Claus for neighborhood children. I can’t pretend that none of the good times happened, just like I can’t pretend that the bad times didn’t happen. Doing so is actually disrespectful to me because it assumes that I spent my entire adult life being duped. I don’t believe that is true because my husband spent years after the affair making sure that I knew that everything before the affair was real. I honestly don’t think someone would do this if they weren’t still very invested in their spouse and marriage.

The Memories are as Much for You as They are For Him:  I used to think that I was punishing my husband when I refused to look back on our lives. But I now realize that I was only hurting myself. The life experiences that formed the memories have not changed. All of those things still happened – just as I remembered them. What had changed was my perception. My perception changed for only one reason while the memories were formed from so many good things. In other words, the memories had longevity and numbers on their side. There was more good than bad.

My grandfather is deceased, and after he passed, thinking of him was painful because his passing was fresh. However, today, I love thinking of him. We had wonderful memories. It still hurts to know that we won’t be making any new memories. But that doesn’t negate the wonderful memories that we had, and I don’t want to cheat myself by not allowing myself to remember and feel them.

Your memories with your husband may become like this again – if you want them to and if you can heal.

Your Feelings Can Evolve:  As I’ve alluded to, how you feel today may not be the way you feel six months from now or in some years. I certainly don’t feel as raw, angry, or damaged as I did right after the affair, but I worked very hard to heal. I’d never pretend that I’m fine about the affair happening. That will never be true. It was a very painful part of my life. But I’ve had painful parts of my life that have come and gone. The affair is one of them. I realized a while back that I didn’t want to continue to drag that kind of pain along with me, like a heavy burden that is never going to go away. This would have been true no matter what happened with my marriage. It’s just too big a burden to bear.  (You can read about how I moved on at https://surviving-the-affair.com

None of this means that you can happily look at your wedding pictures tomorrow, but it might mean that you will be able to in the future. Your reaction now is normal, and it isn’t indicative of how things are going to turn out. Be gentle with yourself and allow yourself to heal, and you may feel differently in the future. If not, these are your feelings, and you have every right to them. But it may be too soon to know how you’re going to feel in the long term. 

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