Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: It’s very easy to get discouraged with any plan or strategy that you try after the discovery of an affair. Sometimes, you feel defeated before you even start. After all, no matter what you do, you may still have the sinking feeling that you are doing all of this work for someone who has already betrayed you. I’ve repeatedly heard wives ask themselves why they even try.

Here’s an example. Someone might say, “I caught my husband cheating on me about three weeks ago. I was extremely shocked, but I don’t know why I was so surprised. He hasn’t been a good husband to me in several months. He clearly had begun to distance himself in our marriage because he was placing his investment somewhere else. I am not sure why I did not immediately kick him out. He did express remorse. But he has not done everything that he has promised. It is as if he’s merely waiting for the dust to settle so he can get back to his regular way of doing things. For example, I asked him to stop going out after work, and he did that for about a week and a half, but now he went out a couple of times. He always has a ready-excuse for this, such as he gave a male co-worker a ride home, but he still not sticking to the plan. No one has explicitly said anything to me about it, but my friends give me the vibe that they think I’m crazy for even trying. Honestly, in their shoes, I would think the very same thing. Why am I even trying after he cheated on me?

Well, you would be the best person to answer this question. But, I can tell you why I tried. And I can tell you some strategies and behaviors that you want to have in place to make it worth your while to keep trying.

Why Many Women Want To Try To Make It Work When Their Husband Cheats Or Has An Affair: Many women are actually surprised when they find themselves even open to seeing what might happen with their marriage after the affair. Because many of us have watched this happen to friends, family members, and loved ones. And we’d always said, “That’s not going to happen to me. But if it does, I will never tolerate that. I will never stay. I will be out immediately.”

However, when faced with the reality of actually uprooting your entire life, your resolve may weaken a bit. And often, we do not have the luxury of only our lives being affected. Many of us have children. Or a business or home that we have built with our spouse. Many of us have literally grown up with our spouse. He has been our main “person” for over half of our lives. So, just walking away from that without a backward glance is not something that many of us take lightly.

So we decide that we might wait and see how this all plays out before we decide to just call it quits. Many of us give our husbands no guarantees, but we decide to watch and wait, to see if our husband will rise to the occasion and make this right, which leads me to…

Behaviors You Want To See To Make You Keep Trying: When you agree to wait and see what your husband will do before walking out the door, you are making a huge gesture of good faith. Your husband needs to return this and then some.

Admittedly, no one likes to live their life under the constant and watchful eye of someone else. No one likes to have to constantly account for their whereabouts. But, I believe that it is not unreasonable that these things need to be the cost of admission.

It is very hard to restore the trust and intimacy after an affair. You won’t be able to do this if you can’t even trust your husband enough to make good on the promises that he has made to you. Now, sometimes, he will test the waters in the beginning. He will try to ease you back into your former way of life pre-affair (such as going out after work.) This doesn’t always mean that he is cheating again.

Sometimes, it just means that he doesn’t want to be under your watchful eye like a child. But, you have to set and then insist upon the ground rules. You can’t get what you need and what you want if you don’t. So the next time he goes out with friends, you might say, “We agreed that, for the time being, you would come right home after work.  We have not made other arrangements, so I need you to do exactly what you’ve promised me. I’m trying.  And I need you to try too.”

This is only my opinion, but in order for me to keep trying with my husband, I needed to see an unbroken and continuous effort to make good on his claims. I needed him to show up over and over and over again, even when it wasn’t easy or even when I pushed him away. Because it certainly was not easy for me.

Sure, he messed up sometimes. He disappointed me sometimes. But when he did, I spoke up. And I told him what I needed and why. And he always regrouped and tried harder – even if it wasn’t always perfect. Yes, we were both frustrated and broken at times. But the common thread was that no one walked away or stopped trying. It was always fairly obvious that my husband was determined to hang in there with me – no matter how hard – because the whole thing was his doing.

Your husband may not always behave or respond as you want him to. But he should approach this with a willingness to at least try. There may be days when he gets frustrated or tries to get away with more freedom before you are ready to give that. But, when you bring this to his attention, he should approach you with a spirit of cooperation, even if he’s not thrilled about the increased scrutiny, which is normal.

No one said this process was easy for either person. Unfortunately, it is anything but easy. Still, we try because we don’t just want to surrender the life that we have earned. And we keep trying when our husband gives us a reason to keep going, even if we have to take two steps backward along the way.

If it helps, you can read about how we hung in there even when it was maddening and we eventually got our marriage back at https://surviving-the-affair.com

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