People often say that if their spouse ever cheats on them, they would never look at them again—let alone stay in a relationship with them. After all, affairs could be considered the most ruthless attack on trust for three main reasons:
- They threaten to tear apart two people whose lives are bound together with a promise of love.
- They often add to other trust-breakers such as lying and trickery.
- They often take place with a mutual friend.
But when it comes down to it, is an affair enough of a reason for divorce? It’s an extremely difficult question that depends on the situation. Sometimes the answer should be yes, while other times it can be no. It all boils down to two questions:
- Is the relationship worth saving?
- Are you both willing to save it?
If the relationship is not worth saving in either your or your spouse’s mind, then it probably isn’t worth the effort to try and move beyond the affair. But even if you both agree that the relationship is worth saving, you still need to be willing to put in the effort to make healing happen.
This means a lot of communication is in order because you will need to completely rebuild the foundation of trust before continuing your life together.
How to Determine if Your Relationship is Worth Saving
So how do you know whether your relationship is worth saving or not? I can’t tell you what decision to make, but it will depend on a number of factors:
- What led to the affair?
- Is the affair a forgivable offense in your mind, or will the thought of it drive you insane every time you look at your spouse?
- Have there been multiple affairs?
- Was the relationship good outside of the affair?
- Do you still love each other?
- Do you enjoy spending time with each other?
- Can you accept people’s mistakes easily and move on, or do you hold a grudge?
- Do you have kids together?
That list isn’t extensive, but it will get you thinking about the type of relationship you had and the pain you will need to overcome. If you both feel it’s worth staying together and rebuilding your relationship from the ground up, then overcoming the obstacle of an affair is certainly possible. An affair can be reason enough for divorce, but it doesn’t have to result in divorce if you don’t want it to.
Bonnie Eaker Weil, Ph.D., explains: “I know how wrenching adultery can be, because I watched it nearly tear apart my own family. I also know from my own experience, both personal and professional, that adultery can be a forgivable sin. Fidelity is not a guarantee that love persists, nor is infidelity a sign that love has faded or died. In fact, adultery can even be a way—albeit dysfunctional—to try and stabilize a floundering relationship.”
When you realize that there has been an affair and both partners know how big of a mistake it was, you have the opportunity to look at your life together and reprioritize. If you both want the main priority to be your marriage, then you can make that happen.
Whenever people make mistakes, they are given the chance to reflect. The pain hurts so much, and often one is shocked by the other’s actions. The cheating spouse will feel extremely apologetic, but an apology won’t mean a thing unless the mistakes are accepted. Of course, accepting an apology doesn’t mean that you want to take the person back into your life, but it does open the door to that possibility.
If you both knew that your relationship was floundering beforehand, an affair can act like a brick wall. Once you hit it, you know that you need to change what you’re doing to move past the obstacle. Whatever led to the affair can be examined, and you can choose to stay together or not.
According to Carol Pulice of PsychCentral, longstanding problems are often more dangerous than the affair itself: “Those marriages in which affairs have occurred are more likely to end in divorce, but the affair usually is not the primary reason for it. For those involved in a relationship in which an affair occurs, it is likely that there are other problems in the relationship that need to be addressed. The affair is often a sign of longstanding problems in the relationship that have remained unresolved.”
If you are able to resolve those longstanding issues, then you have the opportunity to save your marriage. It is easy to blame the person who had the affair for the breakup of your marriage. The fact is, it is the fault of both people that the affair happened. Many times a cheating spouse gets a slap of reality and wishes they could have fixed the problem instead of creating another.
Carol Pulice explains that only a “few couples decide to divorce because of an affair. But of the fewer than 20 percent who do divorce, 80 percent report regretting the decision. In one study of men, 80 percent stated that they would remarry their first wife if they could. The few who have affairs and divorce their spouses to marry one another often divorce again.”
In marriage, everybody is looking for acceptance and love. If they don’t find it within, they sometimes look elsewhere. It’s not right, and an affair can cause a lot of pain, but it doesn’t have to be a reason for divorce.
Instead of an affair being a reason for divorce, it can also be a reason to fight harder for love and make a change. If your relationship is something you believe can be fixed and rebuilt for the future, then it’s worth fighting for. But both partners need to be willing to re-commit and do whatever it takes to solve the problems, instead of ignoring them.
Often, a heart attack causes a person to make major changes in lifestyle and attitude so that they never have one again. In the same way, an affair can prompt you and your spouse to make the necessary changes to strengthen your marriage so you don’t have to go through the marital pain again.
