Can a Marriage Survive an Affair?
Let’s be honest for a second: marriage is hard! Many married men have short-term & long term affairs, but (judging by the sky-high divorce rate), most married men aren’t very good at hiding their adventures from their spouses. Perhaps you’re wondering if this will become an issue in your marriage. Perhaps it’s already happened in your marriage. When a spouse has an affair (particularly with long term affairs), it creates a bunch of complications within your couple’s dynamic. The important thing to know is that cheating sometimes can be an honest mistake and isn’t the end of all things. Married men & ladies around the world deal with both short & long term affairs every day, successfully working their way through cheating & saving their marriage. But how do they accomplish this? In this article, we’ll go over the different approaches married men & women take when they try to get away with being disloyal, the reasons they have long term affairs, how to react if you find out your spouse is cheating, & how to work through these issues.
The Issue With Long Term Extramarital Affairs
Unfortunately, both short & long term affairs are fairly commonplace in regards to marriage. Obviously, married men (or women) don’t want to get caught because that might ruin their marriage, so they’ll often go to extensive lengths to hide that the cheating took place. Unfortunately, unlike a one-time fling, long term affairs pose a massive issue to overcome in any marriage. This is because of a variety of reasons, but the biggest issue regarding this type of cheating is a lack of time. The longer married men do an activity, the more they are invested in the act. This means a purely sexual fling can be forgotten quickly, but if it managed to actually blossom into romantic long term affairs – you’re in trouble. If so, married men are far more likely to abandon their current marriage and go with the individual they’ve had a romantic engagement with outside their family unit.
But what would make married men prefer long term entanglements over a relationship? Truth be told, there are a variety of motivations for why married men may prefer them, so let’s start with the most commonplace motivations people think of when they think of long term marital affairs.
He’s a scumbag
Most ladies blame their failed marriage for this reason. “It’s not me; it’s him.” Although not as common of a reason for an affair as we might think, this is one of the causes why marriage might not survive. Unfortunately, if this type of man starts enjoying long term affairs, the likelihood of the marriage being successful is fairly low. In this context, we’re describing scumbags as married men who don’t value their wives, instead choosing to pursue an affair (or long term affairs), most likely for sexually motivated reasons. If married men are enjoying a long term relationship with someone other than their wife with this reasoning, the problem isn’t the affair; it’s that they got married. These types of married men will never truly find what they’re looking for because what they’re looking for is sexual conquest, not romance. Such relationships seem appealing because they offer something different, which is a common complaint of most married men anyway.
He hates his wife
Married men can hate their wives for a variety of reasons. One of the extreme causes is that both he and his wife are in a separate long term relationships with another people (both married partners stepping out on each other basically indicates the relationship is over). More likely, though, he’s the only one cheating in his marriage. These men may have fallen out of love with their spouses, been abused by their wives, had revenge for a previous instance of cheating, or many other reasons. Regardless of the real reason behind the cheating, it’s safe to assume that these marriage setups won’t work out. Of course, in some situations, it might be nearly impossible to escape a marriage, which leads these married men to enjoy an affair. Of course, long term affairs aren’t a productive alternative to divorce, but many married men still enjoy having mindless fun out of their marriage anyway.
Why Do Married Men Have Long Term Affairs?
We’ve gone over why do men have long term affairs, but we haven’t actually addressed what benefits these married men get out of an out marital relationship that they’re not receiving from their spouse. If you’re a woman currently in a struggling marriage (perhaps your husband just had an affair), you’ve probably wondered this. On the surface, married men seem to have it all: a wife, a happy relationship, a loving home, and perhaps even a family. Unfortunately, the reality is often different than it seems, & that’s what leads so many married men to have long term affairs.
To understand the appeal of romantic entanglement, let’s first imagine a world where long term affairs are socially acceptable. If your current marriage is lacking something (be it romance or simply great sex), the obvious choice is to look somewhere different. Since an affair offers a fresh start, you won’t have to worry about any of the burdens married men often carry. While this is obviously not the world we live in, this quick alternative looks at long term affairs offers a slight explanation about the appeal of an affair: freedom.
Married men currently in an unhappy marriage are far more likely to cheat than married men currently enjoying a happy one. Of course, there are deviations from this rule. Even married men in fantastic relationships enjoy attention from other women sometimes. So, can a marriage survive a long term affair? It’s possible to survive cheating, but the chance of a marriage making it in one piece is much higher if the occurrence was a one-time fling. Long term affair recovery is an entirely different beast.
The issue with cheating that goes on for a while is that these married men have been stepping out on their families just enough to get used to another life; it’s not just a short one-off. These guys will have trouble managing with the repercussions from the long term affairs because their wife will have a hard time forgiving them. Can couples survive an affair? Sure, but they’ll need to essentially restart the marriage all over. Once discovered, long term affairs remove any trust between married men & ladies, which is an important cornerstone of marriage. Even worse, the marriage will probably now be home to a lot of resentment, which prevents married men from easily reconnecting with their spouses. Each day it drags on will make the problem worse, so rediscovering each other again will result in a lot of effort required for rebuilding a relationship.
Naturally, some men are fine with long term affairs & simply don’t care about the marriage. As such, there are women who deal with the multiple relationship at once and have given up on monogamy. These couples are set in their ways, but it doesn’t have to be this way. If married men want to rebuild their marriage, they’ll have to reestablish the trust, so the first thing to do is cut off contact with their long term affairs. To ensure they don’t have another affair, married men can allow their partners to track their phones, attend counseling together, and spend more time with their partner.
How to React If Your Wife Had Long Term Affair
When a spouse cheats, marriage often suffers. Married men usually have a hard time forgiving their spouses for enjoying a relationship outside of marriage, especially if they’ve been cheated on not just physically but emotionally. This is a problem to solve with the therapist, but the first thing you’ve got to remember is that if men and women want to save the marriage, then they’ll have to be open to forgive their partner. This doesn’t have to be instant though (& realistically, it won’t be). Regaining trust throughout a marriage after an affair can take a while, but it starts with communication. Best care scenario, the partner tells them about their long term affairs, comes clean and they solve the issue together. Worst case, one partnr catches another out in the act. Either way, after all the details have been discussed, emotional cheating will no doubt be more challenging to fix.
If your wife has just told you about enjoying a relationship with someone other than you, you should spend some time away to calm down. Retaliation may seem like a good option, but having an side chick yourself will only add fuel to the fire. Don’t do this if you desire to salvage your marriage. Instead, married men should take some time to think over the circumstances. Was it a singular act of emotions acting out? If so, a moment of weakness is easier to forgive. However, the married men who just found out their wives were enjoying long term affairs will need to give their marriage a bit more thought. What led her to enjoy an affair? Is there anything you could’ve done to prevent it? These are important questions to think about before moving forward.
Sadly, many married men will have complications with long term affairs. Infidelity can happen for a variety of causes. After you’ve found any issues (previous to the affair) in your marriage (there might even be none!), it’s time to figure out how to address the long term affairs. First, reduce the chance of an additional affair. It might be fair to ask her to allow you to track her phone. Her reaction to this suggestion should give you a solid idea of where your marriage is at. If she vehemently opposes this without any real reason why she may be looking for another affair (or still have long term affairs behind your back). However, if she’s open to it, then that’s a great starting point. Married men can use this to quickly build trust again.
As married men start rebuilding trust in their marriage, they must also work on communicating better to avoid further long term affairs. A recurring reason behind long term affairs is a lack of communication, so married men will need to start expressing their feelings more with their spouses. Improving this will help prevent an additional affair while building up the marriage. Although it might seem odd, a smart way for married men to heal their connection after long term affairs are by reinstating “date night.” Spending time together strengthens the marriage, allowing both spouses to remember why they got together in the first place.
Some married men will have trouble fully trusting their partners again quickly after an affair, and that’s ok. The key thing you must have to recover from long term affairs is forgiveness, not trust. While marriage is rebuilding after an affair, trust will be built up from the ashes, but you can recover from long term affairs even if you don’t initially trust them. Once these long term affairs are forgiven, the real healing will begin.
With enough time and effort, any marriage can get past an affair. Though it’s true that an affair presents a severe problem in any relation (long term affairs especially), both married men and women can work through it eventually.