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Surviving An Affair

By: Michael S. Broder Ph.D.

Suppose you’re in a committed relationship such as a marriage and you discover that your spouse or partner has at one time had an affair, which now is over. Would you experience this as devastation? Or would you accept reality and forgive your partner?

If you think that you would automatically end the relationship, consider this – numerous studies over the past ten years have found that ended affairs have had much less to do with the current and future quality of an existing marriage, or other long-term relationship that had ever been previously thought.

The consensus of these studies is saying, that if your marriage relationship is now going well and the affair is over, regardless of what your marriage contract was – and most of them do call for monogamy – there isn’t really that much of an affect that the affair itself will have on your marriage or its future, as long as both partners can let go of the hurt and anger that the affair generated.

So research says forgive your partner, and the effect will be only the one that you the discoverer allows it to have. It may not be the easiest thing to do, but in the end it maybe the most rational.