My Spouse Had an Affair With a Married Man/Woman - How to Recover From the Affair

If your spouse had an affair with a married man or woman and you are wondering how to recover from the affair please read this article carefully.

Before you are able to recover from an affair, you need to know what caused or led to the affair. People cheat for different reasons. Men mostly cheat when their need for admiration is not met and women mostly cheat when their emotional need is not met. But whatever the reasons for cheating, understanding the reason is the only way to be able to recover from an affair.

Women desperately need an emotional connection with their spouses. They need someone to talk to, laugh with, make a joke with, have fun with and when this does not happen, there is a yearning inside that begins to develop.

The same goes for men, a man craves to be admired, adored and respected by his spouse and when he does not get this, he becomes ripe for an affair when he meets someone else who meets that need.

If you want to be able to break free from an affair, you first of all need to know the little things that caused the affair. It could be that yours was a perfect marriage. You trusted your spouse with your life. They would be the last person you could ever think of to cheat on you.

Such a trust makes the affair even more painful. But when you sit down and think, you will find that there were ways in which you neglected your spouses' need that made them ripe for an affair. Not that you are to blame for their affair, if anyone chooses to have an affair, whatever the reasons, they and they alone made the stupid choice and thus carry the blame.

But you must also look at what your contribution may have been in their affair.

I know first-hand that things such as work, children and our responsibilities can make us begin to ignore our spouses' needs. Their needs and their love may become more of a burden to us. If we take time to think we will discover that we may have disappointed or annoyed our spouse in several ways.

We may have started taking them for granted, failing to call when we would be home late or just failing to show care, concern and love in very subtle an unnoticeable ways.

Have you failed to give your spouse attention even if it is in small ways like noticing their outfit, giving them an adoring look, kiss or smile, holding their hands, giving them a hug or even saying I love you? What are the things that may have kept you from doing this?

These little habits of showing scorn and bitterness even if only in very small ways can lead to resentment in your spouse to the point that they would be boiling with anger within but unable to tell you.

Once you understand what led to the affair, it will then be easier to deal with the hurt, recover from the affair and save your marriage if so be your desire.

If after your partner has confessed their affair, you decide that you want to stay together then you will need to set some ground rules. If you want to give your marriage another chance, if you both care about your relationship, then these tips will help you.

1. First whenever you feel hurt, scared, unappreciated etc, don't talk about the other person as in blaming the other person. Just talk about yourself and how you feel.

So instead of saying you never appreciate anything I do, you should say

When you behave this way, it makes me feel unappreciated.

2. The second thing you should do is to try to be attentive to your partner. Try to put aside your hurt and anger and really take time to listen to your partner.

3. Lastly, do the best you can to not talk about the affair, of course that is after the affair has been confessed and the details have already been discussed.

Avoid bringing up the affair every now and then. Instead spend time together to have fun, talk about other things, go to movies together, to the restaurant to share a meal or cook together. Just try to spend as much meaningful and enjoyable time as you can with each other.

If your spouse had an affair with a married man or woman and you are wondering how to recover from the affair, know that there is no easy way to recover from an affair and although an affair can break a marriage, sometimes an affair, no matter how painful can make it possible to rebuild a better marriage as you fix the underlying problems and learn to talk about issues in a constructive way instead of dismissing them in the hope that they will eventually go away by themselves.