Stronger and More Loving?
It bothers me sometimes when I hear people say 'most marriages that stay together after an affair become stronger and more loving'. Never mind the connotation that affairs are good for a marriage, I just have a hard time imagining that my marriage will somehow feel 'stronger and more loving' after all this.
Moments like that, I remind myself that statistically, a marriage takes 2-5yrs to recover from an affair. We're just getting started.
But still. I've been through this before. The pain never entirely goes away. And to have more added to what was already there causes some rather thick scar tissue.
I suppose a marriage could be stronger and more loving in the fact that there are now two people doing the loving and being committed, rather than just one. Perhaps it feels stronger and more loving to the person who strayed because they have decided to rejoin the party. But to me it still just feels fractured, broken, tainted, and damaged.
Infidelity, especially physical infidelity, is not something you can take back or make right. No matter how good things become, it's still there. It still happened. And it could still happen again. I think some things in this life only certain people are mentally capable of. It's something you're either susceptible to or you're not. And I don't think that making that mistake somehow makes you more capable of resisting the next time temptation strikes. Well.. maybe more capable, but not necessarily fully capable. I don't know. I used to believe that that was the case. I used to think 'He did that once. He knows what a mistake it was and how badly it hurt me. He learned from that mistake and there's NO WAY he'd ever do that again.'
But I was wrong.
And I accept that. I'm certainly not going to say that that makes it okay for him to do it again.. or that I expect him to do it again. And when I stop to think about it, it's hard to decide if I'd even want to know. I don't think I would. Not unless he decided to just go ahead and leave, then I'd want to know why.
I guess it just feels somewhat insulting to hear people say that marriages often become stronger and more loving after recovering from an affair. It's as if they're minimizing the pain and strife that a betrayed spouse has to endure to get there. And I have a hard time believing that our marriage will ever be as strong and loving as it could have been had he been faithful.
I know what you mean about having a problem with that terminology. I think what most people "mean" when they say that is that those that have survived an affair are less likely to become complacent again, because they've already experienced the pain and fallout from the broken vows, so are more carefully keeping track of the "temperature" of their marriage. When you come so close to losing something that's so important, you're more vigilant about making sure that it doesn't happen again. It doesn't make you immune, but it means you'll probably see warning signs of discontent (on both sides) much earlier than a couple who has never been down that road before. And if you've really talked and worked on your issues, you know what to watch out for, what lead to the infidelity.
And no, the pain NEVER goes away. But the frequency and intensity of it generally decreases. It'll be thought about less often, and won't be so all consuming as it was in the beginning. It becomes part of your history, rather than your current focus.
Your marriage will never be the same, obviously. You guys have taken a different road than most - a different road than you would have been on had it not happened. So it may be stronger in the sense that you already know you've gotten through the worst that could happen, so you both realize just how strong your marriage is. Kind of like the whole "how can you appreciate the light if you've never seen darkness" type of thing. I think the people who make those comments leave out the part that while it may be "stronger", it's so very different than it would have been.
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Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 05/29/2009 - 17:22.