Affair Survival
Affair Survival Thinking Kit
This page contains a series of our posts that were intended to spark your thinking and offer a different way of approaching the issues of affairs and infidelity.
Traditional thinking about infidelity is easily accessible on the plethora of infidelity support boards, where larger social agendas about marriage, family, religious beliefs, and gender norms are pivotal. This generally results in a pro-reconciliation, pro-marriage, pro-coupledom focus that rather obscures the issues of fundamental relationship health, dysfunction, and your own personal success and fulfillment.
We published a series of posts that we called our Affair Survival Thinking Kit. To facilitate their easy location, this page contains that series of posts.
(The posts publish to this page in descending date order – you might wish to start at the bottom post (The Guilt Trip to Therapy) and work up.)
How Could You?! Something that most faithful partners struggle with is trying to understand how their cheater could cheat. What was the reasoning and thinking that led them to make the choice to have an affair? How could they ignore, break, or suspend their commitment to their partner and their …
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Questions After the Affair Even after you’ve had time to absorb and process the affair, certain issues just don’t seem to go away. You probably find yourself obsessing over the same questions and upsets over and over again, as if they’re buzzards circling around the dying body of your relationship. …
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The Cheater Script I’m going to go make a little wager here. I am willing to bet that when you found out about the affair, you had a conversation (or screaming match) with your cheater that had some similarity to this little scenario: “Why an affair? Why that?” “I haven’t …
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Strategic Planning It’s been a little while since you discovered your partner’s affair, and, against all the odds it turned out that infidelity wasn’t fatal after all. Who knew? You’ve done all the right things so far - you’ve registered at every infidelity support forum you can find. You’ve read …
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The Infidelity Black Hole Your partner’s affair can become an all-encompassing black hole of pain and upset that consumes every available ounce of your time and energy. It taints every thought, interaction, and activity and keeps you exhausted, but unable to get a moment’s relief from it all. Focusing on …
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The Infidelity Super Villain Ever wondered how Clark Kent got away with ‘hiding’ his real identity by combing his hair differently, and wearing some glasses? Or how nobody seemed to notice that beneath that innocuous trench coat, lurked The Thing? Affairs are often thinly disguised as only ‘being about sex’. …
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Changing Yourself After Discovering the Affair Have you found yourself vigorously scrubbing the toilet with your toothbrush, considering giving yourself an industrial strength Lysol swirly, as the words, “You’re a terrible housekeeper” ring in your ears? Maybe you’ve swathed yourself in foil and plastic cling wrap like a modern-day mummy, …
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Unmet Needs: A Cheater’s Justification “If you had satisfied my needs sexually I wouldn’t have needed to cheat.” “I felt lonely in the marriage so I cheated to feel connected to someone.” “You didn’t give me enough time and attention so I had to look elsewhere for it.” Sound familiar? …
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Affairs cause damage in many forms beyond the commonly understood ones of rejection and betrayal. Manipulation and abuse are the cornerstone behaviors in affair-mode thinking, and these “Deadly Sins” are frequently the topic of discussion within infidelity forums. Affair & Infidelity Help Forums Support forums can be a valuable resource …
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Discovering an affair in your relationship is a shock and often the first response is one of panic. An affair shows you how tenuous the structure in your life really is: security, finances, home, companionship, shared stresses etc. Your panic bubbles up to the surface almost immediately, and your reaction …
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Surviving the Affair: Accepting Their Right to Cheat Before you reach for the smelling salts, no, infidelity is not an ethical or just choice. Yes, it’s unfair that someone else’s choices have a negative and destructive impact on us. Causing someone else pain by our own selfish choices is reprehensible. …
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Did You Cause the Affair? The reactions to discovering an affair are manifold, but the immediate reaction to the discovery of an affair is generally not, “I did this, I caused this.” The initial reaction is more commonly one of an outraged, “How could you?!” In this reaction is the …
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