An Affair – The Wake-up Call That Will Save Your Marriage

When a spouse is involved in an affair, most husbands and wives don’t understand why the spouse did this. When they both made the decision to get married, they almost certainly believed they knew their loved one well. After all, they plan to spend the rest of their lives together.

So what changed between then and now?

Thinking back to the beginning of the relationship, you two were on your best behavior. Compared to today, it may seem like your spouse was a totally different person back then.

You were convinced that you had found your soul mate with whom you planned to share and enjoy all that married life had to offer. At that time you expected a married life full of devotion, enthusiasm and full of romance.

However, married life often comes with many unforeseen challenges, setbacks, surprises, and joys.

Not long after the excitement of the wedding day, subtle but constant changes begin to wear on their relationship as they both adjust to the routines of home and family life. It doesn’t take long before you realize that the everyday responsibilities of married life have little in common with romance.

So what has changed between now and then? They have since discovered that there are now things about each other that neither of them saw when they were dating. Certain things in your partner that you tolerated before now take on a more acute dimension in the closed spaces of marriage and can become irritating.

The same daily routine settles in and dulls the marriage to boredom. Indifference between them begins to develop, resulting in less communication on important relationship issues. All people change over time and in the proximity of married life, adjusting or adapting to these changes plays a very important role. Failure in this area can lead to conflict, arguments, misunderstandings and disappointment in your partner and vice versa.

Under this environment, couples often resort to anger, disrespect, and demands as a way to resolve marital problems.

the end result

The sum total of all these factors is the development of an emotional, mental, and physical gap that results in unmet needs in either spouse. Affairs occur when the needs of one spouse are not being met by the other. A person in a love relationship has no need to suddenly go out of the blue to find another lover. No thought of that sort would ever enter his mind when they were dating and right after their wedding vows simply because their mutual needs were being met.

The needs may be for physical satisfaction or emotional needs, or both. If you are not meeting your spouse’s needs, your spouse will find someone who can. When this happens, the consequences are devastating for the injured spouse. Broken trust after years of marriage is shattered; anguish and disappointment are hard to bear.

If you find yourself in a situation where your spouse has been involved in an affair, it does not mean that your marriage has to end. You and your spouse have dedicated a significant portion of your lives to building a life together, and the affair is a wake-up call to both sides that there are problems in the relationship.

As unlikely as it may seem, an affair presents an opportunity to refocus on relationship issues. Through open and frank communications and a good dose of understanding, it is an opportunity for you to recover what existed before the affair and develop a much healthier and stronger relationship.