Healing Steps for the Unfaithful Spouse

This is a chapter excerpt from our book, Healing Infidelity: How to Build a Vibrant Marriage After an Affair. You'll find not only other helpful articles in that book, but our story of how my wife entered the affairs, how I found out, and how we successfully rebuilt.

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This chapter is for those unfaithful spouses who wish to rebuild their marriages after having committed an act of infidelity. Many unfaithful spouses who have ended an affair and want to save their marriage don't always know what they need to do, what approach they should have, or understand fully the damage to the hurt spouse. Usually, the “natural” reaction is the wrong one to successfully rebuild. My wife, Lenita, who is an unfaithful spouse and has successfully rebuilt our marriage, wrote an article on what the unfaithful spouse needs to do to help the hurt spouse heal. I'm taking the core outline from that article to write this chapter.

This chapter assumes that you have told your hurt spouse about the affair and that he knows the general details of the affair. Now you are asking: what are the ways in which you can best help you and your hurt spouse heal and save the marriage, if indeed that is your goal? Here are the main areas that need your attention to potentially succeed.

1) Be prepared to invest yourself 100% and more into the rebuilding of the marriage. That means two major points. One, rebuilding will not be easy, especially for the unfaithful spouse. To help your spouse heal means facing the pain of what you've done, examining it, and dealing with it until the wound has healed. These are hard things for anyone to do. Unless you are totally committed to doing whatever it takes, you will tend to falter when, for instance, you debate whether to tell your spouse about that chance encounter with the affair partner or not.

Two, realize this will take years, not weeks. Too often the unfaithful spouse wants to put it all behind them. He doesn't want it thrown into his face regularly. That is understandable. But keep in mind that while you have known this secret for weeks, months, or even years, for the spouse it is fresh and new information that has to be processed, the loss grieved over, and the trust that has been violated to be rebuilt over several months. To do that, he needs to talk about it, deal with it, and process it to the point of satisfaction that he can move past it. That will not happen quickly. Doing the following will help it to happen as quickly as possible, but even in the best of circumstances, don't expect everything to be "back to normal" until a minimum of two years. In some cases it may take even longer. No two individuals are the same. But unless you realize you are in it for the long haul, it will be easy to get discouraged when after three or four months, he is still bringing up issues about the affair. He has to deal with the affair, and if he isn't allowed to, then he is prevented from healing.

2) Develop an attitude of healing. Lenita listed several examples of what that attitude needed to be:

I will own up to what I have done and place none of the blame on anyone else.

I will never try to 'gag' you but will listen bravely without flinching away and answer/discuss anything you need to, anytime you need to.

I will be humble.

I will show you my heart.

I will understand that I must be responsible for helping you heal and that I must work diligently to heal myself.

I will not be defensive concerning the affair or the affair partner.

Without these attitudes, the chances of rebuilding are slim. This is because for healing the marriage to take place, the bulk of the work will be with the unfaithful spouse. The bottom line is you have hurt your spouse, and now it is your job to heal that hurt. You are the only one who can heal your spouse, because only you can rebuild the trust that has been stolen from them. To not do the above is the equivalent of shutting the door on the marriage. If you said to point #1, "Yes, I am committed," then this needs to be the first place you take a stand. Because if you approach it with any other attitude, the following steps will not only be harder, but you'll not implement them as fully as you should to really heal your spouse.

3) Break all contact with the affair partner. Until the hurt spouse feels secure that there is no more contact of any kind going on between you and your affair partner, for him, the affair isn't over. As long as that door is still open, however slightly, the hurt spouse will live in fear that if the affair hasn't restarted, it is only a matter of time until it does. Contact means the emotional bonds are still alive. Only complete and utter no contact will allow the hurt spouse the ability to start healing. To not do so magnifies the odds against any rebuilding efforts being permanent.

Unfortunately, this is one step many unfaithful spouses find hard to follow through on. Especially if they were caught while the affair was ongoing. It usually means a sudden end to a relationship that at that moment, neither of you were ready to end. Maybe one goodby phone call and then to never speak or see them again sounds harsh and drastic. When someone has fallen in love with another person, even if inappropriately, to stop all contact is the equivalent to saying to the affair partner, "I don't love you, leave me alone and never talk to me again," when that is the exact opposite of how you feel. Yet if you want the affair to be over for your spouse so that healing of the marriage can begin, this is a necessity.

Remind yourself that if you are experiencing the sudden loss of a relationship with someone you were with for a few days, weeks, or months, how much more is your spouse going through when they are feeling the loss of a relationship they've had for years with you? At this point, you have to chose and invest yourself in whichever path you wish to go. In either case, that means cutting off all contact with the other you are leaving. No matter how much you love him. Bottom line: this is one of the hard consequences of allowing yourself to have an affair.

"But I work with the affair partner. How do I deal with that?" You may find your spouse is one of the rare ones who can deal with that situation, but with 99% of the hurt spouses, even if they acknowledge the financial stress of losing a job you've held for years, maybe nearing retirement, and the unpredictability of finding new work, the chances of successfully rebuilding the marriage goes down drastically if continued contact of any kind is retained.

Until contact is cut off, the affair is still going for the hurt spouse, even if in truth it isn't. The hurt spouse has no means to know you are being faithful even while making frequent contact at work. He has no way to know you aren't meeting in a closet or room or car. He has no assurance that you aren't sharing lunches together and discussing personal issues. Rebuilding trust in a situation like that is next to impossible. It's like telling someone to put out the fire with water while you continue to blast it with a flame thrower.

As Lenita often told me when she faced something painful, "I asked for this, you didn't." When you allowed an affair to happen, you put at risk everything. Your marriage, your children, your job, your stability. There may come a point that you have to sacrifice your job security for marital security. That can be one of the costs of having and affair. Which will you chose?

There may be solutions. You can ask for a transfer from your department if the company is large enough. Preferably to another building. Your spouse would even by happy in most cases to hear the transfer meant a move to another town. But if that doesn't work out, and there is no choice but to either quit or stay in contact with the person, it may mean making that hard choice to find another job. We again go back to points #1 and #2. It may mean less money, or financial hardships. That's when you have to ask what is more important to you? Your marriage or your job? If it comes down to a decision between the two, and no compromise can be worked out, it may mean making a decision of which one to sacrifice. No contact is that important.

No contact also extends to mementos you have from your affair partner. Pictures, written letters, emails, or other items bought for you all constitute links to the affair partner. These should be deleted or thrown away to complete non-contact. Both because they can be triggers to the hurt spouse, but also triggers for you, causing you to recall him or her and the "good" times. The goal of no contact is to let the affair partner fade into the past, so you can focus on your spouse, your marriage, and your family.

4) Become totally transparent. What is meant by this is to open yourself up in all ways that relate to rebuilding trust in the aftermath of the affair, so that your spouse can see everything he needs to see to feel secure that contact is not still ongoing, and that you are being truthful.

Think of it like this. The hurt spouse just discovered that you've broken your wedding vows to him, and in most cases lied about it, hid it from him. You've stolen something precious to him: his trust in you and his security in your love for him. Any "secret," any request for "privacy" to him is translated that you have something more to hide about the affair. He has no reason to trust you at this point.

It will take months of constantly discovering that you are telling the truth to begin to trust that you are actually doing that. The only way he can see you telling the truth is by being transparent.

There is a saying, that trust takes a lifetime to build, but seconds to destroy. Trust is the glue that holds a marriage together. By opening yourselves to each other in the most intimate of ways, you have made yourself vulnerable to being hurt. Trust means "I trust you enough not to hurt me. So I open my soul to you." The moment that perceived truth is broken by being hurt, the natural reaction is to pull back and not trust. After many positive examples of truth-telling, gradually he will start to trust again. Even then, it will never be the same innocent trust he had prior to the affair. Like an accident victim, he will tend to flinch inwardly when anything that even looks like the same threat darkens his path. That will be with him to some degree for the rest of his life. The only way to rebuild that trust is to no longer hide anything from your spouse that would be of concern to him or her.

What does “no longer hide anything” mean? We're not talking telling him what you ate for lunch, or all the thoughts that go through your mind everyday. Rather, there are two questions you can ask yourself that will determine if it is something you should tell him: “If I were him, would I want to know this?” and “Is this something I don't want him to know?” If you answer “yes” to either of those questions, then to be transparent, you should tell him.

On the practical side, transparency translates into actions like giving your spouse the user names and passwords to all social media accounts you have. All email accounts. All cell phone's and their bills. When your spouse asks to look at them, you readily give them over without the need to "erase" anything. Likewise, one of the best trust rebuilding activities you can do is to tell him things he could have never discovered himself. For instance, my wife told me about any and all encounters with her affair partner, who for some months kept attempting to contact her. Most of those I would have never known about if she hadn't told me. But she wanted to be totally transparent with me. Having her tell me that aided in my rebuilding of trust in her.

Some spouses expect a level of privacy and are unwilling to give this up. However, this is unhealthy, even for a marriage that has not gone through an affair. Even more so once one spouse has hurt the other by having an affair. Some secrets a spouse has are harmless. Maybe you were called a nickname by family or friends when little, and you've never told your spouse out of embarrassment. Understandable. However, once a couple is married, the old saying, “No man is an island” takes on an increased meaning. Any activity you do can affect the marriage and relationship, and each spouse has the right to know about it. That right supersedes any rights to privacy a spouse may think they have. Bottom line, if you have information you don't want your spouse to know that affects the marriage in any way, financially, socially, emotionally, sexually, or spiritually, you don't have the right to keep that from him, and he has every right to find out, even spying, if he has probable cause.

Without consistent transparency, you severally limit the ability of the hurt spouse to rebuild trust in you and the marriage, and drastically lower the chance of success in rebuilding.

5) Avoid "rug sweeping" at all costs. There are two ways and motivations for wanting to take the issues generated by the affair and sweep them under the proverbial rug so you don't have to look at them or deal with them.

One, what you did is painful to face. It is easier to say, "Okay, that's in the past now. It's over. Time to move on," and clam up about the affair, expecting him to do the same. We've already discussed in the previous steps why this is dangerous. It prevents the hurt spouse from dealing with and healing from what has been done to him. He is not able to find closure. It also causes him to sense that you are continuing to hide something from him. Making it near impossible to rebuild trust again. Doing this will ensure the marriage will fail at some point because the hurt spouse will not heal.

Two, it also ensures that you, the unfaithful spouse, will not heal. You will help your hurt spouse heal in large part by healing yourself. He needs to know that you are working to not only discover what character issues as a person allowed you to treat any problems and fulfill any unmet needs in the marriage in such a destructive way, but that you are also working to fix those issues, to make the changes in yourself to prevent another occurrence from happening again.

If you refuse to face your issues and instead keep them out of sight, you will not heal. Indeed, by ignoring the need to face these issues and do the hard work to emotionally and spiritually heal yourself from this destructive event, the likelihood of it happening again is substantially higher. Your spouse knows this instinctively. If you are hiding from the issues, the fear that it will happen again is much greater than if he sees you wrestling with what you've done to him and yourself, and working to fix it.

6) Take advantage of counseling. Being willing to not only go to individual counseling to help you sort through your issues related to the affair, but also marital counseling, is a key component of healing for both of you. Especially important if your skills at communication are less than ideal. A counselor can help to facilitate constructive communication and conflict resolution. But even if you have good communication and you felt your marriage before the affair was good, this is still important.

For us, our marriage counselor helped point us in the right directions. Our first thought was my wife was dealing with a sexual addiction. But we didn't understand that term in its full clinical sense. Our counselor pointed us to where we needed to work on our marriage. I realized after the fact that claiming Lenita had a sexual addition was more a way to blame it on something rather than her bad choices. Self-diagnosis isn't a good idea. An objective, informed guide is much better for seeing where you are at and helping you through the maze of feelings and options you'll encounter.

That said, not all counselors are created equal. Many are not that experienced in dealing with infidelity. I've heard more than my share of stories where a counselor gave out bad advice. Sometimes enabling the unfaithful partner to violate many of the needed tasks listed above. If you have a counselor who does that, feel free to change. Not merely because they ask you to do hard things, but because they aren't helping one or both of you to heal. Get a second opinion. Find out if they have experience counseling couples involved in affairs. There is too much on the line to stick with someone out of some sense of loyalty to them if they are not helping either of you to heal.

7) Read books on dealing with the aftermath of affairs and marriage. For the unfaithful spouse, the following is required reading. Get a copy of How To Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair: A Compact Manual For The Unfaithful by Linda MacDonald. Read it, follow it. It is not a big book, but goes into much more detail than we can in this article. It is very practical, blunt, and tells you exactly what you as an unfaithful spouse needs to do to help you and your spouse heal. You don't need to have the hurt spouse read this book, though he certainly can if he wants. This book is for the unfaithful spouse, and is spot on in guiding you to what is needed if you wish to save the marriage.

After that book, I have three more highly recommended books for both of you to read. The first is Getting Past the Affair: A Program to Help You Cope, Heal, and Move On -- Together or Apart by Douglas K. Snyder. This book will take both of you through a process of healing, step by step. Very practical on issues like communication, and based on sound principles.

The second is Not "Just Friends" by Shirley Glass. This is the best book for gaining insight both into what happened in the affair for both parties, and the steps each needs to take to help heal from it. It is down to earth, easy to read, and very practical. The author has years of work in the field, and her understanding of the reasons why this happens and what needs to be done to change it are on target. Both spouses will greatly benefit reading this book.

The other is His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage by Willard F. Harley. This book attacks another issue that commonly plagues marriages that have gone through affairs: the need to show each other love in a way they understand it. Some people might balk at the idea of working on the marriage until the affair issues have been dealt with. But what Mr. Harley found out in his own counseling practice, is that the success of rebuilding was greatly increased when both spouses were able to effectively communicate the feeling of love to the other person.

If you think about it, it makes sense. The more in love you feel with your spouse, the more motivation you'll have to face all the hard tasks of rebuilding. Likewise, the more your spouse feels you love them, the more likely he'll be able to not only get past the damage of the affair easier, but also motivated to have empathy and forgiveness for what you did. Honest feelings of love become the oil in a marriage racked by an affair that speeds healing and makes all the efforts you do to rebuild that much more effective.

These last three books we suggest you read as a couple. Preferably reading to one another. This not only provides opportunity to bond and participate in an activity together, but provides many chances to explore the events of the affair in a non-threatening manner, and see them through the light of another person. You'll find out your "unique" experience isn't all that unique.

Once done with these, seek out other books. Not just about affairs, but marriage enrichment in general as well. It will keep you both focused in building and maintaining a healthy relationship.

8) Don't neglect the spiritual dimension of healing. One of the advantages those of faith have is ways to deal with the moral and ethical guilt created by an affair. Often disciplines and perspectives can help a person not only deal with the guilt of what he's done, but the spiritual attitudes and practices that will aid in the healing process.

My wife, being a Christian, acknowledged her growing distance from God leading up to the affairs. She mentioned how she kept God in a closet much of the time during her affairs, and how hard it was to approach Him after it was all discovered. Then, as she emerged from the fog and faced the reality of what she'd done to me and herself, the immense guilt overtook her for months.

During all this time, our priest was instrumental in her spiritual recovery. This was key because it directly influenced her recovery in all other areas of the marriage. It also allayed one of my big fears upon discovering her sin, that we'd spend eternity apart from each other if she didn't change course. Key also is the fact that seeing her struggle spiritually enabled me to see she was working on all parts of her life, not just emotional or practical boundaries, but making herself stronger spiritually, which reinforced in me the sense that she was doing all she could to fix herself.

If you are or have held a faith, this is the key time to bring yourself back to that faith for support and strength and help in dealing with all the hard issues you have to face. You need to hear from God, "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more," just as the adulterous woman heard that from Jesus. You'll never hear that by avoiding God. Only by coming to Him in repentance and humility. But dealing with this can be a long road. There are many consequences to work through. As Scripture also says, the sin of adultery is, at its heart, a sin against your own body, your own self. Healing that will require spiritual aid as well as the other steps discussed above.

One practice I gave my wife was to memorize Psalm 51 and say it everyday. If you don't know, Psalm 51 is often referred to as the psalm of repentance. In the case of adultery, it is on target, because this is a psalm King David wrote upon being convicted of not only committing adultery with another man's wife, but having him killed so he could have the man's wife for himself. I knew she would need the constant reminder not only that she could repent and be forgiven by God and me for what she'd done, but the humble attitude needed to rest in God's forgiveness. It became one of the spiritual crutches that helped her through the months when the guilt weighted heavily on her soul as she worked to accept His forgiveness.

9) Work to fall out of love with the affair partner(s). If you felt you loved your affair partner, this is a hard one and will take many months to accomplish. But it is important for the following reasons.

One, the relationship was immoral and should have never started to begin with. It is important that the unfaithful spouse do all they can to erase the improper relationship from their lives. Your love for the affair partner is an affront to your spouse.

Two, no one can love two people and give 100% to only one. The love for the affair partner(s) is love stolen from your spouse who you pledged it to.

Three, as long as you remain in love with the affair partner(s), you are susceptible to temptation to reignite the fires of that relationship. Time alone will not kill off love. You can be ten years of no contact, and if the love never died, it can fire back up into another affair.

At first, it will be hard to do the following, but as you establish no contact successfully, and you gain some distance from the affair, you'll want to make sure you do the following.

One, make sure no contact is fully established, including getting rid of any items or messages or pictures associated with the affair partner. These items serve as remembrances, and provide a link to keep the flame alive.

Two, as you emerge from the fog induced by infatuation, make a list of all the negative things you ignored about the affair partner. In Lenita's case, he had more of an anger problem than I do. I'm very emotionally stable, and she is highly sensitive to anyone being angry to her. He would have, at some point, crushed her love and self-esteem. But in the midst of the affair, she didn't think about it and he remained on his best behavior.

Three, practice guarding your thoughts using distraction and other techniques as described in the "Healing Steps for the Hurt Spouse" chapter. You can't so easily stop thoughts of them from popping into your mind, but you can work to not dwell on them. They slip out as soon as they arrive. The less you think about them, the faster you fall out of love with him.

Four, focus and work on loving your spouse as fully as you can using the resources mentioned in the "read books" step. Investing yourself into loving your spouse will not only regenerate feelings of love for him, but also make feelings you had for your affair partner pale in comparison.

There are many other details we could go into, but the books listed will have more of that than we could ever hope to squeeze into one chapter. But the above are the core issues to deal with to help your hurt spouse heal and save your marriage. It is a lot of work and will take a long time, but the reward can be very worth it both in terms of your own healing and growth as a person, as well as a fuller and richer marriage, despite the negative affects of the affair.

Transparency: Soul Windows

There are two primary losses a hurt spouse endures: the loss of intimacy with their spouse and the loss of trust. Trust is the heaviest casualty in an affair.

As bad as it is, an affair can be ended and in due time, forgiven by most spouses. The transgression can end, no contact established, and it can become a distant memory in time. If that was the sum damage done by an affair, you'd have fewer broken marriages over them.

But it is trust on several levels that does the most damage.

Lack of trust, if not successfully rebuilt, will linger and poison a marriage long after the affair has become ancient history. Time will not heal it, only multiply it. Here is how:

1. Lying during the affair. Few unfaithful spouses are in a frame of mind to confess during an affair. They will often go to great lengths to hide it from their spouse, including denying any accusation, gas lighting, creating marital drama to artificially get angry with the spouse, lying about where they're going, been, what they did, etc.

2. Lying when they get married. Committing infidelity involves breaking one's wedding vows, making what was vowed before witnesses a lie.

If an unfaithful spouse confessed shortly after ending an affair, or in order to end one, that would be the extent of the deception. A definite blow to being able to trust one's spouse, but rebuildable in most cases. Unfortunately, many unfaithful spouses compound that deception by doing the following:

3. Lying after the affair is over. A majority of unfaithful spouses don't confess to the affair to their spouse. Usually in the mistaken belief they are saving the spouse from being hurt. Too late. The damage has already been done. Lying to one's spouse about the condition of the relationship only compounds their hurt. Should the spouse find out about it, as is often the case, the consequences of the deception will grow like interest in a high-yield investment account.

4. Lying after discovery day. Otherwise known as the trickle truth. The unfaithful spouse, fearing losing their spouse or hurting them further, only tells as much as they believe they have to. But each secret is like a land mine waiting to go off during the rebuilding of the marriage. Each new revelation to the hurt spouse destroys trust more than it would have if told at the beginning, making rebuilding trust much less likely to be successful.

A healthy relationship is founded upon mutual trust, honesty, and respect. Destroy that, and you destroy the glue that holds a marriage together. If an unfaithful spouse sincerely wants to rebuild their marriage, rebuilding that trust is the number one priority. Fail there and the rest either won't happen or won't matter.

The antidote to deception and the quickest route to rebuilding trust in a marriage where trust has been destroyed is transparency.

Transparency, as well as no contact with the affair partner, is one of the immediate task an unfaithful spouses is expected to do to rebuild once the cat is out of the bag. This is often translated to mean the unfaithful spouse must allow the hurt spouse full access to all communication venues: email, cell phones, Facebook and other social sites, at any time they want, without the need to sanitize it first.

That is part of it, but it goes further than that. Shirley Glass in Not Just Friends uses the analogy of opening and closing windows. When an affair happens, the unfaithful spouse closes some windows to their spouse in order to open them with the affair partner. Each closed window into the unfaithful spouse's life represents an area of their life closed off to their spouse. It lessens the intimacy and hurts the bonds of marriage.

How, you may ask? As listed in my marriage articles at the beginning of this blog, the marital bond is composed of several strands: physical, emotional, social, legal, and spiritual. Each type of bond represents a degree of intimacy. For example, the legal bond represents the willingness of both spouses to be legally recognized as one entity with its legal benefits and responsibilities. It indicates a higher degree of commitment to one another because it cannot be so easily broken.

An emotional bond is strengthened by closeness, openness to each other. In other words, transparency. The more of your secrets you tell someone, the closer and more intimate of a friend you are to that person. It is that closeness that creates the emotional feelings of being in love with someone.

So the more windows that are closed to the spouse, the more secrets a spouse has that the other is not let in on, the less intimacy and emotional closeness the relationship will have.

This dynamic is often illustrated in affairs themselves. It is frequently the case that the unfaithful spouse and the affair partner share more of their emotional lives with each other than the unfaithful spouse does with the hurt spouse. In my case, my wife talked with me only 5-10 minutes a day prior to discovery day. Meanwhile, she spent hours everyday via phone and text conversing with the affair partner.

Granted, that window, prior to the affairs, wasn't open too much, but once she opened that window to her affair partner, he knew more of what was going on with my marriage than I did. In effect, they shared a transparency that I didn't. I was clueless while the affair partner even knew how often my wife and I had sex.

Soul Windows

True transparency is deeper than giving your spouse your passwords to everything. It involves opening windows to your soul to share with your spouse. It means not only providing openness to your forms of communication, but allowing them to see you as you are, faults, mistakes, good points and all.

It means keeping few, if any, secrets. Most certainly keep no secrets about the condition of the marriage. The more such secrets are kept, the less emotional connection you'll have, the less emotional love you'll feel. The less trusting the hurt spouse will be.

There is the key to transparency: to allow the hurt spouse into your soul and life so they can feel they know you again.

They can experience the honesty and the real you. Without that, giving the hurt spouse passwords and access to accounts will only be a band-aid on a gaping wound. If they still don't feel like they can trust the unfaithful spouse, they'll assume there are hidden accounts and cell phones they don't know anything about.

How Can I Open Soul Windows?

First, spend more time communicating. Just talking more won't insure opening soul windows will happen, but without it, it simply will not happen. You can't have quality time together without also having some quantity. A good goal is to spend 15 hours a week together. A good bit of that time can be conversation.

Second, read good marriage and infidelity books to each other. Pause to discuss points or participate in exercises suggested. My wife and I have had some of our most productive discussions this way.

Third, participate together in marriage counseling. Sometimes a guide can help discuss issues that need to be brought out in the open that a couple might be blind to.

Fourth, participate in activities together. Transparency and opening soul windows involves more than talk, but sharing your time with each other. Transparency of your life.

Fifth, set aside some time to discuss issues that need to be addressed concerning the affair. The hurt spouse needs to only ask questions they really need to know the answer to, and the unfaithful spouse needs to answer them as honestly and completely as possible.

One good suggestion is to create a discussion jar. The hurt spouse can write their questions on pieces of paper and put them in the jar. The unfaithful spouse can look at them as needed. When the time comes to discuss these issues, the unfaithful spouse can draw out the question(s) he wants to answer. A virtual discussion jar using an email and storing them into a folder could accomplish the same thing.

Does this work? Think about it. These are the kinds of things the unfaithful spouse and the affair partner were doing that fueled their fantasy and made it exciting. They spent massive hours each week communicating. They did things together. They shared themselves with each other heart to heart. Is it any wonder they fell in love emotionally?

In short, they were flinging soul windows open to each other. They were becoming transparent to each other while the relationship with the hurt spouse grew less intimate, more closed windows, less feelings of love. Which is exactly where the saying comes in, "I love you but I'm not in love with you." In other words, I love you in my mind, but I'm not feeling it.

To rebuild trust, the unfaithful spouse needs to shut those windows to the affair partner (no contact) and open them fully to the hurt spouse. Over time, if the hurt spouse senses they are seeing the real you, that you are being honest, faithful, and repentant, trust can be rebuilt.

Likewise, the hurt spouse needs to be willing to open their windows in response to the unfaithful spouse's open windows. While it may not happen immediately (you're gun shy), it will do the marriage little good if the unfaithful spouse opens his window but the hurt spouse never does. Unfaithful spouses need to be patient, but transparency in marriage is a two-way street. When transparency is one-sided, it becomes the means of emotional abuse, like infidelity.

What are other ways you've discovered to become more transparent with your spouse?

Pull the Trigger on Triggers

Dealing with emotional triggers is a common problem for hurt spouses. Repentant unfaithful spouses establishing no contact also deal with triggers.

What Are Triggers?

Triggers are any reminders of an emotional trauma that renews the negative emotions of that trauma.

For example, someone involved in a wreck with a semi-truck will feel the emotions of fear while driving in the vicinity of a semi on the road. Seeing a semi on the road serves as a trigger to activate that fear and hurt again.

For hurt spouses, triggers vary widely depending on the circumstances. What triggers one spouse may not trigger another hurt spouse. Not everything that could be a trigger becomes one.

Nor do hurt spouses chose what will trigger them. It is an automatic emotional reaction to something that they experience. They cannot will to not feel that way. It just happens. Most of the time, the hurt spouse wishes they did not have these triggers. They don't want to experience that pain again.

There are three main classifications of triggers for hurt spouses.

1. Words used during the affair.
2. Things used during the affair.
3. Events/places that are related to the affair.

Words are grouped into three sub-categories: words/phrases used on the affair partner, used on the hurt spouse particularly during the affair, or words that appear deceptive and non-transparent.

If the unfaithful spouse referred to his affair partner as "Sweetie" and the hurt spouse knows this, and has never been called that before, being called sweetie post-discovery day could trigger a hurt spouse into recalling the betrayal.

If the unfaithful spouse said, "You're my wild flower," during the affair to the hurt spouse, continuing to use it could remind the hurt spouse of the affair.

Telling the hurt spouse, "Hold on. Let me do a couple things before you use my cell phone," can sound like the unfaithful spouse is hiding something, precipitating the suspicions the hurt spouse felt in the days leading up to discovery day.

Things can be any physical object used during the affair. Gifts given to or by the unfaithful spouse and affair partner, vehicles used--including color, make and model--, a bed, mementos retained by the unfaithful spouse, music listened to, or a credit card, just to name a few examples.

Events and places can be any holiday that was tainted by the affair--like discovering the unfaithful spouse was with the affair partner on Easter. The couple's anniversary, a job, the gym, a restaurant, sex, or company picnics.

Unfaithful spouses also have triggers involving two main areas: guilt/desire for the affair partner, and once guilt for the affair sets in,  the same list for hurt spouses can remind the unfaithful spouse of what they did, triggering shame and more guilt.

How To Deal With Triggers

There are seven main ways of dealing with triggers.

One, realize they are going to be there. All hurt and unfaithful spouses will run into these triggers. The main strategy is to minimize and deaden them as much as possible.

Two, remove as many as you can. This might involve getting a new job, a new vehicle, new furniture, avoiding restaurants that are triggers, deleting/getting rid of mementos, moving to a new city, etc.

Three, get back on the horse, even if the affair partner was riding it before. My own example is my wife met the second affair partner at the gym. I started going to the gym with her. Initially, it was awkward and uncomfortable. But after a week or two, I relaxed, and no longer felt triggery about the gym. Creating new memories with her at the gym rendered it ineffective as a trigger.

Four, invest new meaning into a trigger. Anniversaries--both marital and discovery day--tend to be big triggers. As our first discovery day anniversary approached, we'd been successful at rebuilding so that we both had a lot of hope for the future. A year prior to that, I didn't know if we'd still be married by that point. So our first discovery day anniversary became a celebration that we'd made it that far in good shape.

If you can't do that, due to a rough and uncertain rebuilding, treat it as a memorial, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor is nationally. Be grateful for lessons learned and any progress made, no matter how small, while acknowledging the losses.

Five, hang on, they do deaden with time if not reinforced by new occurrences of the affair. Time may not heal the wound, but it will lessen the impact of the wound emotionally. The safer the hurt spouse feels as time goes by without new cheating, the less impact triggers will have.

Six, focus on strengthening your romance. Couples who feel in love with each other will not be as negatively affected by triggers. The book, His Needs, Her Needs is an excellent tool to aid in that process.

Seven, both hurt spouses and unfaithful spouses should realize that feelings are not controlled directly by will power and reasoning. They can influence emotions, but can't turn them off and on like flipping a light switch. It takes time to modify emotions. This is true whether we're talking about feelings of pain and anger from a hurt spouse, or the unfaithful spouse feeling in love with their affair partner. Because a trigger flairs those feelings up from time to time doesn't mean the person has gone back to square one.

There are perhaps other methods of dealing with them. What has worked for you?

Am I in Love?

 The following is a chapter from our book, Healing Infidelity: How to Build a Vibrant Marriage After an Affair. It is an attempt to discern what it means to say "I love you" especially in the context of an affair and spouses rebuilding.

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A common statement among unfaithful spouses is that they fell in love with their affair partners. I've heard them say statements like, "She made me feel more alive than I ever have." The rush of an affair-generated love can be addictive. But is the unfaithful spouse really in love with his affair partner? Also what does he mean when he says he still love his spouse despite that?

Likewise, when a hurt spouse discovers the affair, his love for his spouse can take a hit. Some, over time, end up "falling out of love" with their spouse. This causes them to be less motivated in rebuilding or even caring about their spouse. If they stay in the marriage, it is more for the sake of the kids or financial reasons than loving their spouse. Some hurt spouses are unable to ever get over the rejection that the affair caused them to experience, either due to the unfaithful spouse not doing the needed actions to help them heal, or sometimes because the hurt spouse is too wounded from it to heal.

In either case, love or the loss of it becomes involved. It is therefore important that we look at what love is and within the context of an affair and rebuilding, how it can help or hurt as the case may be.

I intend to show why we feel love of various kinds and how they interact to form a full experience of love, and how when extracted from that context, get perverted into a false love. To do this, we need to first understand the four types of loves. C. S. Lewis, in his book "The Four Loves," lists four Greek words most common to understanding love: storge, philio, eros, and agape.

I know, I know. Many of you have heard all this before. Before you jump to conclusions about what I'm going to say, press reset for a moment and let's take a fresh look at these in the context of infidelity.

Eros

We're starting with this word because out of the four, it is the most misunderstood word. Perhaps because it is never used in the New Testament, the word tends to be restricted to sexual love. But this is too restrictive, not only in classical Greek usage—Plato uses it in non-sexual contexts—but in the Early Church Fathers, who often used the Greek word, eros, to describe our love for God.

The word that sums up the meaning of eros is passion. It is emotional, and a strong desire that moves us to action. It excites, activates, and moves us to act.

This is the type of love that appeals to help the starving children. Most any appeal, to be successful, has to pull this type of love from you. Seeing pictures of starving children is designed to get you to donate because your pity motivates you, gives you enough passion to move you to act. This is why the Church Fathers used the word in relation to God. We were to have a driving passion for God, and without that, you wouldn't have the motivation to stand up and be martyred for Christ.

Passion itself is a misunderstood term. It comes from the Greek as well and means "to suffer." So the "passion of Christ" refers to the suffering of Christ. How does this get from there to excitement that motivates? Simple. All passion is driven by suffering a lack of something perceived to be needed. In short, when you see something you want, you are suffering because you don't have it. You are in "pain" and are motivated to resolve it by fulfilling that desire.

Added to that, God has built into us a survival mechanism, usually related to hunger and other desires that we need to live. Sex falls into this realm too. When the brain perceives a feeling as pleasurable due to the infusion of dopamine firing off the brain synapses, it stores that as a need. If the dopamine levels are high enough, the brain can rate it as highly needed for survival. This forms the addictive pattern which can eventually—if reinforced enough times—lead one to having an addiction to a specific desire.

This dopamine response pattern can be fooled into perceiving something as a survival need that really is not. Nowhere is this more evident when an unfaithful spouse perceives he can't live without his affair partner, that dumping her means he is missing out on an important part of his life. This derives from the brain seeing the feelings the person receives from his affair partner as a "survival need" when in truth, he will survive just fine without her. Especially evident when he consider that he once felt that way about his current spouse, which is why he married her.

At its heart, eros or passion is a selfish love. It is having a need and seeking to fulfill it. But the other side of the coin is if we don't care, perceive something as not a need, we neglect that object and leave it to rot. Without this love, rebuilding will be much harder simply because we are not motivated to do the hard work of rebuilding. We don't perceive it as a need. Meanwhile, the unfaithful spouse still feels that passion for the affair partner. He has an eros love for the affair partner, but a different kind of love for the spouse.

Eros love, then, is a desire and need based love. It is motivated for what we will get out of it. Ideally, in conjunction with the other loves, we are also giving to someone else what they need for their passion. When that happens, you have what is generally termed as "romantic love" in our day. This gives us some insight into how this love works both in marriages and in affairs.

Romantic passion usually starts up in a relationship automatically. That is, most people feel that it happens naturally, without any effort on either person's part. Often it is described as a chemistry between two people. Or the most common term, "falling in love." For true marital love, this love acts as the priming of the marital love pump.

We usually refer to this experience as infatuation. When romantic love fires off between two people, they are both excited about each other. They both fail to see the failings and negative aspects of each other, or if they do, they make excuses or believe they will change, because this powerful love they feel will conquer all, or so it seems.

It should be noted this is the same type of love that one feels during an affair. It produces the "fog" we spoke of in Part 1. The feeling of new love is so powerful that it tends to put blinders on a person so that he cannot see the negative aspects of what he is doing. He only know one thing: "I can't live without having this feeling of love in my life. I must have it." Like a drug addict who is willing to spend their life's savings on the next high, those in affairs don't consider the negative consequences of what they are putting at risk in an affair.

But whether we are talking about a relationship that ends in marriage or one that ends in an affair, eventually this love dies if left unattended. This especially is true with a marriage because of the many distractions. Jobs, bills, children, sports, hobbies, school and many other responsibilities of married couples work to kill off romantic love. Passion dies off like a fire running out of fuel. But even for an affair relationship, eventually it gets old, is not new, the excitement dies off and the two at some point start to feel a responsibility to each other, not to mention the constant worry that they will be discovered and it all come to a sudden end.

This dynamic, the excitement of a new relationship, has led some to conclude that we were not made or created to be monogamous. Most who posit an evolutionary creation of man, point to this as the basic instinct of man that allowed him, especially when man was a small number, to spread his seed as widely as possible for the survival of the species.

However, this fails to account for the totality of love. It places eros, passion, romantic love as the only real love, at least as it relates to marriage and creating a family. As we will see, this is an incomplete picture of love. It is only one part, important as it may be. A part that can easily be perverted toward destructive actions in the name of love just as much as the drug addict is willing to steal and kill in the name of his love for the drug.

Because this love is based on an emotional needs-based feeling of well-being, it will naturally go up and down over a period of time. The "honeymoon" eventually dies off. So if we need this type of love in a marriage, how do we keep those fires burning?

This is where the book, His Needs, Her Needs: How to Affair-proof Your Marriage by Willard F. Jr. Harley, comes into the picture. This topic is way too big for one article, so I would highly suggest this book be obtained and read for a full understanding, but here is a summary that applies to what we are discussing here.

Men and women tend to have different needs to feel love for someone. One person may perceive a hug as saying, "I love you." Another may feel that when the other does some type of act of service like washing the dishes for them. Another when the person joins them in an activity like a sport or a hobby. While men and women tend to have opposite needs, each person is different. What makes one woman feel loved is not the same for another woman, or one man to another.

Doing the actions that say "I love you" to someone causes them to feel love, and fills what Mr. Harley calls the "love bank." As long as the deposits exceed the withdrawals—doing something that doesn't make them feel loved—the romantic fires are kept going.

The reason that it feels natural in the beginning of a relationship is because each person has an excitement about the relationship that causes them to invest as much time as possible with the other person. When that happens, it makes the other person feel loved. You are each motivated to do for the other the things they want to do. You find yourself spending every spare minute with them.

When I dated Lenita, we were together every evening unless otherwise prevented. When we were together, we focused on each other. I'm sure if I added up the time we spent together, it amounted to at least four to five hours a day on the average. That means we were together, focused on each other, for around 28 hours a week.

But what happened to us? Like all marriages, jobs and children pulled us apart. Over the years, our time spent with each other shrank to minutes a day instead of hours. Often those minutes weren't focused on each other, but on daily issues, taking care of this or that, or attending church. We rarely took time to make deposits into each other's love banks. We had some of the other loves we'll be talking about, so we felt we loved each other, but this love became neglected over the years. It would get fed only on special occasions like Valentine's Day or our anniversary. But nothing like we did during our dating time.

The key then is spending quality time together. Not focused on responsibilities, the children, or a job, but upon each other. Only by spending enough time together can either of you hope to make deposits into the love bank "naturally." Filling those needs comes through quantity of contact. Mr. Harely recommends spending at least 15 hours a week together. That can seem like a lot, but it is an issue of priorities. If one's marriage is important, one will make the time just as easily as you make the time to watch a football game or meet with the guys or any other number of hobbies we may have.

Since discovery day and reading His Needs, Her Needs, we've gone from spending a total of one or two hours a week focused on each other to over 15. The result? Despite the affairs, I've never felt more in love with my wife. Even more so than when we were first married.

What occurs naturally at the beginning of a relationship is spending time with each other long enough that we naturally do the actions that say to the other, "I love you." Words are good, but those actions make it real. But as the relationship moves forward, the time together naturally goes down unless the couple makes a conscious effort to counteract it. This requires more than having a night out once a week, though that is a good start. But to make a difference will require spending 15 hours together at least. Find activities you can participate together in.

For instance, here is our usual weekly schedule. Most nights find us swimming at the local gym for around one and a half hours on average including drive time. That amounts to a weekly total of 7.5 hours. Weekly we spend our time on Saturdays going to church together. The car ride is 45 minutes each way, for a total 1.5 hours. Usually she reads a book on marriage enrichment or initially about affairs and dealing with them. That ups the total to 9 hours. We have a weekly eating out together, which invests another 1.5 or more hours a week, bringing it to 10.5 hours a week. Every week, I help her with a cleaning job at an office 30 minutes away. Another hour of drive time alone together, making it 11.5. She usually calls me on her lunch breaks and when she's traveling between jobs, and we talk. This is harder to estimate, but that amounts to at least one hour a day. Add five hours to the total and we spend at least 16.5 hours a week together, focused on each other.

We could add in more smaller pieces, like our texts back and forth, our time in the room when we share things we've found on the computer or discussing some of the issues we've run across on the support forum, but you get the picture. Whereas before the affair we were lucky to spend five minutes focused on each other a day, now it is back to hours. Invest that much time into a relationship, and it becomes hard to not feel loved by them because you are both saying to each other, "You're worth investing my time to be with." Not doing that can't but help to say the opposite.

But that shows how eros love works in an affair and why some people become so addicted to that new-relationship excitement, not knowing how to keep it alive, they end up going from one person to another each time the relationship seems to lose its spark and excitement. They don't realize that if they would simply invest the same amount of time with their spouse as they want to do "naturally" with the affair partner, that they would soon feel the same exciting romantic love for them as they do their affair partner.

Romantic, passionate love will rise and fall through a marriage, but if a couple doesn't learn to preserve the time for each other in the face of the other demands, it will fall and rarely rise up. What was natural, spending loads of time with them, now has to be done intentionally. Or more appropriately, the couple needs to intentionally preserve that space and not let other, less important responsibilities, overgrow the love in a marriage. Like weeds need to be pulled from a garden to keep the plants healthy, the marriage has to be tended after planting the seeds through infatuation. Failing to do this is saying the marital garden is not worth saving or preserving.

The danger for the unfaithful spouse, on the other hand, is failing to realize the love they often feel for their affair partner is mostly, if not all, passion, but not the fullness of what love is. The infatuation is the starting gun to trigger a more fuller love, which we will discuss in the next sections. But too many, when they experience this exciting new-relationship romance, mistake it for what love is. By itself, it is a fickle and emotional response to having one's love-needs met by someone else. It is the instinctive response to those triggers that gets romanticized in popular culture as to what love is.

Phileo

The keyword to describe phileo love is friendship. Most people understand this one well enough. It contains elements of the other loves in a unique combination. Like eros, it deepens and is enriched only when we spend time on it. Another more descriptive word, however, is companionship. Unlike eros, it isn't totally need based, can involve sacrifice, and isn't sexually oriented.

It is when one combines phileo love with romantic love that one hits a version of marital love. Yet, even this is not the fullness of marital love. It requires more ingredients. Yet, a marriage that lacks a sense of companionship is a weak marriage indeed.

One of Lenita's songs she always said was our song was "You're My Best Friend" by Queen. We've always had a sense of that friendship, and the subsequent love. But we allowed the companionship to die. We still felt we were friends, we still felt we loved each other, but we had allowed our zest in our relationship to shrivel. It was that lack that her second local affair partner filled, as he talked with her and spent time with her while I was involved in my own world, oblivious to it all.

This thin line between friendship and romantic love is the premise behind the most popular book on the topic of infidelity, Not Just Friends by Shirley Glass. Friendship can entail intimacy to a degree, and intense love for the other person, only minus the more sexual overtones and romantic love. If two people who become close friends find they are becoming romantically attracted to each other, it becomes very easy to justify to one's self that "we're just friends." As Lenita thought at the time, "I can handle this and not let it evolve into an affair," all the while she was already neck deep into the affair. Blurring the lines between friendship and romantic love is the fertile grounds for affairs to blossom.

How does one identify if a friendship is moving into romantic love? One can identify it by answering the following questions. Do either of you flirt with the other? Do you spend more time talking and interacting with the friend than your own spouse? When you talk, do you regularly discuss intimate details like marital problems you are dealing with, or sexual preferences? Do you make contact via text, phone, or email/messages multiple times every day? Do you think about them daily? Do you sense an attraction to them, or what many people would call "chemistry"?

If you can answer yes to any of these questions, it should serve as a warning flag that this relationship has the potential to be more than just friends, and you should take steps to establish firm boundaries and prevent alone time. Limit contact and use techniques to guard your thoughts so as to not allow the spark to start a fire.

If you answered yes to several of these questions, you are likely already involved in the early stages of an affair, whether you've even kissed or held hands yet. Pulling back and dialing down the contact to once or twice a week is the only way to preserve the friendship and avoid damaging your marriage.

True friendship is a great blessing. Each person in the marriage can benefit from having friends outside the marriage. As John Gray says in Why Mars and Venus Collide, it is important that each spouse find other sources of friendship outside the marriage so that the spouse isn't left to provide all of one's well-being. Women need other women to talk to, and men need other males to interact with. Our society has more and more limited friendships, especially among men.

When dealing with friendships of the opposite sex or any person one may be attracted to, boundaries are important. It is usually the ignoring of those boundaries that leads to a friendship evolving into a romantic relationship. Avoid spending alone time with such an individual. Always have someone else with you. Avoid discussing marital issues or other intimate details reserved for a marital relationship or professional therapist. If he wants to text or contact you frequently, send signals you're not available all the time, like waiting for a few hours to answer a text, or a quick text back that you are involved in something and can't chat now. Enough of those and he'll get the signal in most cases.

When you see several of these warning signs growing, that is the time to run. Don't think you can handle it. You're already hooked if these things are happening. The deeper in you go from there, the harder it will be to stop the affair and the more danger to your marriage as the addictive nature of what you are feeling takes over.

Perhaps you have heard some unfaithful spouses say they just wanted the sex, not a relationship. In effect, they wanted the eros love without the phileo. They want the pleasure of sex without the entanglements of a relationship. They are in love with the feelings, not the person. Therefore, they don't care from whom they get them, just so they get them. Is this possible?

In short, yes, to a degree. It is possible for someone to want only the sex and not love the person involved or desire a friendship with them. That was the attitude of Clyde, Lenita's first affair partner. He didn't want to know about her, her family, or any details of her life and history. He just wanted sexual favors, period. In effect, he didn't want to be one with her emotionally. This is the basis of prostitution. A man can pay for it, and not have any strings attached. He may never see that girl again.

However, to say this creates no emotional or marital bonds is a secular view of sex as a form of recreation and not much more. Only when it is linked with love for the person does it take on any meaning whatsoever in a bonding fashion, per that view. As we will see in the next chapter, this is an incomplete picture of sex. Rather, sexual intercourse involves making the two into one flesh. Whoever one has sex with, joins with them in the basic act of matrimony. A bond is created, no matter how much love is or is not felt for the person. In other words, yes one can avoid phileo love with another individual, but eros love has its own bonding with the other that cannot be escaped.

Storge

The two words that describe this type of love is comforting affection. Its use in Greek is mostly restricted to family relationships, but can expand into a more broader "family" among friends.

In the popular TV show of the 80s, "Star Trek, the Next Generation," one of the characters was named Data, a sentient android. In seeking to define a friend or even romantic relationship, he described it as, "My neurological pathways have become accustom to your presence." This is the essentially the definition of storge love, but in a more biological sense. We become accustom to those around us, extended family and friends, and develop an affection for them that we find comforting. We enjoy being with them because we find security in their presence. It also tends to include biological connections, though not exclusively.

Often when a hurt spouse learns about the affair, he will bounce between hate and love for his unfaithful spouse. He is angry that the spouse chose someone over or in addition to him, equating to a rejection of his love. This negatively affects his romantic and companionship love. Yet, he is accustom to the unfaithful spouse's presence and doesn't want to lose the security of that relationship, especially if they have been together for years.

This love also interacts in concern for the children. Not wanting a broken family, some stay together for the sake of the children. Storge love is involved in such decisions. The hurt spouse doesn't want to deny the children the relationship with their father or mother, so for the sake of the children and keeping the family whole, they stay together even if the love between them is dead or dying.

The unfaithful spouse experiences this love when he feels he loves his spouse and doesn't want to divorce, but he no longer feels "in love" with the hurt spouse. What he means is he no longer feels any eros love, especially when compared to the excitement of the affair partner, but he still feels the bonds of storge love with his spouse, the mother or father of their children. That relationship is familiar, comfortable, and provides security. There is a history to that relationship, unlike with the affair partner.

In a healthy marriage, this love grows with time spent together. As the years pass, each grows accustom to the other's presence. With the advent of biological children, this bond grows exponentially. A family is created, and the love for one's child extends to the spouse who is also a parent and who contributed their DNA to create this child bonding the two into one, literal flesh.

To the degree Lenita and I felt true love for each other before the affair started, this and the next love, for me, defined why we felt we loved each other. We didn't take into account, as important as this love was, that it was not the totality of what marital love should be. After 29 years and three children, our storge love was very strong. But our phileo, eros, and in Lenita's case to a degree, agape love had waned.

Agape

Agape is also one of the loves little understood. Most think of it in terms of divine love, or non-sexual love as contrasted with eros. But these ideas only skirt the foundation of the word and its corresponding love.

If there is one word I would list to describe what this type of love involves, it would be martyr. Unlike eros, it is not based on filling one's needs. Unlike phileo, it doesn't require companionship. Contrasted with storge, it is not based on family bonds or a comforting presence. Rather, this love indicates one who is willing to sacrifice themselves for another, a cause, or a belief.

In classic Greek, the term was rarely used, and was a more generic word for love without a lot of meaning attached to it. The writers of the New Testament infused the word with the meaning of love that God has for us. But there are three times in the Bible when the word is not used of divine love, but inappropriate love. It is the highest form of love one can have. It willingly sacrifices what one wants in favor of the needs and desires of the one loved. This is why Jesus said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (Joh 15:13 ASV)

The term became attached to divine love because God's love so often uses the term. Because Israel so often committed adultery against Him, and He forgave them and took them back. Because we so often seek other "gods" in our lives than Him, and yet He waits with open arms to receive us again like the father did the prodigal son. For sure, the pure example of agape love is God Himself, who willingly became incarnate as a man, so He could give His life, to defeat death, and restore life through His resurrection. In spite of the fact that we, as a whole, had rejected Him.

None of us can hope to have and exhibit a pure agape love, but we can participate in it through Him. Our love involves selfish desires, need-based companionship. We can't get away from that, and indeed, should not. For us, agape love transforms those loves into an integrated whole of what love should be.

St. Paul exhorts the Ephesians in relation to marriage: "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it;" (Eph 5:25 ASV) Marriage is at its ideal, a sacrifice of each other on the altar of their new spouse. In the Orthodox Church's marriage ceremony, this is illustrated with crowns the groom and bride wear on their heads, known as crowns of martyrdom. This same spirit is shown in the traditional Western marriage vows, "...for better or for worse."

This type of love does not waver with one's feelings of love. It does not rely upon being treated fairly or justly by the other spouse. It does not even depend upon whether one's spouse is abusive or not. Once one has agape love for another, it is there forever.

Note, I'm not saying this love puts up with abuse or injustice anymore than God puts up with sin. Simply that one loves the other, and has their best interest at heart no matter what happens or what sacrifices need to be made.

Allow me to illustrate this with my own situation, at the risk of sounding puffed up and wanting praise from my readers. For I don't count this as something I did through great effort, but was simply there and natural, so I attribute it to God working in me when I needed it most.

When I first discovered Lenita's affairs, among the shock, denial, and disbelief that I would ever find myself in this situation, one desire rose above the others. I realized she had committed a mortal sin that could destroy our marriage and her. While not denying my pain and struggle, my first concern was for redeeming her if at all possible.

So much so that when I called my priest the next morning, he asked me whether I wanted a divorce or not. I said without hesitation, as if there could be any doubt so why ask, that I did not want a divorce. The idea of divorcing her hadn't even entered my mind, though I worried that it could end there depending on where she was at. I readily forgave her, and that has stuck. I've never dangled her sin over her head as a punishment.

That said, agape love would have demanded that I leave if she continued to reject me. If she had not repented within a reasonable amount of time, like the sinner cannot be with God in heaven, I would have had to leave her. That in itself would have been a sacrifice on my part because I wouldn't want to do that. Yet, if she stood any chance of healing, it would require at some point for me to release her like the father did the prodigal son. But no matter what, I would still love her, no matter what she did. For that, my pain would be all the more deep. But it is far less than the pain God has for the many who have rejected Him, and He still so loved the world that He sent His only-begotten son to rescue us through the sacrifice of death.

It is agape love that ties the other loves together into a full, complete, and holy love that goes beyond ourselves. You cannot "fall out of love" with agape love. The heart of a marital love is this self-sacrificial love.

Allow me to put it in the negative. Many look at love as merely a feeling, an emotional attachment. It is that, but by itself, it falls far short. So when during the marriage, the one spouse isn't getting the sexual love he wants or expects, instead of being willing to sacrifice for a time, he goes outside the marriage to find his fulfillment. When one spouse neglects the other, and someone comes along who pays attention to him, he mistakes that attention for true love because he doesn't have a sacrificial love for his spouse that no matter the temptation presented, he will abstain. Agape love does not ebb and flow with circumstances, but with one's commitment to be a martyr for the benefit of the other person.

I know what some are thinking. Doormat. No, not quite, as I illustrated above. Agape love doesn't shield the object of love from the consequences of his actions, but loves him, even when that love says you must release him in the hope that he will eventually repent and return with a true change of heart. That is often harder than staying and shielding him from the consequences of his actions, and ends up enabling his sin instead of healing it.

What is True Marital Love?

All love contains elements of each flavor of love. It is not like you can take love and neatly divide it into these black and white categories. Storge love for a child involves a level of eros passion for him. The parents sacrifice often for the well-being and benefit of the child, exhibiting true agape love. All human agape love is connected to eros, phileo, and storge love.

In each action, one type of love tends to dominate over the others in time, while for a full love, all comes under the umbrella of agape love in general. For if love doesn't mean to give of one's self for the betterment of the other, then in what manner is it true love? In what manner is instinctive and needs-based love really love in the full sense of the word if it does not have as its final goal the best for the other person, even at your expense?

The ironic aspect of a full love of this nature is that one gets more than what the other loves can give by themselves. Our fulfillment doesn't come from getting, but in giving. It is the nature of this type of love to establish love as a lasting love.

While in my story I've attributed several aspects of what Lenita did to rebuilding as key in my quick recovery, if there is one reason why I healed as fast as I did, much quicker than most people in my support group, is that this sacrificial love caused me to be more concerned for her than for myself. I was more focused on her healing than my own. I forgave her readily, even though I didn't know if her commitment would stick. As I write this, not even two years past discovery day, I don't think about the affairs much. It is always there, but I don't hurt as much from it. I don't get depressed over it anymore. Our relationship is better than it has ever been. I'm exceedingly thankful that she was able to repent and turn from the path she was headed down. It has been a long and painful process, but a rewarding one for both of us.

To put it bluntly, without a strong sense of love embracing all the loves, especially agape love, I would still be hurting today. I would feel the injustice of what she did to me, the grief of what I had lost would still weigh heavily on my heart. Despite the fact she'd done all the right things so that other hurt spouses on the support group vocally wish their spouses were like her, I would still hurt deep inside, not feeling free to relinquish my pain for fear it would let her off the hook. I would not have easily forgiven her. If it were not for a love that didn't depend upon her behavior to exist, I would not have sacrificed my own selfish desires for what was best for both of us. Instead of enjoying a fulfilling relationship with her now, we would live in doubt and stress, fearing the next slip up and that love would shatter with the next sin.

If passion love, family affection love, and companionship love do not lead one to sacrificial love, then that love is a shadow of the real thing, and not fully love. If love can so readily changed based upon feelings and actions of others, then it is not true love, but selfish ego-protecting desires.

As St. Paul states: "Love is patient, love is kind; love does not envy; love does not boast, is not puffed up; does not behave disgracefully, does not seek its own, is not provoked to anger, thinks no evil; does not rejoice over unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."(1Co 13:4-7 EMTV)

Are you in love? Let that love be the mark by which you measure if you are there. If we are honest, none of us exhibit it perfectly. But we strive to do so, and if we don't, only then have we lost.

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Check out the full book, which includes the story of how Lenita ended up in a series of affairs, how Rick discovered it, and how both rebuilt their marriage into a vibrant one, as well as many other good articles like this one to aid in Healing Infidelity.

The 180 for Unfaithful Spouse

The 180 is a list of behaviors from Michelle Wiener Davis, the author of Divorce Busting, a book about how to save a marriage headed toward divorce. I’ve not read the book, but it does have four stars out of 74 reviews on Amazon as I write this.

The 180 was originally written for spouses dealing with an uncooperative spouse who is headed for the divorce door. It has become popular among infidelity support groups in helping hurt spouses deal effectively with their uncooperative, unfaithful spouse. Follow this link if you are looking for The 180 for Hurt Spouses.

The goal of the 180 is to project confidence, self-esteem, non-reliance upon the other person, and that the spouse is ready to move on without them if necessary.

Recently on the support forum I frequent, an unfaithful spouse asked if the 180 was for cheating spouses or betrayed spouses? It dawned upon me that with some tweaks, these could be used to help unfaithful spouses establish and maintain no contact with their affair partner.

First, let’s define what no contact means. There are two levels of no contact with an affair partner: external and internal.

External no contact means that the unfaithful spouse does not initiate contact with the affair partner and avoids responding to their contact attempts as much as possible. If they text you, you ignore them. If they call, you don’t answer. If you answer not knowing it is them or bump into them publicly, politely say, “Sorry, I can’t talk with you,” and hang up or walk away. Ignore and avoid any attempts to communicate with you.

Establishing internal contact will take much longer than external. Effectively establishing external no contact is necessary before you can ever hope to establish internal no contact.

Internal no contact means the unfaithful spouse reduces and minimizes points of indirect contact that keeps love and feelings for the affair partner from dying and fading into the past. This involves getting rid of any reminders of the affair partner including pictures, gifts, mementos, old messages, letters, or the like. Even deeper it involves not dwelling on them nor in any way continuing to care about them which can include feelings of guilt for hurting them through the affair and/or no contact.

The 180 for unfaithful spouses is a list of behaviors that the unfaithful spouse can focus on to establish and maintain external no contact.

It is emotionally hard enough to break up a relationship when one or both of you decided to end it. Even harder when neither of you were ready to end it. The path to successful no contact in these cases is to focus not on what you feel, which is often not easy to change, but to focus on actions and behaviors despite how you feel.

An unfaithful spouse who developed feelings of love for the affair partner will not feel like doing these behaviors. It is understood, especially for affairs stopped by the hurt spouse discovering the extra-marital relationship, that going no contact with your affair partner will seem counter to what you want emotionally and be one of the hardest things you’ll do in your life.

That said, most unfaithful spouses agree to this to preserve their marriage. It becomes a matter of priorities and knowing the two relationships cannot exist side-by-side. No matter which way you chose to go, you’ll hurt someone. If you love your spouse too, you’d have the same issues going no contact with them as you would with your affair partner. It is one of the consequences created by having an affair.

Following these behaviors, even if you don’t feel like doing them, will help you to not only show your commitment to rebuild your marriage with your spouse, but over time the sense of independence, empowerment, and self-respect it develops will aid in establishing internal no contact and having the self-control to not go there again.

Some of these behaviors will feel radical. That’s because often the unfaithful spouse feels bad about a sudden and abrupt break with the affair partner. They want to slowly break off the relationship. Problem is, this rarely works. It is a delay tactic by the addicted brain to keep a foot in the door because it doesn’t want the relationship to end. Likewise, such a tactic creates more pain over the long haul with not only the spouse, but with yourself and the affair partner.

A clean break is the least painful and most effective way to establish no contact. It is like pulling a bandage off a hairy arm. It hurts much less when removed as quickly as possible. Likewise, in any past breakups with former girlfriends or boyfriends, were any ever done slowly? Rarely.

Following is the 180, tweaked for the purposes of the unfaithful spouse establishing and maintaining no contact with the affair partner. If you slip, don’t despair. Pick yourself up and get back on track. It may take some patience with yourself to fully implement all of these. Not all will apply to everyone. If the shoe fits, put it on.

The “No Contact 180” for Unfaithful Spouses

Don’t initiate phone calls. If they call, tell them you can’t talk with them and politely hang up. Don’t entertain answering any questions or discuss how you feel.

Don’t initiate messages of any kind, and don’t respond to any of the affair partner’s attempts to contact you.

Don’t pursue “closure” or “resolution”. It is a myth that only brings about less closure and resolution if attempted.

Don't follow them around on social sites like Facebook.

Don't ask for help from the family members of your affair partner.

Don't say, "I Love You!" to them or within yourself, even if you still feel you do. Saying it creates an expectation of dependency instead of independence.

Do more than act as if you are moving on with your life; begin moving on with your life.

Be cheerful, strong, outgoing and independent.

Don't sit around waiting on your affair partner. Get busy. Do things. Go out with friends. Enjoy old hobbies. Find new ones. Stay busy.

Your affair partner needs to believe that you are moving on with your life without them.

Don’t give into acting like a moody, needy, pathetic individual but a self-assured individual, secure in the knowledge that you have value not based on their love and affection.

Do not entertain any questions about the relationship either in your mind or with the affair partner. Initiate no such conversation.

Be patient and learn to see the negatives in the affair partner. List them out, as it will help clear foggy thinking.

Listen and then listen some more to close friends, therapists, and support networks to help you maintain no contact.

Learn to back off, keep your mouth shut, and walk away when you want to contact them, no matter the provocation.

Take care of you. Exercise, sleep, laugh, and focus on all the other parts of your life that are not in turmoil.

Know that if you can do this 180, your smallest consistent action will change your feelings far more than sweeping issues under the rug and hoping for the best.

Do not be openly desperate or needy even when you are hurting and are feeling totally desperate and needy.

Do not give up no matter how dark it is or how bad you feel.

Do not backslide from your hard earned changes. Remain consistent. It is the consistency of action and attitude that delivers the message to your spouse that you are committed to them and to the affair partner that it is really over.

When expressing your dissatisfaction with the behaviors of the affair partner or spouse, never be judgmental, critical or express moral outrage. Focus on the pain that their acts caused you.

This is the kind of behavior that shows you are not afraid to move on with your life.

More important, given enough time and consistency of behavior, it will convince yourself that you can move on with your life and convince the affair partner that you’re serious about ending it.

In instances where the unfaithful spouse has contact—such as working together, sharing parental responsibilities of a child, accidental encounters, a persistent affair partner trying to make contact, or other similar situations—keep the following 180 behaviors in mind should contact happen:

Don't pursue, reason, chase, beg, plead or implore.

Only discuss required business issues and nothing else.

Don't point out "good points" in the relationship.

Don't encourage or initiate discussion about the future.

Don't ask for reassurances.

Don't buy or give gifts.

When the affair partner engages you in person, be short on words. Don't push any issue, no matter how much you want to. End the conversation as soon as possible, don’t encourage extended discussion. Interrupt if need be, gracefully bow out, and leave.

If you were in the habit of asking your affair partner how they are doing, ask nothing. Seem totally uninterested in their life.

Don't be overly negative, reactionary, or excited to see them—just pull yourself back. Don't be available for anything other than required business. Your affair partner will notice.

No matter what you are feeling today, only show your affair partner happiness and contentment.

Do not allow yourself to lose your temper. No yelling, screaming or name calling ever. Be cool, act cool; be in control of the only thing you can control: yourself.

Refuse to argue at all. It shows you care.

Be strong, confident, and learn to speak softly.

Do not focus on yourself. Don’t discuss how you feel.

Do not believe any of what you hear them say and less than 50% of what you see. Try to remember that they are also hurting and desperate to make contact, and so they will say anything to justify their behavior.

By focusing on doing the above behaviors to the best of your ability, it will send the right message to both your spouse and your affair partner: you are committed to rebuilding your marriage. As months pass, feelings will align with actions. You’ll gain more self-confidence and self-respect. You’ll realize you can do the right thing, even when it is hard and painful. That will go a long way to restoring the love and trust between your spouse and you.