Forgiving Infidelity - How to Move Past Cheating in Your Relationship
Forgiving Infidelity - How to Move Past Cheating in Your Relationship
Forgiving infidelity in marriage is a huge hurdle for many. Forgiving your spouse for cheating on you is a bitter pill to swallow especially if you've just found out about the affair. You may even feel that forgiving him and trying to save your marriage means that you are rewarding his bad behavior. But for the sake of your mental and physical health you need to learn to let go of your negative feelings.
It is unrealistic to expect you to be able to forgive your cheating spouse right away, our emotions just don't work like that. Besides the hurt and the distrust that you are now feeling, what if after you forgive him he turns around, have another affair and betrays you all over again? You realize that without forgiveness it will be virtually impossible to rebuild your marriage. But what if you can't forgive your spouse, what are you to do?
If forgiving infidelity is not in the cards for you right now, you can still get some measure of peace by coming to terms with that which you cannot change. That is, you have to learn to accept that your spouse cheated on you and yes the affair did happen and nothing can change that no matter how much you want to. Accepting that the affair is now part of your history is going to move you toward healing and eventually forgiving your spouse when the time is right.
The road to forgiving infidelity and moving on with your marriage does not require forgiveness from you. Forgiveness requires work and that work begins with acceptance. Acceptance is very easy to swallow as you can take things slowly and see how things are going in the marriage without feeling pressured to forgive only to be betrayed again. Accepting that the affair happened also lets you work through your pain and anxiety and helps to rebuild trust in your spouse.