Will Your Marriage Ever be the Same Again?

“I just wish it could go back to the way it used to be. We were so happy before he cheated. I loved our marriage. And despite what he says, I think he did too. We had so much fun together. I wonder if we’ll ever feel that way again …

Do you think our marriage will ever be the same? Can’t we just go back to how it was before the affair?”

I can’t begin to tell you how many people have asked me questions like these over the years. I would say it’s one of the most common questions I get in my practice.

And, frankly, when I hear this question it always reminds me of the problem thinking that often leads to divorce.

It’s hard to believe.

After all you’ve been through together …

You did so well together for so long. You’ve been married for years, maybe decades. You may have raised kids who are now grown and out of the house. You’ve most likely suffered through financial difficulties, family crises, and personal catastrophes.

And now you’re wondering if it’s all over. Has the marriage you have worked for and cherished for so long finally run its course? Is this really the end?

That is what many people who are injured by an affair ask themselves. Facing this question and considering whether or not it is time to end your marriage is never an easy place to be. Coping with an affair (or other traumatic event in your marriage) is one of the most difficult emotional experiences a human being can have.

“I have these awful images of the affair, and I can’t seem to make them stop. They just keep playing over and over again like a horror film. I see him with her doing … unnamable things … It feels like I am slowly going crazy …”

I hear my clients say things like this all the time. They are haunted by images of their spouses cheating with the paramour—even when they have no idea what the paramour looks like or what the two of them might have done together.

Despite their best efforts to stop this barrage of painful images they can’t seem to shut off their mental movies.

It’s one of the awful, though not at all uncommon, outcomes of being injured by an affair.

“When I found out my husband cheated after 15 years of marriage it completely crushed me. It wasn’t just that he had slept with another woman; it was that I didn’t understand how he could say he loved me on one hand and completely betray me on the other. I thought if you loved someone you didn’t do things like that.

So I was left with this question: Does he still love me?

It took me years to figure out the answer.”

Does this woman’s struggle sound familiar to you? Do you wonder how your spouse could cheat on you if he truly loved you? Are you left with the sinking feeling that maybe your spouse doesn’t love you anymore and that your marriage is on the verge of collapse as a result of the lost love?

If so, you aren’t alone.

The question of whether or not your spouse is still in love with you is quite difficult to address. To be completely honest with you, there is only one person who can give you a real answer to that question, and that’s your spouse. The degree to which you believe this response is a reflection of the level of trust and honesty in your marriage.

However, in this article, I plan to give you some insight that may help reduce your anxiety and offer you some guidance about how to think about this question.

Cheating Doesn’t Mean He Doesn’t Love You

Let me start by stating something that may not be completely obvious to you at this moment: Just because your spouse cheated, it doesn’t automatically mean he or she has fallen out of love with you.

I know it is very difficult to reconcile the idea that someone who loves you can completely betray you. It would seem that if your spouse truly loved you, he or she would not have cheated.

I can tell you only what I observe: in some cases, the cheating spouse seems to be in love with the spouse, and in other cases, he or she is not. My observation does not always fit with what the cheating spouse says.

Sometimes the cheating spouse says there are reasons for going outside the relationship that have to do with the marriage, and sometimes the cheater will try to make it seem as if it had nothing to do with what was happening inside the marriage.

Regardless of the conscious or unconscious motivation, cheating was a decision.

There is no “excuse” for being unfaithful in a marriage, and no “reason” that can justify the action. As such, the choice to have an affair reflects, at minimum, a character leak in your spouse. He or she has a breach of integrity, and this is the real reason the affair happened.

This is all to say that having an affair and loving your spouse aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s possible that your spouse still loves you despite that fact that he or she cheated on you.

Now that we have established the possibility that your spouse still loves you, let’s look at the probability.

A Diamond That’s Been Trashed

In my long years as a marriage counselor I have noticed something incredibly interesting about love. The love that was put together when you first got married can endure an extraordinary amount of change and suffering. In almost all of the couples who come in to see me, the love they started with is still there. It’s just been buried.

Love is like a diamond. In your case, it’s like a diamond that’s been trashed. The love you share with your spouse may be covered in the mud and grime of miscommunications. It may be buried in the hurt of emotional outbursts or years of silence. It may be disgustingly filthy with the vomit and dog poop of a horrific affair.

But in the end, it’s still a diamond.

You can pick up this diamond, clean off the filth, and you still have a beautiful gem. Your love endures.

That may be true of the feelings your spouse has for you as well, even if he or she doesn’t currently recognize it. This is definitely not universal; it doesn’t fit for all couples or all people. There are those out there who truly fall out of love. But in my experience, of the people who come to me, these cases are rare.

What happens instead is that the love gets buried. People get confused. They lose their way.

But just because they are lost, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have fallen out of love with you.

In fact, your spouse may not be fully aware of the depth of his feelings himself. Over the course of this traumatic time you may hear things like:

• “I love you, but I am no longer in love with you anymore.”
• “I never really loved you. I just married you out of a sense of obligation.”
• “I was afraid you would fall apart if I told you how I really felt.”

Even statements like these don’t necessarily mean your spouse has fallen out of love with you. They are more an indication of the poor state of your relationship than they are a meaningful measure of your spouse’s love. However, your spouse may have so much resentment and hurt that he or she is not willing to consider anything but leaving.

So where do you go from here?

Take a Magic Pill

The question that I ask people when they come in to see me stating they have lost their loving feelings is this:

• If I could give you a magic pill that would make you suddenly fall deeply in love with your partner again, would you take it?

If your spouse has said something like, “I love you, but I am no longer in love with you” he or she needs to ponder the answer to this question. It wouldn’t hurt for you to ponder the answer to this question as well.

If the response is “yes I would take the pill,” it means somewhere your spouse still has feelings for you. You (and/or your spouse) want to rebuild your relationship, you just don’t know how to do it.

This is actually good news. The main thing you need to heal your marriage is a deep desire and a strong commitment to repair the relationship. Learning how to do it comes by acquiring a set of skills that can be taught to you.

If the answer is “no I wouldn’t take the pill,” then the prognosis is much worse. Your spouse may truly have fallen out of love with you, or he may be so lost that he can’t or won’t access the loving feelings he still has.

In some cases it takes a dramatic event of some kind to uncover these feelings again. I have seen clients who don’t wake up and realize that love is still there until the marriage is falling completely into ruin. Divorce papers may be ready to be signed, the loving/injured spouse may be packing up and walking out, and only then does the cheating/out-of-love partner realize how he or she truly feels.

It’s also possible that the person never wakes from this slumber of lost love or moves on to a different relationship and uses that new relationship as a fun distraction to get away from thinking or feeling about your marriage.

In any event, if your spouse would refuse the magic pill, things are looking pretty bad. Depending on how committed the person is to leaving the relationship, this may be the end. It’s still possible to save your marriage on your own (a topic I have written about at length in my book Saving Your Marriage) but doing so is less probable. You may even need to employ the assistance of a therapist experienced in poor prognosis marriages.

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Discover the underlying problems of your marriage. Inside Saving Your Marriage, Dr. Gunzburg reveals where your marriage problems come from and realistic steps for fixing them and restoring the love.

How to End the Lies: Learning to Be Transparent Part 5

What you want most is to develop an open, honest relationship with your spouse that you can count on. You want to open the doors of communication and trust once more and keep them open so you’re marriage can flourish.

But how do you do this?

It’s an interesting question, and the answer involves a lot of different components. But if you have started employing the techniques for being transparent you learned in the last few articles, you should begin to sense a shift in your marriage.

It may feel like it takes you forever to get there. It will surely take a lot of work from both of you. But if you keep at it, eventually the tide will turn and the environment in your marriage will go from one of deceit to one of understanding and trust.

Has our whole relationship been a lie? Did he ever tell me the truth? Who else has she slept with? Was this really the only affair? What other kinds of horrible atrocities has my spouse committed?

These are some of the questions that torment a person injured by an affair.

If you’re the injured person, you are already well acquainted with questions like these. They may plague you day and night now that you have learned about the affair, making you suffer in ways you never imagined you could.

If you’re the cheater, you may not realize just how much was lost when you had the affair. But let me tell you, your spouse’s trust in you was shattered.

You no longer trust your spouse. That’s the crux of the problem. When he goes to work you wonder whether or not he is in contact with “her.” When she goes out dancing on the weekend with her girlfriends you wonder if “he” will be there.

When your spouse is home late from work without calling, it sets off a series of paranoid images that flash through your mind like a horror film. When you call his cell phone or office and there is no answer, you automatically assume he is at her place …

You’re suspicious. And it’s eating you alive.

This unwelcome change in your psyche is an unfortunate but absolutely natural outcome when you have suffered from an affair. You have been lied to so regularly for so long that you can’t help but wonder whether or not anything your spouse says or does is genuine.

“How could he do this to me? I loved him. We had a good marriage. We have kids for goodness sake. Now he’s gone and ruined it all. Why did he cheat? Why?”

Do you find yourself desperately trying to understand why your spouse cheated? Do you search your brain looking for a logical explanation to make sense of your spouse’s actions only to be left wondering over and over again?

If so, you aren’t alone. People who are faced with the devastating realization of an affair almost always ask themselves this question at some point.

If you have gone through the trauma of finding out your spouse cheated, you probably want to know, “Why?”

When Carol heard the words come out of Dave’s
mouth, she felt like someone had reached inside her chest
and torn her heart out.

“I love you, but I’m no longerin love with you.”

Hot tears streamed down her cheeks. It seemed
like her whole world was coming apart at the seams.

“Look, it’s not that I don’t care for you anymore.
I do. It’s just that … well you’re my best friend. I love
you. I just don’t feel that way anymore.”

She felt the air catch in her throat as she tried to breathe
through her tears. They had been through hard
times before, but she never expected anything like this.

“What if I have tried everything, and my marriage still doesn’t seem like it’s getting better? Is there a time I should give up and move on with my life?”

Are you asking yourself questions like this right now? Are you worried that you’ve tried everything, and still your marriage is on the verge of collapse.

Do you suffer with the pain and anguish thoughts like these bring with them?

If so, let me assure you, you are not alone.

As a marriage counselor, I hear questions like this from clients all the time.

People come into my office, having tried their best to put their marriages back together again, and desperately hope I can give them some insight about whether or not it’s time to end the marriage, get a divorce, and move on with their lives.