What happens after an infidelity? If you want to save your relationship, you’ll confess to your partner. This conversation can be extremely delicate, and choosing the wrong time or revealing too much or too little information can devastate your relationship. Here’s what to know before you begin.
The Process of Finding Out
Learning about sexual betrayal is incredibly painful—even micro-cheating can cause long-term effects in a relationship. But it matters how the information is delivered. If you are confessing to your partner, they will still have trust issues with you but there’s a better chance that they will feel like they can trust you because you confessed. If your partner caught you cheating, they don’t know that you would have eventually come clean. The betrayal is compounded when you continue to lie throughout, making the actual infidelity even more painful. Coming clean is always the best course of action if you want to preserve the relationship. Otherwise, they will always wonder if you would have stopped if you didn’t get caught.
The experience of finding out your partner is cheating on you can be traumatic—literally. Your partner may go through shock or the stages of grief. They may remember for the rest of their life where they were when they found out—it’s that life-changing. As with other traumas in life, it can have knock-on consequences of PTSD, depression, anxiety, and more. And it will highlight every insecurity in the relationship; it may even breathe new life into old fights that you believed were handled.
How Much You Should Reveal
Further, what type of information you tell your partner is important. Disclosing every detail can fill your partner with images that may haunt them forever. Each element can become a trigger, including the places you had sex, what the person looked like, or phrases you used in conversation with each other. Every detail may stick with your partner forever, even as they try to move past it. They may never be able to eat at a certain restaurant again or may feel insecure about their looks in a new way. Disclosing everything may feel good for your conscience, but it may also do more damage to your relationship in the long run. Be careful and go slowly.
Your Partner’s Response to the Affair
How someone responds to an affair is complicated. It’s informed by their relationship history, how their parents’ relationship was, and their personality. If they watched one of their parents get cheated on and vowed to never be in a relationship where someone was unfaithful, that will have a major impact on how they receive the news of the betrayal. How they have responded to previous betrayals may be a good indication of how they will handle this one—but they may surprise you, too. Give them space to act uncharacteristically because they are experiencing trauma.
Trauma can create a state of hypervigilance in your relationship. It may make your partner feel like every attractive person is a threat or like you two can never be apart or another infidelity will occur. Your partner’s faith will be shaken in your relationship, but their faith in their own judgment and intuition may also be decimated. To rectify this, the person who cheated should make every effort to help the partner who was cheated on feel emotionally safe in the relationship again.
Long-term surveillance, on the other hand, isn’t helpful for the relationship. If the partner who was cheated on still feels the need to go through the texts and social media years after the infidelity occurred, it means that the trust was never rebuilt. Leaving this dynamic to fester can result in a parent-child vibe, which isn’t sexy for anyone involved.
Deciding Whether to Leave or Stay
Whether or not your partner stays doesn’t just depend on how you present the information and how well you can rebuild trust. Other factors, like whether you have children, own a house together, and whether your partner can afford to live on their own will come into play. It may also depend on why you cheated in the first place, and whether or not that issue can be solved.
Self-care after the affair is crucial. Your partner will need to invest in themself again, build up their confidence, and take a step back from other stresses in their life.
It can be easy to get stuck in a cycle of anger. Your body has been affected by the news of the affair, causing your cortisol levels to rise. The anger felt is real and valid, but it’s important not to stay in that stage forever.
For more information, don’t miss my YouTube video on How to Repair a Relationship After an Affair:
Find a Safe Space
Working with a licensed therapist can help the conversation about infidelity go much smoother. Contact me for a free consultation today!
Bio: Dr. Nazanin Moali is a clinical psychologist and sex therapist in the Los Angeles area. She works with various individuals to understand and improve their sexuality. Dr. Moali conducts personal consultation sessions in her Torrance and Hermosa Beach offices, or via a secure, online video-counseling platform. Click here to take the sex quiz for women.