Many couples who are in the process of recovering from infidelity want to know if their relationship will ever get back to the way it was before the affair. But think carefully, do you really want to go back to that time? To a time when you were inadvertently setting yourself up for more pain and heartache than you ever thought possible.

You want to wipe the slate clean, to start over and make things better than they were rather than going back to the same situation where you found yourself being cheated on by your spouse. Cheating is always a choice. It is horribly selfish and unjustifiable and it is not the way to appropriately express dissatisfaction and pain. But as painful as it is to accept, the cheating probably brought to head problems in your marriage that needs to be fixed. Even though some people do lack morals and are serial cheaters, the likelihood of your spouse cheating on you if your marriage was in good shape is highly unlikely. So take a hard, painful look at yourself and your relationship and commit to the work necessary to make your marriage far better in the future.

Believing that everything will be okay if you just went back to how things were or romanticizing the past and ignoring what lead to the cheating in the first place is not going to help you heal either yourself or your marriage. Recovering from infidelity means putting the past behind you and moving forward with a new resolve to make things better than they were before.

When recovering from infidelity, both of you will have to love, commit and work at making your marriage better than ever. Dreaming of going back to the way things once were before the affair is not the best use of your time and energy. Instead,  why not use your time to reflect on your own deficiencies, both in relation to your spouse and your marriage, in terms of what you need to improve on as a person. Not necessarily for your partner, but because you want to be better. When you make changes in yourself you can inspire changes in your spouse as well.