When you are struggling to overcome infidelity in your relationship you want to find a quick fix or easy solution of dealing with all of the tumultuous emotions and feelings caused by the affair. This is unrealistic, because healing from the hurt and pain and restoring the trust takes a lot of time and effort. Even if you're seeing a counselor or therapist, it will still take a long time surviving an affair. The process has to run its course, you cannot rush it.

Even though surviving an affair takes time, there are some factors that determine the outcome.

• The cheater breaking off all ties with the other person
  
• The cheater's readiness to answer questions
  
• The cheater's willingness to put up with the unavoidable emotional fallout
  

There are some normalcies that are common to affairs for both the betrayed spouse and the cheater.

The Betrayed Spouse:

• Experiencing severe emotional distress. Being in pain and feeling crushed and humiliated
  
• Having a hard time trying to understand why their spouse had an affair
  
• Unable to function properly both emotionally and physically.
  

The Wayward Spouse:

• Rationalizes in their own mind that the affair is separate from their family relationship
  
• If questioned, would deny the affair. If the affair is already discovered, they will refuse to discuss it
  
• Wants to sweep the affair under the rug instead of facing the issue and working it out
  

There a two steps to surviving an affair:

1. Personally recovering
2. Rebuilding the relationship

Personal recovery

You CAN recover from the emotional devastation of the affair whether or not your marriage survives, but there are a few things that have to happen first:

• Accept the fact that the affair did happen
  
• You have to allow time for healing, it's not going to happen overnight
  
• It is understandable that you want to get over the affair as quickly as possible, however trying to bury it is counterproductive as it will only rear its ugly head again. The best way is to just deal with it.
  

Rebuilding the marriage - what's involved

1) Work on restoring the trust, and not just with promises but through your actions
2) Make an ongoing commitment to honesty and transparency

In surviving an affair, both parties (more so the betrayed) are looking for some type of assurance that the same thing is not going to happen again. There is no single thing that you can do to prevent a future affair from occurring. Preventing future affairs is not something you do one time and that's it. It requires continual honest communication, setting appropriate boundaries and devising ways to affair-proof your marriage.