Support

A complaint often heard about marriage is “My husband or wife doesn’t support me.”

But take a look for a minute at what is being assumed when you say this.  What kind of things should your spouse support you in?  Certainly you want to be partners in life.  Should your spouse support you unconditionally?  Should they support all of your interests?  If you are abusive to your husband or wife, should they support your abuse?  If you are a drug addict should they support your drug addict?  If you decide to have an affair, should they support your infidelity?

Of course most of us would not say that our spouse should support us in doing terrible things, but what if I am interested in doing something that isn’t terrible by itself, but hurts or bothers my wife?  Should she be supportive of my interest?

The Policy of Joint Agreement gives the answer: do nothing without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse.  If I am interested in becoming the best video game player possible, but I want to have a good marriage, then the only way I should pursue that interest is if my wife is enthusiastic (not reluctant).  If she’s feeling neglected because of the time I spend practicing video games, then if I want to have a good marriage, I should abandon that interest.  If my wife is interested in pursuing a professional singing career, but wants to have a good marriage with me, then she should pursue that career only in a way that I would be enthusiastic about.  There’s nothing wrong with video games or singing, but Dr. Harley has observed that in any marriage where an exception is made to the Policy of Joint Agreement, where one spouse does what they want in one particular area regardless of how their husband or wife feels about it, then that one thing will eventually cause the ruin of the marriage.  It happens pretty much every time.

Suppose I want to run for political office.  Should I be able to count on my wife to support my political aspirations?  Only if she’s enthusiastic about me running!

Some people think that husbands and wives ought to support each other in almost everything, as long as it meets certain standards of being “reasonable.”  But again I point back to Dr. Harley’s expertise: if there’s something that you are going to do regardless of how your husband or wife feels about it, then that one exception you’ve made the the Policy of Joint Agreement will eventually ruin your marriage.

I actually have more interests than I can possibly engage in in one lifetime.  I can count on getting my wife’s support by limiting myself to interests that she is enthusiastic about me pursuing.  Because I do this, I find that she is very supportive.

The feeling of trust

There are many people who do not want their spouse to check up on them.  Frequently they will say something like “Marriage has to be based on trust.”

That’s an interesting perspective.  It sounds like most people who say it want their spouse to change the way they feel.  But I’ve heard Dr. Harley say over and over again that it is almost impossible to change our emotional reactions.  According to Dr. Harley it is much easier to change behavior than it is to change what somebody feels in response to behavior.  Dr. Harley is a very successful marriage counselor and an expert in behavioral psychology, so I believe he knows what he is talking about.  And since he has a successful marriage and a successful track record of saving marriages, but most other people do not know how to have good marriages, I would be inclined to believe what Dr. Harley says and take what other people say with a grain of salt.

Trust is an emotional response to certain conditions. The condition is you have to act a certain way for quite a long time.  If your spouse doesn’t trust you, then either you aren’t acting the right way, or it hasn’t been long enough yet. Be patient; it will come (if you are acting trustworthy). And, believe it or not, you can have a good marriage without trust. The good marriage can come first, and the feeling of trust can come later.

If you are willing to act in certain ways and you are consistent about it, then in Dr. Harley’s experience, your husband or wife will eventually feel trust.  It’s up to you to cause your spouse to feel trust; it’s not up to him or her to try to feel that way when it is impossible!  And in Dr. Harley’s experience, first the marriage recovers, and then the feeling of trust comes later.

One problem we often see is people wanting their husband or wife to trust them in bad situations. This is a mistake, since trust is an emotional response to people acting a certain way. An example: suppose I go on a business trip with a lady coworker, and ask my wife to trust me. I am acting in an untrustworthy manner, so it’s a mistake to expect my wife to feel the feeling of trust when I act this way. I can instead expect her to suddenly start feeling distrust if I even suggest such a thing!

Another example: I change my email account password and don’t tell my wife. A couple days later she tries to get into my account and discovers she can’t. She asks if I’ve changed the password, and what it is. Instead of telling her what it is, I tell her to “trust me.” It’s a mistake for me to expect her to trust me, since I’m not acting in a way that causes the feeling of trust. She will never trust me as long as I act like that!

So, what things can you do to help your husband or wife feel trust sooner?

Practice transparency: keep your mate fully informed about your schedule, whereabouts, and who is with you. Reveal to him or her all email passwords, bank accounts, PIN numbers, etc. Invite them to check up on you using any means necessary, and if you notice them checking up on you, reassure them that this is okay. (My wife put a keylogger on my computer; I told her I was glad about it.)

Practice honesty: always tell the truth, do not conceal or change any details in order to “protect” your spouse. Do not erase messages. Do not try to prevent misunderstandings, but simply tell the truth.

Follow all of the Extraordinary Precautions that Dr. Harley recommends for avoiding an affair.  These Extraordinary Precautions are not just for husbands or wives who have been unfaithful.  Dr. Harley and his wife follow all of these, and it leads to a great marriage.

It makes no sense to order your spouse to feel trust without giving them any evidence to create it.  Trust is an emotion. You can’t force yourself to feel it. You have to create the right psychological environment to bring it about. The way to do that is with evidence: trust (the emotion) is built over time when repeated evidence adds up to trust being a reasonable conclusion for your emotions. And how can you do that if you aren’t looking at the evidence?

Transparency and openness is part of a normal healthy marriage. It’s what normal couples do in a normal healthy marriage. “Hey, where are you going today?” “Let me tell you …”  When a husband or wife is not acting normal and is not providing this transparency, Dr. Harley recommends that their spouse snoop and check up on them and find out the truth.

The reason the Marriage Builders plan calls for all of this sharing and openness is so that you can create the emotion of trust.

Do you want your spouse to feel trust?  Welcome them checking up on you.  Do you want to keep your spouse from ever feeling trust?  Then get upset with them when they check up on you and be demanding, disrespectful, or angry.  It’s that simple.

Dear Wayward Wives …

To the Wayward Wives out there,

I do not judge you. I understand what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. Perhaps your husband has neglected you for years, leaving you feeling lonely and empty and taken for granted. Or, perhaps, he is verbally abusive — maybe he puts you down, or blows up at you over the littlest things, and your heart just can’t take it anymore.

And, when nothing good seems to be coming your way, you met him: the sweet, caring, thrilling guy who listens. Maybe you talked to him about your marriage woes, or maybe you escaped with him with exciting conversations that distract you from your problems. Whatever the case, he became a dear friend. He actually listened. He actually admired you, and everything you must go through. He cares. Eventually, your friendship turned to love, and you would do anything for him — perhaps even give your body to him.

I understand that. I was there.

Now I implore you to listen to me for a bit. None of it is worth it. That may not make sense, but it’s true.

The road you are going down feels so right, but it leads to destruction. Your children will suffer. You see, the marriage you have with their father is the foundation for their entire world. And when their foundation crumbles, their whole world falls a part. Sure, you could get them counseling. But that will never repair the damage that is done. They will continue to suffer into adulthood, and they may even choose to cut you out of their lives because it is too painful to be around you.

They need you to be a strong woman and put their needs before your own. They need you to end your affair and repair your marriage.

Your own life is suffering, as well. If guilt is not already eating you up, it will and your health will go downhill. Do you feel the gnawing knot in your stomach yet? It just about killed me. That, plus the high anxiety, stole countless hours of sleep from me, which affected my ability to live life to the fullest. And trust me, if you were to divorce your husband now and start living the single life, life will become A LOT HARDER for you. Shuffling kids around, trying to raise them alone, living on only your own income … Your boyfriend will eventually leave you, and you will be alone.

And your husband … I know you do not care much about him right now. But even he, no matter what he has done to you, doesn’t deserve the pain this affair inflicts on him. I have talked to people who have suffered through the death of a child AND the betrayal of their spouses, and they say that the betrayal was by far the worst thing that has ever happened to them. Can you imagine anything being worse than the death of your child? That’s what your husband is going through. The father of your children doesn’t deserve that.

But, you are not doomed to a life of misery. I promise you that you can have a beautiful life, deeply in love with your best friend. A life so romantic and great and happy you can hardly stand it. It’s not with your Other Man. You CAN have that fairy tale with your husband.

If you could have that with your husband, would you be interested? If you knew that he would start treating you the way he should, if he wouldn’t hurt you, if you knew he could love you beyond your wildest dreams? If you knew he would be your secure, comforting friend that you could rely on — would you be interested?

Because he can. Your marriage doesn’t have to end — You CAN have that fairy tale. We can show you the plan to turn things around.

Interested?

What is wrong with me?

I have spoken with a lot of people who have had affairs.  Frequently these people get into a lot of study and searching, looking for an answer to some question like “Why did I have an affair?” or “What is broken about me, what is wrong with me, that I would have an affair?” or “What is wrong with me that I was looking for something else outside of my marriage?”

If you have had an affair, I can explain to you why you had the affair.  I have learned Dr. Harley’s take on the subject, and I have seen enough marriages with affairs to accept his position: people have affairs because we are all wired for it.  Having an affair is completely normal and natural.  It does not mean that you are broken and need to be fixed.

According to Dr. Harley, we would all have an affair under the right circumstances.  Many people dispute that, but from what I have seen, I believe it to be true.  We are all wired to fall in love and to reproduce.  Create the right circumstances for falling in love, and it will happen every time.

Maybe you think everybody else finds fidelity easy and natural.  Maybe you think they are “normal” and you are “broken.”  But the truth is, if we could take those people and put them in circumstances that cause them to fall in love with someone besides their spouse, they would suddenly find it almost impossible to be faithful.  And if we take you and make sure that you never get into circumstances where an affair could be possible, then no matter how enticing you have felt affairs were in the past, you would be completely faithful.

According to Dr. Harley, there are some circumstances under which all of us could be trusted – and some circumstances under which none of us should be trusted.  He’s right!

Feeling desire for someone you are not married to is not a sign that there is something wrong with you.  That is something completely normal and natural that happens to people who are close to someone of the opposite sex.  You should realize that if you act on that desire, you will hurt the person you have made a solemn vow to care for.  And you should also realize that if you remain in contact with the person you are feeling desire for, they will make Love Bank deposits in their account in your Love Bank, and your feelings for them will only increase.  That’s how everybody’s Love Bank works.  So if you find yourself attracted to somebody else, the thing to do is to 1) tell your spouse, and 2) break off all contact with the person you are feeling desire for, for life.

Dr. Harley realized early in life that nearly every member of his family had had an affair.  He realized that if he did not take extraordinary precautions to prevent an affair, he would end up being unfaithful to his wife Joyce.  Dr. Harley is at risk of an affair, just like you and me.  He is not broken, and neither are you.  He took those extraordinary precautions to make an affair impossible, and he has never had an affair.  He didn’t have to take those extraordinary precautions because he had something wrong with them: he had to do that because anybody who doesn’t is very likely to fall in love with someone else and have an affair.

By the way, if you have had an affair and are reading or getting therapy to find out what is “wrong” with you, or to “fix” yourself, you are taking a very selfish route while your victim (your spouse) is suffering.  You will never “fix” the thing inside you that leads to affairs, because it is a part of human wiring and we all have it.  But you can fix your mistake, and fix your marriage, by taking extraordinary precautions to prevent an affair, and meeting your spouse’s emotional needs and working to heal them from the hurt you have caused.

Are you listening to the Marriage Builders Radio show, daily?  Do you have the app?  Remember, Dr. Willard Harley is the expert – not me.  He’s the one who figured out how to save marriages.  I’m just happy to pass on what I have learned from his program and materials.  And the best advice I can give you is, take Dr. Harley’s free “class” on the radio every day!

Love Busters: the Other Half of the Program

Dr. Harley’s first and best selling book is His Needs, Her Needs.  Many couples buy just this book and are able to save their marriage.  But in our case, and in the case of many couples that I have seen, His Needs, Her Needs is not enough.  Meeting emotional needs is only one half of the equation.  Your balance in your spouse’s Love Bank can’t reach the romantic love threshold if you are making withdrawals, and so most marriages need to learn to avoid Love Busters.

Many people grew up in households where disrespect and angry outbursts were unacceptable.  Their parents didn’t treat each other that way and did not allow the children to treat each other that way.  But a lot of us come from families and a culture that believes that everyone has an angry outburst now and then, and that disrespect is sometimes a great way (perhaps even the only way) to get a point across.  Without any examples or teaching to the contrary, some of us took our natural instinct to be disrespectful or angry and turned it into a very well-practiced habit.

Likewise, some people have a philosophy that it is okay for a wife to boss a husband around, or a husband to boss a wife around.  I can think of many marriages I’ve known where one or the other spouse was the boss, or where both husband and wife constantly competed to be boss (what Dr. Harley calls “dueling dictators”).

So selfish demands, disrespectful judgments, and angry outbursts come very naturally to many people in marriage, and an awful lot of people feel that these behaviors are justified, at least some of the time.  It’s a real shock to see someone like Dr. Harley labeling these behaviors as abuse, and many people want to argue with that definition.  But these behaviors destroy marriages.  They make people as miserable as they can possibly be, from the relationship that should make them happier than any other.  How fair is that, to the victim of the demands, disrespect, and anger?

The other Love Busters are also common and tolerated in many families.  The idea that a husband (or a wife) should give up any behaviors that their spouse is not enthusiastic about will usually get you laughed at.  Dr. Harley’s Policy of Radical Honesty is only called “radical” because most people don’t believe you should reveal to your spouse everything you know about yourself – most people think there are some things that you should hold back.  And if you suggest that husbands and wives should make an effort to eliminate habits that their mate finds annoying, prepare to be told by the “experts” how wrong you are.

Selfish demands, disrespectful judgments, and angry outbursts all lead to an abusive marriage.  And dishonesty, independent behavior, and annoying habits all lead to an incompatible marriage.  Most people (and counselors) believe that some or all of these behaviors should be tolerated, at least some of the time.  But most people (and counselors) don’t have a good marriage, and don’t know how to teach people how to have a good marriage!

If you want to have a good marriage, the only way I know to do it is to draw a firm line and decide that these behaviors are unacceptable and you are not going to tolerate them.  They are called “Love Busters” for a reason – they bust love, like a bubble or balloon shot with a gun.

I have seen a lot of people look at this program and proclaim that the problem is that their spouse will not meet their emotional needs, but do so in a way that demonstrates that they are very disrespectful toward their spouse.  Let me advise you that if you are engaging in Love Busters, your spouse is not the cause.  Dr. Harley’s position is that you need to refrain from Love Busters even if your spouse doesn’t meet your emotional needs, and even if they engage in Love Busters themselves!  Dr. Harley and his wife Joyce frequently comment that “there are reasons for an affair, but no excuses.”  Well, there are also reasons for angry outbursts, but there are no excuses.  There are reasons for disrespectful judgments, but there are no excuses.  There are reasons for independent behavior, but there are no excuses.

The marriages that I have seen recover are the ones where somebody decided that they weren’t going to engage in Love Busters, no matter what their spouse did.  If all you want to do is talk about the intolerable situation your spouse is causing and why you are so upset, don’t expect anything to ever get better.  Instead of talking about your justifications for your love busters, do something – learn to stop love busting, and if your spouse doesn’t follow suit, look into your additional options like separation or getting professional help.  But whatever you do, don’t fall back on Love Busters.  Otherwise you are as much to blame for the failure of your marriage as your spouse.

A special anniversary

Today is a special “anniversary,” of sorts.  If you take a look at the Marriage Builders Radio archives, the oldest archived show is March 20, 2006.  That’s nine years ago today! The show actually start before then, and it hasn’t run continuously during that time, but there are thousands of shows in the archives, and I believe at this point I’ve listened to every single one.

Thank you so much, Joyce and Dr. Harley, for your tireless broadcasting. I’ve used every service and product Marriage Builders has to offer, and I still don’t think my wife and I would’ve built our great marriage without the extensive education and motivation we received from your show.

Maybe March 20 ought to be National Marriage Builders Radio Day.

Everybody tune in! This priceless resource is FREE. Put the app on your phone and listen, or load it to your computer. If you can’t spare an hour a day to listen to the radio while doing something else I really don’t think you’ll ever have time to save your marriage.  This is the radio broadcast that saved my marriage.

Brainstorming

Sometimes when a couple tries to put these marriage principles into practice in their marriage, they run into a problem: it seems that when they try to follow the Policy of Joint Agreement, and when they try to follow the Four Guidelines for Successful Negotiation, they run into issues where it seems impossible to have a win-win solution.  Either he gets his way, or she gets her way.  Perhaps both of them are committed to not doing anything until they have enthusiastic agreement, but one of them resigns himself or herself to losing this particular conflict because it seems that only two alternatives are possible.

What this means is that you aren’t done negotiating – and you aren’t looking broadly enough for alternatives.  Go back to the Four Guidelines for Successful Negotiation and walk through them again.  Ask more questions of your spouse to understand his or her perspective more fully.  What benefit is it that he or she feels they would receive if their preferred solution were chosen?  What difficulties are they facing as a result of no solution being adopted yet?

And brainstorm more broadly.  The solution is to find an alternative you both like.  Maybe he wants to take a vacation to New York, and she wants to go camping in the mountains.  They can’t think of an alternative trip to take.  But who says the solution is a trip at all?

I’ve heard Dr. Harley talk often about depression.  Usually a person with depression has days that have nothing whatsoever in them to look forward to.  An important part of the solution to depression is to put things into the person’s day that he or she does look forward to.  And really we all need to put things like this into our lives, and if a husband and wife are to be happy in marriage, they have to have something to look forward to together.  If you can’t agree on a trip, start talking about other things that you would enjoy and would look forward to doing.  Don’t limit yourself to the same category as the things you both originally wanted, or you will be limiting the solutions that you look at and will probably not see any solutions to the problem.

Suppose the husband wants to buy their son a dog and the wife wants to buy him a cat.  Neither one is enthusiastic about what the other wants.  They try to brainstorm alternatives, but everything they suggest sounds silly to both of them: gerbil, parakeet, goldfish.  Neither one of them wants any alternative pet.  A couple in this situation might feel that there is just no way to negotiate a win-win solution and that one or both of them has to lose.  But they might be able to solve the problem if they didn’t limit themselves to pets.  What else can they put into their son’s life that they would enjoy with him?  Would they both like to enroll him in a sport?  Get him started in a hobby they all like?  Take him somewhere they would all enjoy?  Create some new special family traditions that they are both enthusiastic about?  If they will put their minds to it they can build a very enjoyable life with each other and with their son and it can be so rewarding that nobody is left feeling resentful that their spouse didn’t go along with their original desire.

Dr. Harley describes two types of resentment in marriage.  One type is the type of resentment arises when your spouse does something against your wishes, which Dr. Harley calls Type A resentment.  The other type of resentment, Type B resentment, arises when you are unable to do something you want to do because of your spouse’s objections.  Both of these types of resentment can be pretty miserable, but according to Dr. Harley, Type B resentment fades when you discover a mutually enjoyable alternative.  So this is how to solve an “unsolvable” negotiation problem: find an alternative that you both really enjoy.

Raising children

My wife Prisca and I have seven children.  I’ve read a lot about how to raise children.  In the end, I think these are the most important rules in raising children:

• Learn how to never have an angry outburst.  Since an angry outburst is temporary insanity, ask yourself if being temporarily insane is ever helpful for making a serious decision like what to do about your children.
• Make sure your children’s other parent is in love with you, and you are in love with him or her.  Of course, this takes two people willing to cooperate together.  Many of us are at the point where divorce, adultery, and/or remarriage has rendered this impossible.  But if you are married, you should know that the most important thing you can do for your children is have a romantic relationship with their father or mother.  You’ll give your children peace and well-being and a wonderful foundation for life, and you will also be teaching them incredible lessons about how to care for other people and lead a happy and healthy life, just by example.  And at least one of you will probably have a strong emotional need for family commitment, so in order to actually be in love, one thing you will have to do is spend time together with the children as a family.  And of course, to stay in love, you will have to learn to resolve your conflicts in a way that you are both enthusiastic about, which brings me to my third rule:
• Follow the Policy of Joint Agreement in all of your parenting choices.  You can read all the books by all the parenting experts in the world and it will still not be as valuable as simply following this rule.  Not every parenting idea works for every child, but the two people in the world who know your children best are you and your spouse.  If one of you think something the other wants to do in raising the children is a bad idea, it probably is.  So stick with ideas that both of you think are good – the decisions you make will be wiser, and you will avoid a host of mistakes.

That’s it.  I could make lots of specific recommendations for specific situations, but I don’t think any of them would be any near as valuable as following the above three principles.  If you get the above three rules right and miss everything else, I suspect your children will still turn out great by most people’s standards.

I should mention that if everybody followed the above three rules, child abuse would be eliminated.

No contact, revisited

Yesterday I wrote that if a marriage is going to survive after an affair, it is imperative that the unfaithful spouse must strictly observe a policy of no contact for life with the affair partner.

Today I want to write about another use of the strategy of going no contact: when your husband or wife refuses to end an affair.  This is what Dr. Harley calls “Plan B.”

Faced with an unfaithful spouse, many people decide they want to keep their marriage.  They do their best to win the unfaithful spouse back to the marriage.  This is what Dr. Harley calls “Plan A.”  A good Plan A will include:

• exposing the affair to children, parents, family members, church members, the affair partner’s spouse, clergy, workplace (if the affair is with a coworker) and anyone else significant in the life of the betrayed spouse, unfaithful spouse, or affair partner.
• refraining from Love Busters
• expressing a willingness to have a good marriage with the unfaithful husband or wife and meet their emotional needs – if the unfaithful spouse will end their affair

Frequently the wayward spouse will continue their affair no matter how good their betrayed spouse performs Plan A.  The ongoing trauma of the wayward spouse’s continued contact with the affair partner becomes unbearable and has a devastating effect on the betrayed spouse – especially if the betrayed spouse is a woman.  Dr. Harley has seen this continued trauma have terrible effects on the emotional and physical health of betrayed wives.  And so the plan he recommends for women is to go to Plan B in order to protect themselves from this trauma, usually after about three weeks.

In Plan B, the betrayed wife does not see or talk to her unfaithful husband.  She will usually need to see a lawyer and arrange to file for separation or divorce and have her husband removed from the home (and safeguard her financial security for herself and her children).  She should get a friend to serve as intermediary for any necessary communication about children visitation or finances, and the intermediary should filter out everything else the wayward spouse tries to talk about.  She should not even see her unfaithful husband when the children go to him for visitation – she should get some help from someone who can help arrange dropoffs for the children so that she does not have to see her unfaithful husband.  She may need to change her contact information or even obtain a restraining order if the unfaithful spouse will not respect her privacy.

The main point of Plan B is therapeutic – the betrayed spouse gets the chance to heal and recover in peace, away from the continued trauma of the unfaithful spouse’s affair.  She should spend this time taking care of herself and children and filling their lives with things to enjoy and look forward to.  If her husband’s affair never ends, this is the beginning of her recovery.  Or if he does eventually end his affair, she will be in much better shape to go through the difficult work of marital recovery with him.  If she avoids Plan B (or compromises it with occasional continued contact with her unfaithful husband) there is a good chance that by the time her husband’s affair finally ends she will not be willing to recover her marriage with him.

For most of this post I’ve written about Plan B for betrayed wives.  Dr. Harley does occasionally recommend that husbands go into Plan B, but in general he recommends that they try to stick with Plan A longer.  For a typical husband, going to Plan B is usually the end of the marriage, and he is also usually able to engage in Plan A longer than a typical betrayed wife.  I should also mention that Dr. Harley frequently recommends Plan B or a similar no contact plan for wives whose husbands are abusive or have a drug or alcohol addiction, and occasionally he even recommends Plan B when a husband indicates he is not willing to meet his wife’s emotional needs.

No contact is a great way to heal from a toxic relationship.  If you’ve had an affair, having no contact with your affair partner is vital for your own healing and for the healing of your marriage.  And if your spouse is having an affair, sooner or later you will need to go no contact with your spouse for your own protection.

Here are some useful resources for learning about Plan B:

• the book Surviving an Affair
• How to Plan B Correctly by MarriedForever, Marriage Builders forum poster
• When to Call it Quits by Dr. Harley (three part article)
• What Are Plan A and Plan B? by Dr. Harley

Another great resource of course is the Marriage Builders Radio program.  Write Dr. Harley and his wife Joyce and ask if he thinks Plan B is warranted in your situation, and how to go about it.

Absolutely no contact!

Recently on the Marriage Builders Radio show I heard Dr. Harley comment that the advice he gives works – but it isn’t always easy to follow.  Dr. Harley has written “The plan I recommend for recovery after an affair is very specific. That’s because I’ve found that even small deviations from that plan are usually disastrous. But when it’s followed, it always works.”  Most couples get tripped up on the very first part of Dr. Harley’s recovery plan: complete separation from the affair partner.  That means absolutely, positively no contact whatsoever between the spouse who had the affair, and the affair partner, for the rest of his or her life.

This is pretty drastic, but now that I have seen many couples deal with the aftermath of an affair, I can tell you positively that 100% of marriages I’ve seen failed when an unfaithful spouse maintains contact with an affair partner.

Continued contact with an affair partner is not just a chance for an affair to rekindle.  Even if the unfaithful spouse has grown to hate the affair partner and feels he or she could never love the affair partner again, the continued contact will have a devastating effect on the betrayed spouse.  Devastating.  There are not words to describe what I have seen betrayed spouses go through when their spouse has contact of any sort with a former affair partner.  It is an offense to the betrayed spouse, it usually causes the betrayed spouse to worry and wonder about the affair rekindling, and under all circumstances it is a reminder of the most painful trauma the betrayed spouse ever went through in his or her life.  It prevents healing because it is like reopening a scabbed wound over and over again.

Unfortunately many times these betrayed spouses have approved of the choice to maintain contact.  The result is that whatever they wanted to get out of allowing their spouse to maintain contact with the affair partner becomes the death of their marriage.

The unfaithful spouse should not see or talk to the affair partner ever again, and needs to remove reminders of the affair partner from his or her life (including things like photos, mementos, and social network connections).  There is a good chance that the couple will need to move.  And there is no way in the world that the unfaithful spouse can continue to work at the same job as the affair partner.

This is drastic.  But an affair is a drastic trauma, and if you want to heal from it, this has to happen.  Bargain, deny, get angry all you want – if your marriage has been through an affair you are going to have to create a whole new life and a whole new marriage.  And if your spouse will not end contact with their affair partner, then eventually you will have to create a whole new life without them if you want to recover.

I’ve seen dozens of couples try to maintain some form of contact with an affair partner, with lots of different reasons and excuses offered.  Maybe you know of some situation where this appeared to work.  I’ve known people who smoked tobacco heavily and lived into their nineties, but I wouldn’t recommend smoking tobacco because I know that if you do it, you will probably not live into your nineties.  I had a cousin who survived and overcame a hard drug addiction, but I wouldn’t recommend you take hard drugs because I know that if you do it, you will probably not overcome the addiction.  I’ve never known a couple that maintained contact with an affair partner and had a good marriage.  And there’s no way I would recommend that you take such a damaging course of action.

The plan [Dr. Harley] recommends for recovery after an affair is very specific. That’s because he’s found that even small deviations from that plan are usually disastrous. But when it’s followed, it always works.