Marriage After Infidelity: Reasons to Stay Married

Remaining in a marriage after infidelity might sound counter-intuitive at first. While your pride and ego might tell you that a divorce is the only option, there are economic, emotional, and familial reasons to stay in a marriage after cheating.

Marriage After Infidelity: Reasons to Stay Married

Emotional Reasons

Marriage after infidelity is possible even though you've been deeply hurt or you have hurt your spouse with the ultimate act of betrayal.

• As hard as it is to believe, men and women that love their spouses can still cheat on them. Lust, insecurity, a rush to judgment, or anger can cause a spouse to have an affair. The bonds of marriage exist on a plane at a higher level than rash emotions that cause cheating.

  If your spouse is not a rampant cheater, don't let a mistake they made in the heat of the moment topple your life-long commitment to each other. The person he or she cheated with usually disappears, but your marriage shouldn't.

• Consider all the reasons you love your spouse besides the trust bond that they broke.

  It might sound funny to compartmentalize his or her positive traits like this, but just try. Maybe your spouse is a good listener, protective of you and your home, a good provider, funny, smart, driven, helped you in a time of need, has a personality that meshes well with yours, etc.

  There are reasons you married this individual. See if those traits you loved are still there. Focus on them.

• An incidence of cheating can actually make your marriage stronger, but it requires introspection into your relationship. You have to face each other rationally, find out what drove the cheating spouse to his or her action, try to remedy the issue, and remember what brought you together in the first place.

  When you get through a rough spot like cheating, you realize that your love and commitment are more powerful and you are perhaps more bonded than before. It is easy to get along when your marriage is like a song, but how you react in trying times is what determines the strength of your bond.

Economic Reasons

• You have purchased a home and have assets like retirement plans together. While married you can still enjoy the fruits of these securities together. If you divorce, not only will you have to split the assets up somehow, but attorneys will be sure to get a portion of what you've built together for themselves.

• You will be poorer if you divorce. Your separate incomes will place you into a lower economic bracket. You will have to move into a lower income neighborhood should you need to find a place of your own.

  Perhaps that higher income you have together allows you to take vacations, have a pool, belong to a golf club, go to the spa, etc. Divorce strips away lot of those little extra comforts you are used to.

Remember, all marriages to a certain degree are marriages of convenience due to the economic advantages it brings. Think it over a while before you convince yourself that divorce is the only option. Would you really be comfortable lowering the economic standard of your lifestyle?

Familial Reasons

Often, deciding what to do in a marriage after cheating requires you think about more than just your relationship as husband and wife.

• Staying together for your children is not a bad reason to remain married. Your children need both a good mother and a good father. They need role models that show them how a strong marriage survives even through a rough patch.

• Giving your children a home to come back to after school, emotional support from both parents through their ups and downs, and economic security is of utmost importance.

Not all of these reasons will be for everyone, but a few of them will be. Whether you are primarily concerned with your financial status, emotional security, or the well-roundedness of your children, there are many reasons to stay in a marriage after infidelity.