I have never to my knowledge been cheated upon. I was wondering For those in marriages or other stable relationships where other party strayed how did you recover your ability to be intimate with the adulterer/adulteress. I would have found it… Difficult if not impossible.
Enough said.
Are you using “intimate” as a euphemism for sex? Or do you mean all forms of intimacy?
In my relationship, there wasn’t a recovery. Things were never the same, and we ultimately split.
It includes sex yes, but I wanted to be more expansive.
A relationship is built on a foundation of trust and cheating damages that foundation to the point it can never be fully repaired. In order to resume the relationship, the person who was cheated on has to able to settle for less then that they had before the incident.
I once attempted and failed to remain in this type of situation because trusting my mate is too important to me. This lack of trust causes you to question entirely too much of the day to day general relationship.
It’s a deal breaker for me as well.
I had a GF who cheated, tried to make it work. Couldn’t get intimate with her. Once the trust bridge is burned, it’s gone for good.
This. I was married and we had kids so I felt it was worth the effort to put aside my pride, do some forgiving and move on leaving the past in the past. About half the time I was able to do it and the other times it was like…well, you know how in the Lord of the Rings movies every now and then Sauron’s eye pops up and you hear this “BLEAH!” sound? I’d get something like that whenever I’d touch her but instead of something as comforting as Sauron’s eye I’d get a mental image of her and her dude. In the three years I was trying to get things to work, that never went away.
Sex & general loveydoveyness I was really only comfortable with when I was in extreme need of human companionship. And even then she was usually not into it so it was kind of a moot point. Might have actually worked out if she’d ever really re-engaged in the marriage but she didn’t.
While it has never happened to me personally, it has happened in the family. My brother cheated on my sister in law TWICE over the course of their 10 year marriage. Once at the very beginning and once more about a year ago. They’re still together and she’s working on, once more, building up that trust. She says she’s still with him because despite it all she still loves him. But I personally think it’s also because they have 4 kids and she has nowhere else to go. Still, I give her a lot of respect for trying to make it work.
It depends. The offending partner needs to truly repent and truly want to change and mend the relationship. Lacking that, any restoration to a functional intimate relationship is very unlikely.
The partner offended against needs to be able to work through their issues too, and eventually come out of it with perhaps a scar that gives an occasional twinge as a reminder that things are not what they once were. What they can’t have is a never-healing wound that refuses to improve at all. That’s as toxic for the relationship as an unrepentant cheating partner.
As for forgiveness, well, what is forgiveness for, if not for the people you are closest to? Forgiving someone you’re barely connected to is, or ought to be pretty simple.
And who’s a better candidate for forgiveness than a repentant partner who’s given you some of the best orgasms of your life? (Hopefully that would be your case, anyway. The orgasm part, not the cheating part.)
It never happened to me but I vote “deal breaker”.
And of course there are exceptions. I know of several marriages that have survived one or both partners straying. Some where there have been one-nght stands that ‘didn’t mean anything’ and others where the spouses got back together after long term affairs.
Of the people I know well enough to ask, they say it took a lot of work to get past it, but their marriage was stronger after that work than it was before the affair(s).
Disclaimer: I think it would be a deal breaker for any relationship I was in.
Deal breaker for me, too. I’m much more comfortable with spending my entire life alone than getting gutshot.
IMHO it mostly depends on how much work the cheating partner is willing to put into restoring the relationship. If they are truly repentant and work their ass off to rebuild trust and prove that they really do value the original relationship, it can work. If the cheater pretty much expects everything to go back to normal once they end the affair, forget it.
I suspect that a large component of cheating is taking the cheated-on partner for granted. If the cheater can’t change that view of their partner, it’s not going to work. I’m speaking of couples that I have observed, not from personal experience. (Thank God!)
I was cheated on and have not been able to be intimate again with my other half for the past 4 years.
As far as I can tell it wont change and it’s sad, because I’m at the difficult age where intimacy is important, and I’d have to toss the relationship as a whole and take my chances on a new person who might have been with who knows how many people in this climate.
It was very, very difficult. Especially since he wasn’t a whole lot repentant, and pretty much blamed me for his straying. Afters, I acted like I was fine, but I always had the shields up around my heart. I’m sure that contributed in part to him straying again (and again, and again, and again…when we split up I made him count up the affairs for me…nine in 16 years…yeah, I don’t think I was the whole problem here). It was always in the back of my mind…especially in bed when he would want to try this or that and I would think, where did he learn THAT? Since it was always pretty much the unspoken “well, if you won’t, someone else will” it really did affect how open and honest we could be with each other.
Visualize a fine, beautiful china cup. Then hit it with a hammer. Now glue all the pieces back together.
It is highly unlikely that all the pieces will make it back. Even if they do, the cup will have groddy lines and will leak.
That cup is the trust and faith that a marriage/relationship is built on. Once broken, it can never be mended.
Would it matter if the infidelity wasn’t physical in nature?
I’ve known more women who’ve forgiven their men for cheating than the other way around. It makes sense; men can typically compartmentalize love and lust. They can have sexual encounters with women that truly are meaningless, while still emotionally devoted to their wives/girlfriends. And some women understand that, and will accept it. I don’t think that women, generally, can compartmentalize this in the same way. For them to want to have sex with a man usually means they are emotionally invested in him. Men understand this, and that’s why it’s hard for them to accept it.
It helps.
As documented in other places on this board, I spent a year in the process of my marriage collapsing. My wife cheated in every way save the physical, and that only because her e-love wasn’t able to get to where she was for a week while she was away on business. Not for lack of trying though.
Things are hard, very hard, but we are working on it.
If had managed to hook up for that week of physical cheating, that may have been the straw that broke my back. It’s bad enough knowing what did happen, if things had gone farther I don’t know if I would have been able to stay in the marriage.
Fortunately, relationships are living, dynamic things which can often successfully heal, not static objects like cups.