Infidelity can feel like your whole world has been ripped apart. Whether you cheated or you’re the one who got betrayed (or you suspect it’s happening), the emotional fallout is intense—rage, shock, guilt, heartbreak.
But in the heat of the moment, there’s one reality that often goes overlooked:
The next steps you take can set the tone for your entire future—either you move toward healing and clarity, or you slip deeper into resentment, confusion, and regret.
Why This Moment Is So Critical
- Emotions Are at an All-Time High
When trust is broken (or suspected to be broken), adrenaline and fear take over. You might lash out or withdraw in a panic. The decisions made in this hyper charged state—like abruptly leaving, hiding the truth, or retaliating—often lead to deeper scars that are tough to heal later.
- Patterns Get Cemented Here
If you handle infidelity by avoiding honest conversations, you risk establishing a pattern of hiding, denial, or silent resentment. Conversely, taking a courageous step—seeking help, setting boundaries, or having a candid talk can pave the way for genuine healing or a cleaner separation if that’s the ultimate path.
- It’s Harder to Repair Later
Delaying crucial decisions (like whether to seek counseling or confront the issue head-on) can worsen the damage.
If you or your partner keep secrets, avoid tough conversations, or let anger run wild, it can take exponentially more work to rebuild trust down the line.
Taking the Right Next Steps.
What do you do next? It varies by situation, but here are a few core principles you should remember.
- Decide If You Want to Keep Trying
Do you want to salvage the relationship? Are you both willing to put in the hard work of repairing trust. If the answer is “yes,” then a structured, step-by-step plan is often the best immediate step.
- Get Clear on Boundaries and Truth
If you suspect cheating, honesty is crucial. If you were the one who strayed, honesty and taking responsibility are essential to have any chance at rebuilding.
- Don’t Make a Lifetime Decision Overnight
You don’t have to decide right this second whether to stay or go. Take time to think and gather your thoughts. Try to keep a cool head during this discussions.
We Want to Hear from You
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re in this situation or worried you might be.
We’re considering putting together a special program that walks you step-by-step through these exact crossroads.
It will help you decide whether to leave or rebuild, how to handle the emotional rollercoaster, and how to communicate with a partner (or ex-partner) in a way that fosters real clarity and healing.
If that’s something you’d be interested in, please leave a quick comment.
Tell us what outcome you’re hoping for—whether you want to save your relationship or you’re leaning toward letting go.
We’d love to know what specific questions you have, or what you’re struggling with most right now. The more we hear from you, the better we can tailor something that is truly helpful.
Also, feel free to stay anonymous and put a nickname. No emails are ever published.
When you see his car parked where it shouldn’t be, when he’s “working late” too many times, when he guards his phone as if it’s a priceless treasure, when he comes back home from “working out” and his “cologne” is definitely not his, when he sends you a message in the middle of texting you that is clearly intended for someone he wants to get to know better. Let him go!
I have been married for 16 years and we have been together for over 18. Just before our 18 year anniversary, I found out my husband, the love of my life, cheated on me with a much younger woman. That was in October of 2024. He left 2 weeks after our wedding anniversary in March of 2025. I miss him so much and want to try to work on getting back to us but he “doesn’t know” if he wants to. I suffer from depression and it hit an all time low about 2 years ago. He has had a very hard time dealing with the feelings of general disrespect, unthoughtfulness, and “feeling like he was just a meal ticket” during that time. When he would lose his temper about how he was feeling, I would make an effort to be more of what he needed but would have something that would send me spiraling back into my depression. After a couple of time of this happening, he was unhappy with our relationship. After I found out about the affair, he says that it is over and he realized he was wrong. They still talk multiple times a day but are supposedly just friends and he refuses to give up the friendship for a marriage that he doesn’t know if he wants to work through. I have forgiven him and accepted my part of the blame for the breakdown in our relationship by unintentionally pushing him away and not being intentional about his needs and feelings. I don’t know where to go from here and he thinks “counseling” is a joke. I don’t want to give up on him but I don’t know what to do.
I really think you should walk away from your husband to show him how it feels how dare he having affair with the woman come back to you and still talk to her talking about their friends first and foremost a husband should not have a friend that is not a friend of yours also you guys should both be her friend and if that’s not the case it’s nothing better and it only hurts your feelings more and make you have low self-esteem and question your marriage more until he ends the friendship with her or until you guys do go to counseling and talk about it I don’t know if that works but I do know that the more he is friends with this woman the more it’s going to hurt your self assuming your value as a woman so you should love yourself more than you love him and if he’s hurting you you should leave I know it’s hard but sometimes you got to do the hard things in life so you can live a happy one
Dear Hopeless,
It has been almost three years since I found out that my husband was having a year long (or more) affair with his 18 y/o employee (she had turned 19, June 2022 ). It was August of 2022 when I found out, right after our 26th wedding anniversary. We were getting ready to go on our summer family vacation.
One night, I get a text from someone who said she was a former employee of my husband’s She said he had been in a serious relationship, with another employee, for a year more, but thought that he had broke it off with her. (I later found out that he had been trying to do so for months, but she had her ways of manipulating him. At some point, I think is was Spring of 2022, she told him she was pregnant, but then happened to “miscarry” that very same day, so she held that over his head. She was also a cutter, as she has her own traumatizing childhood from her mother (addict) and father (molestation).
The person texting me felt bad for me and said that someone should finally be telling me about the affair and I deserved to know the truth. When I started asking questions and for proof, she then me sent screenshots of one their text threads. Of course, he got angry and tried to deny it at first, saying it was one of his bitter former employees trying to get revenge (which we think it was). However, he couldn’t deny the screenshots, because they came from his phone number. Proir to this, in May 2022, I found texts on his phone, but he promised me that it was just flirting and would stop, because he knew it was inappropriate, given her age and the fact that he was her boss (he even swore on his father’s grave). Since the Fall 2021, there had been quite a few red flags, but whenever I would ask him, he would just say “she just looked up to him like a father figure” (disgusting) or call me jealous, controlling, paranoid or crazy. He continued the gaslighting, lying and picking fights all the time and after a while, it felt like we could no longer communicate about anything anymore. I also suffer from depression and began spiraling once things started opening back up after COVID, so neither one of us had a stronger half to lean on for support. We were both lost.
At that time, he was still struggling with accepting our oldest child as trans female and felt I wasn’t taking his feelings into consideration. He was refusing to use the correct pronouns and called her by her birth name. He said he felt isolated, because as my relationship with her was growing, his was suffering, because he had refused to accept her as his daughter. This had been an issue since 2017 and then he lost his own father to cancer in 2019. We had been going to counseling with her and then COVID hit… In 2021 he started drinking a lot, made excuses for going to work early or staying late and took 2 showers a day, sometimes three. He had lost weight, was buying new clothes and was gone all day on his days off.
We are high school sweethearts and best friends, together for 27 years! I WAS DEVASTATED. My whole world felt like it was going collapse. I lost my identity, my self esteem and tried to blame myself. It was months before the anger towards him came out. Everyday, I struggled just to get out of bed and go to work, but it was all the strength I could muster. I cried every day for months and months and still do sometimes do, if I get triggered. Betrayal trauma is a real thing…I started going to counseling in October of 2022. He also started seeing a counselor a couple of months later. Our marriage counseling didn’t start until much later in 2023, after I admitted myself to a mental health crisis center in March.
At the time of their break-up, she was no longer working for my husband, but was still with the same company. After he broke it off with her, she threatened to kill herself, holding the “baby they lost” over his head. She began stalking him, calling his work and asking other co-workers how he was doing. She basically moved in with my next door neighbor (who said that she would just sit by the window staring out at us and ask if we had been fighting). From then on, until Jan 2022, she was always there, which only further traumatized me. At first, I tried to be nice to her and get as many details as I could, because my husband was holding them back, ” in order to protect my feelings”, but new information kept coming out, only gashing deeper into the wound. I even found out that he added her to our cell phone plan, after her boyfriend and his parents had found out in Feb 2022 and they kicked her out. After that happened, he helped her find an apartment, so it was free-for-all from then on out. I could see on our bank statements everytime he went to see her, because he always went to the same convenience store for liquor and/or gas. Prior to that, that had only been having sex in the dressing room, before and/or after work.
I also found out his mom went to my husband’s place of work and threatened him to call everything off or she would be reporting it as statutory rape. The girl had been hanging out at my house with my oldest daughter (2 years her senior and also worked for the same company), since Spring 2021, before she had turned 18. (They had her phone records pulled but couldn’t prove anything had started before that). There were other co-workers there too (including her boyfriend, whose parents’ she was living with at the time), but she was only there a few times when I came home and usually left once I did, or had already left around the time I was heading home. They all hung out togther and left together, so at the time, I didn’t think anything of it and neither did her boyfriend’s mother. Eventually, she suspected something was going on with the girl and she was cheating her son. At some point she was always gone and left dressing “slutty”, she would say. We even all went trick-or-treating together as a big group and she always tagged along with the other co-workers(they had young children). She dressed as a “slutty devil” and followed him around like a puppy dog that night. For other activities and outings with my family and the neighbors, she was happily there to take my place, even developing a relationship with my youngest daughter (who was only seven at the time).
After my husband broke it off, for a few months, he did the whole “we can still be friends” and “it shouldn’t be a big deal, because other people are around” or “nothing is going to happen”. I began drinking a lot more than usual and would go into fits of rage breaking glasses, dishes, clocks you name it. I would leave the house in the middle of the night and go on walks, just to get away. It wasn’t until mid-October 2022 that he finally realized what he had done to me, our relationship and our family. He came out of the “fog of the affair”, so to speak and decided to fight for our marriage, as I had been doing so already. Giving her a month’s notice, we had her phone shut off. He told her that he couldn’t be in her life anymore and wished her the best. He stopped answering his phone or texting her back. Two days after her phone was turned off, she retailated, reported him to HR and he was fired a couple of days later.
Once we finally went to marriage counseling, the marriage slowly began to heal. He was able to be honest with me and open up about his feelings. We learned more about each other than ever before and our communication was all the better for it. It was almost like we had to start a new marriage. It took a very long time for me to heal (late 2024). He had to learn my triggers and what to do when they happened. He struggled at first, saying “it was in the past and I needed to get over it” and “we have to move on” or “we could have had a great day/night together, but you got triggered and that time was ruined, sometimes even getting angry and shutting down again.
We made it through hell and back though. I hope that this can help with giving you the hope you are looking for; that it is possible for a marriage to heal and recover after an affair. It has definitely been the hardest thing I have done in life, thus far, but I made the choice to save my marriage. You have to do what is best for you. He will see what he lost, whether it’s when he comes begging back or you decide to walk away and heal on your own. Either way, I wish you the very best in the aftermath of everything and that you will find peace and healing in the future.
-K
an affair survivor
I was in a relationship that I thought was solid but it turned out to be not so strong. I’d started noticing some little things that weren’t normal, and I was seeing red flags appear out of nowhere. Two weeks later, it all came to a head when I spotted his car where it should not have been. When I confronted him about it the next day, he didn’t deny it. He told me that he had been seeing this other woman for two weeks and didn’t know how to tell me.
Since then, we’ve talked about it, and he’s no longer seeing that woman or sleeping with her. I want to tell him that she’s the one who started all the problems we’ve been having, but I realize that that’s just an excuse for his behavior. He’s taken full responsibility for the situation, and he has since apologized for all the pain and suffering he caused me.
He had to be told by Senior Leaders (of our faith) who the person was that was doing all the talking and when he found out that it was the other woman and not me, he was somewhat defestated that she would do something like that, out of pure jealousy and envy in order to make herself look good and to make him look bad to everyone else.
He let it be known to his senior leaders that he will not allow anyone or anything to destroy our friendship. He is trying his best to get back to where we were and make it work better for us.
I live my husband so much that I knew/ known that he js cheating and I get mad leave and then go back. It’s a pattern that we have inquired and it sucks. I want him to stop he says he is going to then I see or notice that he is still speaking to the gf. He won’t stop and I’m so heaftbroken.
A committed person doesn’t cheat. If you cheat or have been cheated, ask about the level of commitment on both sides. Start there before exploding, losing your temper or throwing insults. How committed are you to the person, the relationship and to yourself. Do you want to live like this? What does commitment look like to you..how deep is your love? That’s not just a song by the BeeGees, that’s a fact of life. Best wishes in your studies.
Jaki,
Married people cheat all the time and it is possible to recover from the aftermath of the affair. The statistics for saved marriages are actually quite high! When both partners are willing to put in the tough work it takes to heal the marriage, through honest communication, vulnerability and rebuilding trust. Counseling for the individuals and as a couple is definitely recommended. My husband had his affair in our 23rd year of marriage and we will be celebrating our 26th anniversary August 7th. For those out there who have lost hope for their marriages/committed relationship, I was strong enough to fight for it and our relationship has been rebuilt, even revitalized. The changes in you and your partner can be amazing, only further deeping your understanding and love for each other!
My partner has been cheating on me through our relationship and lies a lot. We haven’t been really together a couple weeks and had a disagreement that lead to not communicating for a couple days. We reconnected and he says he doesn’t want to lose me but he has been inconsistent and continued to be inconsistent so I felt something was still off. He has been chatting with old and new women and possibly still having sex with people. He still says he wasn’t to be with me and I want to be with him but the inconsistency from him makes me believe I’m joking myself. I really want to work on my self and how I personally communicate to him but I feel he isn’t committed even though he says he is and wants to be there for me.
Give up on this man, do yourself a favour and move on…. It won’t be easy but don’t waste any more time on him – he’s not goon’ to change ….
I have been on the receiving end of this. You feel so many things at once that I think it would be good for some direction. However, I wanna know when you should break up with your boyfriend, if you think it’s not working bc he is bipolar?
He cheated the women is about to have his baby he doesn’t know that I know … he tells her over the phone that he only wants her and he only loves her. She tells him to tell me but he is having a hard time doing it . I think he does because he lies to me so much what should I do
I dated a ‘good’ man or boyfriend last year, and plans were underway for our marriage. He was so loving and caring and never let a day go by without checking on me. Towards our marriage time, he started being mute and blamed every one in his family for blocking him from marrying. I understood him and really wished that our plans would succeed, only for he himself to start going mute on me. I was now worried because I had even informed my parents. One of his ex girlfriend started chatting my friend and I came to realize that he was having some deeper friendship with one of his many ex girlfriends. Till now, he has never opened up on what exactly happened. I confronted him about it and he seemed dismissive. Later, he confirmed that the issue was taking a toll on him and that his parents were concerned, since his and my parents are best friends. To date, we don’t talk. I feel mad, pity, and concerned at a go. I am confused . Please advice.
I am looking to find love in my partner again. I am the one who strayed and as a woman it’s not talked about enough how we too “stray.” No one is to blame but myself, but the mentality through the cheating is something I’m not proud of. There were many moments of weakness. I love my husband and I want us to choose each other. After 4-5 months we are still mending things. It is hard and there’s a lot of trust to rebuild. Ultimately, I’d love to be trusted again, but I’d also love to trust him again. And during marriage he has only been faithful. I lost trust through other scenarios. There’s more work on my side as I did the betrayal, but again…end game is to trust and love each other the best we can.
I am in this situation and have given my all for so many years of marriage. Reality checked that there has been no we, us, or ours. I don’t want my marriage to end and he says he doesn’t want it to end either. However, actions always speak louder than words. It is not just the cheating. It’s not taking responsibility for own actions (inactions towards me and OUR daughter, who at 9, 16 now, truly felt her daddy hated us) and decisions he made.
I am in this situation and have given my all for so many years of marriage. Reality checked that there has been no we, us, or ours. I don’t want my marriage to end and he says he doesn’t want it to end either. However, actions always speak louder than words. It is not just the cheating. It’s not taking responsibility for own actions (inactions towards me and OUR daughter, who at 9, 16 now, truly felt her daddy hated us) and decisions he made.
I went through 2 marriages (and divorces), where my husband cheated. In both cases I wanted to save the marriage, but my husband did not. Both left me for “the other woman.”
He asked me if I wanted us to get married, but I still see him on our dating app, “typing” to someone, even during our chat. I said I saw him typing and I received no message,and he makes an excuse that he was looking for water, or in the bathroom.