Question:
What can you do when you’re spouse is involved in an emotional affair? I feel like I can’t fight it. With a sexual affair, at least your fighting something concrete but if they aren’t having sex and are so emotionally attached to each other that the flatly refuse to give them up, no matter the costs, what do I do?

With the question, “What can I do?” it will help if you understand all that is involved in growing and sustaining an emotional attachment. The key ingredient in the emotional bond is the degree in which the two people are honest with each other. Sometimes people feel safer being more honest with someone other than their spouse because this other person has no real personal investment in these feelings like a spouse would have. They also won’t respond the same way as a spouse would because they don’t have the same kind of judgment on those feelings that a spouse would have. A way to understand this is to think of how often you share information with a stranger that you wouldn’t share with friends or family. This is because the stranger really doesn’t know you so telling them really has no impact on your life.
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Question:

Even if you never meet, online affairs still contain the same thinking patterns and emotions as physical affairs. Online affairs will have a sense of newness and excitement and they will have secrecy and deception.
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Ever since the big Tiger Woods scandal, many people around the world have had a sense of insecurity when it comes to wondering if they would know if their spouse was cheating on them. There are many quizzes and tests out there to give you some help in seeing if your spouse is one of the ones cheating.

Is your gut telling you that something is up? Do you just feel it in your gut but your not quite sure why you feel it? You feel it because you can unconsciously add up things that just aren’t quite right. Little things are off but you just can’t seem to put your finger on what. Always trust your gut! If your gut is telling you something is off, then something is off! You need to find out exactly what and asking your spouse is useless because if they are cheating they WILL lie to you!
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When I first found out about my husbands affair I was so lost and I felt so totally alone. It wasn’t till about a year and a half after D-Day that I finally turned to God. I wasn’t getting any better and my marriage wasn’t getting any better either. I wanted a daily devotional to help me through what I was struggling with. I search the internet for hours but couldn’t find a single daily devotional for those suffering from their spouse’s affair.

I mean really, if this effects close to 60% or more of marriages wouldn’t you think there would be a daily devotional on it? It’s such a devastating event in ones life but nothing. There are ones for grief, divorce, for couples, for marriage, but nothing specifically for infidelity!
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This is a post by Joseph, a member of BAN Support Group. He wrote to this letter to his wife to explain why he asked for details of her affair.

I know you are feeling the pain of guilt and confusion. I understand that you wish all this never happened and that you wish it would just go away. I can even believe that you truly love me and that your indiscretion hurts you emotionally much the same way it hurts me. I understand your apprehension to me discovering little by little, everything that led up to your indiscretion, everything that happened that night, and everything that happened afterwords. I understand. No one wants to have a mistake or misjudgment thrown in their face repeatedly.
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To heal the pain in both of you after an affair takes the participation of both of you. It also takes talking about the affair at great length so that both parties can absorb all the pain so that true healing can happen. The offender really needs to listen to the hurt and pain of the injured party. Not get defensive, but to really hear and feel the other persons hurt and pain. The more they pay attention to your pain, the less likely you are to pay attention to it.

You need to be able to go to them as often as you need to with your pain and to really be heard. No more, “Let’s not talk about the affair anymore.” No more, “Let the past stay in the past.” You should be able to talk about the affair whenever you need to and have them willing be there for you with support and not anger or defensiveness.
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What exactly is forgiveness and can you really forgive someone for such a devastating betrayal? Wikipedia says this about forgiveness: Forgiveness is the mental, and/or spiritual process of ceasing to feel resentment, indignation or anger against another person for a perceived offense, difference or mistake, or ceasing to demand punishment or restitution. So, what does it mean to actually forgive someone?

For one, it means that you won’t ever bring up what they have done to you in terms of being mean and to cause pain to them. That doesn’t mean you can never speak of it again but when you do it will be to find insight and enlightenment to move forward and not to throw barbs at the other person just to see them bleed.
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Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we won’t ever think about the infidelity again. But it does mean that we make the conscious effort to not to think about it in ways that are destructive to us anymore. So, these thoughts will most likely come back to haunt you and that is only natural but, you have you have to be in control, don’t like your thoughts be in control of you. Forgiveness is choosing not to dwell on these negative thoughts in a way that can become destructive to you and your relationship.

Forgiveness is our choice and is up to us to give it or withhold it. But if you withhold your forgiveness in order to hurt the other party, you might just find out that the only person you are hurting is yourself. You’ll find that forgiving is very freeing, it’s freeing you of the bitterness and hatred that you’ve been carrying around in your heart towards this other person and your able to enjoy life again.
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Is it really spying or are you just confirming that your spouse is staying faithful to the marriage? The benefit is that when your spouse is being truthful in all areas, these tools serve to rebuild the trust and strengthen the marriage.

I believe that it only turns into spying when you are planning on using the information to use against your spouse. If your spouse refuses to change their cheating ways and they are mean and abusive rather than becoming open, honest and accountable after repeatedly being caught lying, then you need to make a decision to either leave or stay and accept that that is the way it is. This can be an extremely painful decision but one that really needs to be made. You cannot let someone treat you this way, plain and simple it is abuse.
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Through the healing process we learn to trust ourselves. We won’t ever be the same and our marriage will never be the same again but don’t let that fool you. You and your marriage can still be happy. I read this in an email this week that you never have to blindly trust someone in order to love them. Love should never assume blind trust.

So, you want to “check up on” your spouse. Just be sure that your motive is to improve the marriage not bring down your spouse. You’re doing this to regain the trust towards your spouse. Also, when you find things out and you want your spouse to be honest with you, that you don’t bite their head off when you get the truth.
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