Can Your Marriage Survive an Affair?
Today, your relationship is at a turning point. Infidelity can be both a crisis and a crossroad. You owe it to each other (your families and yourself) to sit down (without blame) and have a real frank, heart-to-heart discussion about your situation.
What Do You Really Want?
To me, “relationship happiness” isn’t random or accidental. I don’t believe that soul mates are made in heaven. I believe you create relationship happiness right here on earth.
What It Takes for a Relationship to Survive Infidelity
In the aftermath of infidelity, there are two kinds of recovery: Personal Recovery AND Relationship Recovery.
The fact is… infidelity can lead to “a relationship breakup” or “a relationship breakthrough” to a deeper level of intimacy. It’s all up to you. Right now, it may feel like your relationship will never recover. Don’t believe it. It’s not true. However… you must be willing to do what it takes.
And you should be aware…
Couples who get counseling, coaching, or support during an infidelity crisis do better (emotionally, mentally and physically) over the long run.
Many people confuse getting help with admitting failure. This is simply NOT true. It’s more like asking for directions when you’re not sure where you’re going.
Looking for the tools that will get you where you want to go is a smart choice. In a time like this, getting help may very well be the best choice for you to get some clarity and control in your life.
Now ask yourself…
WHAT ARE YOUR BEST REASONS FOR STAYING?
Lean in and listen closely.
There are really only TWO reasons to stay: Love and Willingness.
LOVE is the greatest motivator for healing a broken relationship, and nothing is impossible to a willing heart. If underneath all the pain, hurt, anger, rage, fear, and defensiveness, you “sense” there’s something here worth fighting for… if you know in your heart they are worth it, and you want a life with them, and they want a life with you … Love will not let you down.
You must BOTH be willing to:
- Grow from the experience (rather than give up)
- Learn from the experience (rather than be in denial)
- Trust again (despite all reasons not to)
What you need for a successful recovery:
- The decision to let your experience pull you closer together rather than tear you apart
- The decision to focus your energy on accepting each other versus “fixing” each other
- Commitment to do whatever it takes to rebuild trust, intimacy and honesty
- Willingness to learn how to create and sustain a relationship that fulfills BOTH partners
Here’s a key insight: relationships are like books. They are for learning (mostly about yourself). That’s why relationship success comes to those who are “learning-motivated” and relationship failure comes to those who are indifferent to learning.
YES, it’s as simple as that. How could it not be?
My Approach to Infidelity
My approach can be summed up in these eleven words: to forgive is to heal… to heal is to make happy.
Our Relationship Recovery Process includes:
- Learning Forgiveness and Designing Amendments — Forgiveness is the first door to reconciliation, healing and recovery. It’s both the technology and the remedy. Take this step, and every other step gets easier. Amendments are the key to avoiding disappointments and future resentment. They must be made each time promises or agreements are broken. I teach couples the best ways to inspire forgiveness and create sincere “win-win” amendments that increase trust and security, while continuing to develop deeper levels of intimacy.
- Creating Radical Honesty and Rebuilding Trust — As we all know, trust can’t be earned. It’s a gift that is given out of one’s free will. Once broken, radical honesty is the bridge that rebuilds a solid foundation of trust once again. I show you how to create a space for honesty without fear of censure. I teach you three of my most effective trust-building exercises that give you the tools to use when you need them. (This session is a master key to preventing future affairs)
- Improving Communications — Everyone knows how to talk. But most couples don’t know how to communicate the things they truly want to say in a way that they feel heard and understood. I teach women the secret language of men, so she’s able to relate to his natural communication style. Then, she’s better able to connect with him in ways that he hears and understands. I teach men the secret language of women, so he’s able to touch her heart and inspire her understanding, while making her feel safe, secure and appreciated. I teach couples my step-by-step techniques and strategies for handling (even the most difficult) misunderstandings, events, and situations.
- Creating Healthy Boundaries — Infidelity usually occurs in relationships where personal and/or relationship boundaries are either too weak or too rigid. Before a relationship can experience TRUE recovery, it’s important for both partners to learn about boundary issues. I help partners (individually) create, communicate, and enforce a healthy personal boundary. This empowers each person to take full responsibility for his or her emotions, thoughts, and feelings. I show couples the right way to define, design, and agree on healthy relationship boundaries. This gives the relationship the room it needs to evolve into a more fun, free and powerful relationship — for BOTH PARTNERS.
- Creating and Sustaining “Passionate Monogamy” — What is Passionate Monogamy? Simply put: It’s the feeling of being satisfied with one person. It’s what I believe to be both the prevention (and the cure) for infidelity. If you have ever had the unfortunate experience of infidelity… Passionate Monogamy can help you prevent it from happening again. If you have been fortunate to have never experienced infidelity… Passionate Monogamy can help you ensure things stay that way. Passionate Monogamy is my patented passion-building process that teaches committed couples how to ignite more passion and keep the fires burning for a lifetime of love, sex, and romance — with one partner. Passionate Monogamy is all about designing the relationship of your dreams so you’ll have so much fun in the relationship you have, you’ll feel no desire to go outside of it.
How to Rebuild Trust and Make It Safe to Love Again
All relationships are based on commitment, and all commitments are based on trust. “The power of love can bridge everything… but not dishonesty.” If you don’t have trust, then you don’t have a commitment. If you don’t have a commitment, then you don’t have a relationship. When two people feel SAFE enough with each other to share their deepest inner thoughts, fears, and desires… there is trust.
Rebuilding trust means being radically honest, intimate, and willing to respect truth (even if you don’t like it).
Ask yourself:
How do we “inhibit” each other from telling the truth?
- What do I find most difficult to discuss?
- What do I secretly worry about the most?
- What disappointments have I kept inside?
Classic Examples of Dishonesty (the REAL HOME-WRECKER)
External Dishonesty
- Lying (including little white lies)
- Exaggerations (overstating the truth, understating the truth)
- Misdirection (omission, manipulation, withholding)
- Excuses (indirectness, vagueness, avoidance)
- Pretense (faking it)
Emotional Dishonesty
- Denial (pretending to want what you don’t, hiding what you do want)
- Projection (attacking, accusing, blaming, condemning to cover up your own fears and anger)
- Selling Out (the choice for “approval” above telling the truth)
- Saving Face (the choice to “impress” above revealing ignorance)
- Deception (secret strategies to have your own way or win regardless of consequences)
- Rationalization (using the intellect to “buffer” against fear of facing feelings)
The reality is… it’s better to be happy than right.
Ask yourself…
What can each of you do to make it easier to be honest with each other?
There’s NO risk in being deceptive. The REAL risk is in telling the truth.
Honesty is NOT about cruelty, preaching at each other, or passing judgment.
The truth about honesty is this:
Whatever comes across your lips only bears witness to who and what YOU think you are.
The Rewards of Trust
Love without trust is impossible. That’s why the real foundation of all relationships is built on one word: trust. It’s like a major gift that gives birth to many other gifts.
Here are the biggest gifts of a relationship built on a solid foundation of trust:
The Gift of Acceptance
The easiest way for one to feel total trust with another human being is knowing you are totally accepted as you are. Trust comes naturally to those who know they are accepted. When you are able to accept your partner’s shortcomings, you show them it’s safe to be themselves and to be honest with you.
The Gift of Appreciation
Appreciation comes from the gratitude you feel when you’re in a relationship that’s secure.
Appreciation comes from the gratitude you feel when you’re in a relationship that’s secure. It’s that sense of “well-being” and fulfillment you get from being around someone who accepts you, rather than judges you. Someone who’s understanding. Someone who’s supportive of you, as well as allows you to support them.
The Gift of Intimacy
Intimacy helps you speak honestly about the issues that are dividing you. Every relationship leads you to a place of self-discovery. In order for us to experience discovery, there needs to be disclosure, attention, and interest. Imagine how wonderful it would be when you allow someone to discover you. Because you trust each other, you can allow yourselves to discover each other. This discovery leads to endless nights and days of adventure.
When the Student Is Ready
Life sends us everything (and everyone) we need in the instant we need them. Infidelity doesn’t call for punishment. It calls for better understanding, more insight, and most importantly … love. This isn’t so much a process of learning as it is a process of unlearning. It’s not a new discovery — just a rediscovery of what is real. This is a path of rescue and recovery. You will find there are no new truths to be discovered… only errors to be exposed.
Here’s the beautiful truth:
LOVE is a decision — not just a feeling. It’s a noun AND a verb. It’s not something you “get” or “give”. It’s what you ARE. The choice to love again isn’t a risk. It’s a choice to be happy. Are you willing to rebuild an even stronger relationship? Yes? Then rebuilding trust is A MUST.
The Secrets to Rebuilding a Better Marriage
What is YOUR definition for Relationship Happiness?
Here’s my definition: Relationship Happiness = wanting what you have and having exactly what you want in your relationship.
Simple, isn’t it? (But not always so easy to achieve.)
Now let me ask you a question.
Before today… has anyone ever taken the time to fully explain to you all the elements, strategies, and facets of love, friendship, passion, adventure, and romance that it takes… to design a relationship that’s automatically “infidelity-proof”… because it matches and mirrors both partners’ deepest desires, in exactly the way they want it to? If not, then today is your day.
The Power of Passionate Monogamy™
Here’s the beautiful truth.
Without passion, a relationship is hard WORK.
Passion is what keeps monogamy so sweet. It’s the secret sauce to every successful and fulfilling relationship. Without passion, a monogamous relationship loses its pleasure and becomes a prison.
Passion evokes playfulness.
It’s sincere, but not serious. When it comes to passion, words are just decorative placeholders. It can’t be explained — it must be experienced. You can’t just think about it. You must live it, taste it, and breathe it for yourself. And yet when it’s absent, you know. How do you know? Because your life feels incomplete… like a puzzle with missing pieces. Passion is what makes sex spectacular. Without passion, sex becomes basic reproduction. Passion is the energy that allows us to connect like humans… not like robots.
Simply put… it’s the feeling of being satisfied and fulfilled by “one”. I believe learning how to create and sustain Passionate Monogamy™ becomes both the prevention AND the cure for couples to avoid having to deal with infidelity in their relationship.
In other words… if you have already experienced infidelity in your relationship, then Passionate Monogamy™ can help prevent it from happening again.
Likewise, if you’ve been lucky enough to have avoided the painful challenges of betrayal or infidelity, then learning how to keep the fire burning by learning how to have Passionate Monogamy™ in your relationship will help make sure everything stays that way.
How can passionate monogamy help infidelity-proof and rebuild a better marriage?
In order to create Passionate Monogamy™, couples must learn to create win-win experience in three key areas:
1. Love
2. Trust
3. Sexual Happiness
Why these three areas? Because we know that most instances of infidelity is caused when there is a “lack” or “void” in one (or more) of these three areas (whether real or imagined). We also know that when couples are able to successfully combine Love + Trust + Sexual Happiness, it results in relationship satisfaction, and neither partner feels the need to reach beyond.
In the next few minutes…
I’m going to give a crash course on some of my secrets to creating Passionate Monogamy™ for both men and women. I suggest you sit back and relax, and allow me to explain (all the way through) how to use these secrets to create the relationship of your dreams, so neither you nor your partner will ever need to reach beyond it for anything.
How to Rebuild a Better Marriage
(Passionate Monogamy Secrets Every Married Woman Needs to Know)
Secret #1: Keep in mind that for men, sex remains a high priority all their lives.
I once had a friend, Bill, who was still flirting with the ladies, way past his 89th birthday. (And I’m talking about young stuff … 68, 70, 73). The point I’m making is this: for men, nothing substitutes for sex or replaces passion (not career, kids, or awards). Sex serves as both a relief and a medicine for the pressures of life. Without sex, a man’s life normally feels incomplete. I think it’s time (and smart) for women to not only respect a man’s sexuality… but to hold a reverence for it.
Secret #2: Some men are secretly more romantic than women.
There’s an old saying that eager girls get more love than pretty girls. It’s a crude way of pointing out what men find irresistible. For him, there’s a huge difference between being “needed” and being “wanted”. For a man, romance is that feeling of being totally wanted, welcomed, and admired. Attention, affection, and appreciation are his mental aphrodisiacs.
Every married woman should use this knowledge to her advantage. Here’s the reality: If he doesn’t get them from you, he may very well get them somewhere else.
Secret #3: Listening leads to intimacy.
Here’s one more thing I want to share with you: all men have difficulties revealing themselves. (Don’t worry… your guy isn’t the only one.) It seems a lot of men have natural “do not enter” warning signs to protect their feelings. To the masculine mind … intimacy means risk. And disclosure equals pain. So, how can you get your man to relax, open up, and connect more emotionally with you?
I read an article the other day that said there’s another man waiting in the wings for every woman. I don’t know if this is true, but it certainly serves as a great reminder of how important it is NOT to take your wife for granted. In one way, she’s totally unique, and yet in another way, she’s just like other women. She wants to experience the thrills of being romanced by one man.
Secret #1: Every woman “longs” to fall in love again.
She wants to re-experience the rush, the giddiness, the tingles, the giggles, the anticipation, the intensity. Why do you think romance novels, account for 51% OF ALL BOOKS SOLD? Here’s why: it’s because they “virtually” deliver those same feelings to her again and again. But trust me, she doesn’t want it from a book. She wants it with YOU!
How can you use this information to your advantage? Simple. Stop thinking of her as your wife or partner and start thinking of her as your lover. Begin to ask yourself questions like… “what can I do to inspire more of her desire?”
Secret #2: Her desire for sex can never be "forced" (and yet, it can be inspired).
It’s all about the “right words”. For women (ALL WOMEN), sex begins in the imagination (and believe me when I tell you… every woman has a wild imagination!). That’s why there are no bad lovers… only uninspiring ones. Success with any woman (including your wife) comes down to your ability to capture and lead her imagination. This is THE MASTER KEY to inspiring her sexual desires. Just like a romance novelist knows it’s all about using the right words at the right time… to stir up her sexual feelings and flood her with an insatiable amount of desire to connect with you.
My recipe for inspiring her desire:
- Approach with confidence (never “beg” or “justify” your desire).
- Let her know that she is safe and in control. (Keep coming back to this.)
- Create an “emotional connection” using non-sexual affection.
- Make sure she knows it is HER you want … not just sex.
- Use humor to charm and disarm any resistance or reluctance she may have.
- DEEPEN your voice and speak SLOWER to her.
- Look FULLY into her eyes.
- Use your words to get her imagining herself having fun, being pleased and experiencing pleasure with you (ALL BEFORE YOU TOUCH HER).
Secret #3: "Deep inside", a woman is never 100% certain of her appeal. (Yes, even super models have insecurities.)
In HER mind, she silently wonders: “is it me he wants, or is it just sex?” That’s why “better sex techniques” and “exotic sex positions” are NEVER the answer to female sexual happiness. The secret… is in knowing how to inspire more of her desire by using her imagination as your ultimate secret weapon.
Secret #4: Trust is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac.
It’s your integrity, strength, and “willingness to do what you say and say what you mean” that makes it easy for her to surrender to you. To have her complete trust, you must practice radical honesty. Here’s my definition of radical honesty: it’s when “what you say” doesn’t conflict with “what you feel”. Make it your practice to be impeccable with your words. It’s like what the Yaqui Indian Sage, Don Juan, advised his protegee, Carlos Castaneda, in the book, The Art of Dreaming:
“To be impeccable means to ‘put your life on the line’
in order to ‘back up’ your decisions.”
Do this… and I promise you’ll find her trust, admiration, and desire for you growing over the years… gathering momentum like a giant snowball storming down a mountain.
Let me ask you.
Knowing what you NOW know…
Stop! (and really THINK ABOUT that question) Are you willing to see your relationship, yourself and your partner in a new light? Are you willing to redesign THIS RELATIONSHIP in such a way that you both find it fulfills your wildest, deepest desires? Are you willing to learn how to be satisfied with one, and to allow that one to learn how to truly satisfy you?
Here’s why I ask:
As much as couples SAY they want a more passionate marriage (or a more loving relationship)… very few are willing to learn what it takes to create that relationship. A lot of my friends ask me why that is. Well, I’ll tell you exactly what I tell them: “I believe it’s because passionate monogamy entails a certain amount of risk. It goes way beyond the traditional concepts of right and wrong. It requires couples to wake up to the reality of what it means to truly create loving relationships.”
Embracing Passionate Monogamy also requires a certain amount of courage, “willingness to learn” and “willingness to grow closer” as a result of that learning. This can be a very scary notion to a lot of people who would rather live in mediocrity… than risk change. My most successful couples tell me… because Passionate Monogamy required them to be so radically honest and intimate with each other, they found it to be one of the primary reasons they have been able to sustain such happiness together.
And I’ve discovered over the past several years, we don’t have to make each other prisoners in order to sustain monogamy. Each one of us has the power (and the choice) to make our relationships better OR to make them worse. It’s up to us to use our unlimited powers of creativity, sensuality, and imagination to inspire our partners (and ourselves) to have everything we desire (and more).
For more information on how to grow your passion or rebuild an even better marriage, read my article: Intro to Passionate Monogamy.
I have an intuition about you.
The fact that you have read this article all the way through tells me you’re willing to learn whatever it is you need… in order to get the results you want. Congratulations! You have already taken a giant step in the right direction. (And you’re way ahead of most people). Yet it is STILL not enough to just learn. One must also experience the reality of relationship success.
Here’s the best part:
Part of having a better relationship… is having the desire to have a better relationship. I challenge you to make today the day YOU make quantum leaps in your happiness. One way you can do that is by learning the secrets to creating Passionate Monogamy and opening the way for more passion, intimacy, and romance to blossom like wildflowers in YOUR relationship. Because when it comes right down to it… you might wonder, imagine, ponder or fantasize about the idea of having a better marriage (and a more loving relationship). But it won’t be until you feel, understand, and “experience it yourself”… that it becomes true for you.
Yes … you CAN have all you ever wanted in THIS relationship (and more).
You’ll find all three options are highly entertaining and highly effective in helping committed couples create the kind of relationship they truly want to have. Now isn’t that worth learning how to do?
If it is, then take a deep breath… and let the journey begin.
Until we speak again…
Remember… Love Wins!
