A Dangerous Liaison?

I'm glad you're here, though I imagine if you're choosing to read this blog the topic might feel a bit raw.

Maybe you've discovered something that's shattered your world. Or maybe you're the one who's crossed a line and you're terrified about what happens next. Possibly you're simply curious about how relationships survive, or don't, after betrayal.

So, before I get into the nitty gritty, I want to start with something super important: yes, you can survive an affair. I say this confidently because I've seen it happen many times. It's not easy, it's not guaranteed, but it is possible. And sometimes, not always, a relationship can become stronger after an affair than it was before.

Why Affairs Happen

When couples arrive in my consulting room after an affair has been discovered or disclosed, they're often in crisis mode. If there are children involved, there's the added fear of what will happen to our family. But even when there aren't children in the mix, the sense of betrayal, hurt, and pain is enormous.

Sometimes, and forgive me for being blunt, an affair happens because the relationship has reached the end of the road. It's a passive, deeply disrespectful way to end things. One person wants out but can't say it directly, so they behave in a way that will precipitate the catastrophe and force the ending.

But that's only one reason. Most affairs are far more complicated.

Often we're dealing with escapism. Life gets routine with work, children, finances, the daily grind. Suddenly there's someone who makes you feel seen, valued, attractive. Someone who wakes you up, makes you feel alive in a way you haven't felt in years. There's desire there, that spark of excitement that's so difficult to maintain when you're dealing with the everyday realities of family life.

Through that attention from someone new, you experience mattering. All of a sudden "I matter" "I'm seen" "I'm important" "I'm attractive" "I'm wanted". While at home, for what in this moment feels like an interminable length of time, you've felt invisible, unimportant, unwanted: just toil and labour with no recognition.

Sometimes low self-esteem has created the vulnerability that makes an affair make sense. You believe your esteem needs aren't being met at home, so you seek them elsewhere.

At risk of sounding rude, if we're honest, sometimes it's also boredom. Life has just got a bit dull and tedious and the dynamics of a secret affair, quite literally, spice things up.

Often, choosing an affair is taking the easy option. I'm not claiming this is a conscious decision - it can feel like something that's happened to us rather than something we've chosen - but ultimately, betraying your partner with a secret lover is a choice whatever justifying factors we throw at it. It feels easier to play away rather than doing the harder work of looking inside yourself and taking responsibility for what's not right in your relationship.

The Secret That Isn't a Secret

Something people often don't realise until they're living it is that affairs are extraordinarily stressful. Keeping secrets is so stressful that in men over 50, the risk of heart attack increases significantly during an affair. Often you unwittingly start leaving clues and get careless.

When disclosure finally happens, the first feeling the unfaithful partner often reports is relief. The absolute relief of being found out, of not having to keep living that double life anymore.

What happens next is crucial. If the person who strayed takes responsibility - "Yes, I feel terrible, what I did was awful and unforgivable, and now my priority is getting our relationship back on track" - then you've got something to work with. But if they go down the route of "I'm such a terrible person, I don't know what took me there," essentially asking their partner to rescue them from their own guilt, that's a problem and harder to work with.

Not All Betrayals Look the Same

Sometimes there hasn't been a physical affair at all; it's an emotional affair. You've taken your most private, intimate thoughts and feelings to someone else, not your partner, and created a rupture in your primary relationship.

Perpetrators of emotional affairs sometimes refuse to take responsibility or see the impact of their choices on their partnership. If they're willing to do this, the work in therapy is often just as rich and challenging as if physical sex had occurred.

Sometimes it's opportunistic: a moment at the work Christmas party or a vulnerable time when your partner's away and suddenly there's comfort and reassurance on offer.

The injured party's feelings aren't any different whether it was a three-month relationship or a one-time encounter in the stationery cupboard. The sense of betrayal, invisibility, and "how could you" is equally enormous.

The Broader Landscape

We live in times of greater sexual freedom and curiosity than perhaps ever before. The traditional narrative of one man, one woman in a legally binding marriage where the man held all the economic power has shifted. Women now often have economic independence, and unsurprisingly, the gender gap in affairs has closed.

It used to be mainly men having affairs because they had the power. Now we know that narrative about men being "unable" to be monogamous was always nonsense.

This brings me to an important point: there are many ways to structure relationships beyond traditional monogamy. If you're polyamorous, if you love more than one person, that's valid.

But here's the crucial bit: if you've made a commitment to one person with assumed boundaries of monogamy, you need to have the conversation before you explore elsewhere. Without that conversation and agreement, it's an affair.

Some couples navigate consensual non-monogamy or move to polyamory successfully. Perhaps one person doesn't want sex anymore but the other does, and they find a way for sexual needs to be met outside the relationship with full consent and clear boundaries.

Sometimes it's about exploring a kink or fetish that one partner has no interest in. Sometimes it's just about having no need or desire to be monogamous.

These arrangements can work, but they require a lot of in-depth communication, clear agreements about what's acceptable, and ongoing negotiation as your relationship evolves and you both learn what works and what doesn't for you.

The key difference is secret versus consensual. Affairs happen in secret, behind your partner's back. Everything else requires talking, agreeing, and continuing to talk as you go.

If You're in Crisis Right Now

If you've discovered an affair, or committed one, here are some suggestions:

Resist oversimplifying

The temptation to fall into black and white thinking - goodies and baddies - is huge. Be careful who you confide in because friends and family will happily jump on the "they're terrible, you must leave" bandwagon.

But most people who find themselves in this situation aren't arseholes trying to create a train crash. They're nice people who've got themselves into a pickle.

Ask the hard questions together

What did I tell myself that made it okay to do this? What wasn't working in our relationship? How did we get here? Really dig into the why without justifying the behaviour. Understanding doesn't mean excusing.

Allow space for grief

If you're the injured party, you need time in your righteous indignation, your hurt, your wounded outrage. That's part of the grief process and it deserves honour and attention. Don't rush through it or repress it too quickly.

The pain must be heard and acknowledged. And if you genuinely want to rebuild, there comes a point where you need to stop howling and start collaborating on building your future together.

Avoid cheap forgiveness

Jumping too quickly to "I forgive you" out of fear or panic doesn't heal. The resentment, hurt, and pain will still be there, unattended and misunderstood.

Work towards understanding and acceptance instead. These create far more solid ground to build on than rushed or forced forgiveness.

Consider individual work too

Sometimes betrayal touches on old wounds from previous relationships or from childhood. If you've watched a parent be repeatedly let down, if you've learned not to trust intimate relationships, that's material worth exploring in individual therapy alongside the couples work.

Future-Proofing Your Relationship

Here's something that might surprise you: if you've learned you're incapable of trust because of your backstory, you're unwittingly complicit in creating conditions for betrayal. If your partner knows they're not trusted, that shapes how they behave.

You're both responsible for creating a relationship container together that is trustworthy and safe.

This means:

• Talking about your respective vulnerabilities and where they come from
• Understanding the coping mechanisms you've both developed
• Not taking yourself off to find solutions that exclude your partner
• Revisiting old agreements (remember that conversation about exclusivity you had ten years ago, pre-children? Maybe it's time to reconsider what you both actually want now)
• Staying in conversation rather than letting resentment build silently

The Work Ahead

Recovering from an affair is uncomfortable work. It means addressing pain and what went wrong. It's no walk in the park and some couples decide the relationship isn't worth that much effort.

But for those who do the work, the payoff can be significant. Relationships that survive affairs often become stronger because you can't take each other for granted anymore. You can't just assume you'll be together forever without attending to the relationship and to each other.

A Reflection Exercise

Whether you're dealing with the aftermath of an affair or wanting to affair-proof your relationship, sit down separately and write:

• What do I need to feel seen and valued in this relationship?
• What makes me feel invisible or unimportant?
• What agreements did we make years ago that might need revisiting?
• What am I afraid to say out loud?

Then, when you're both ready, share what you've written. You won't fix everything in one conversation, but you'll start building understanding.

A Final Word

Affairs are messy, painful, and complicated. They're also remarkably common. The narrative that paints one person as villain and the other as victim rarely captures the full truth. Most affairs happen in relationships where both people have, in different ways, stopped really seeing each other.

If you're in the middle of this crisis, please remember that it doesn't have to be the end of the road. With commitment, hard work, and willingness to truly understand what happened, many couples build something stronger than what they had before.

Not everyone chooses that path, and that's okay too. But the possibility is there if you both want it.

Be gentle with yourself. This is hard.

Clare

If you want to hear Janet and I explore this topic more fully, including the nuances we couldn't fit here, listen to the full episode at thesexandrelationshipspodcast.com.