Infidelity; it is indeed our secret epidemic until the next celebrity like Diamond Plantnum with his tragic saga unfolding, rivets his fans attention to the fact that betrayal, in all of its various forms, is all too alive and well in marriages across the world.
The question many are asking is this: Can a marriage actually be saved following an affair? Is it really possible to survive infidelity or is a divorce inevitable?
Most women who have gone through this have different opinions. Sarah Babirye, mother of 4 says “The fact is that your ability to save the relationship has less to do with the circumstances of the affair and much more to do with the responses to it by both people involved. Marriages don’t end because of infidelity; they end because of how infidelity is dealt with”
Majority of the people say that “ with love it is possible” but the real question is “How do you define love?” and “Is your definition of love large enough to encompass profound failure?”. The only limitations on love are those we place on it; either that of the imagination or lack of in this case, where possibility is foreclosed on due to overwhelming emotion that is not as well managed as it can be.
For example, people often claim as a matter of fact that certain things are simply “unforgivable” (some famous feminists preach this regularly!)There are limits to how much you can love someone”. Perhaps, but in our quick fix, self-absorbed culture it is our contention that those “limits” are too many and too quickly ascribed, accounting for the failure of a lot of marriages and many couples plagued with infidelity.
If you define love as contingent upon your spouse always being faithful and never failing you, especially in the arena of fidelity, or your relationship, and always conforming with your ideas of how it “should be”, then I agree with the naysayers – it isn’t possible to save a marriage following an affair and you are destined to be consumed by resentment forever. In this case, forget forgiveness. However, if you define love as we do, as “unconditional contribution” in the face of the extreme failure that can accompany being a mere human being (and, with the caveat that there will be boundaries and standards an unfaithful partner agrees to live by to do the work of healing and redesign), then it is not only possible to save a marriage after infidelity, it is possible to thrive beyond it.
Relationship counsellors advice that anything can be forgiven because doing so is an act of will rather than a change of circumstances aligning with what we deem they must, as that represents a set of conditions that have little to do with the work of forgiveness and even less to do with what it means to love. Forgiveness that is grounded in “true love” is as much about the willingness of the forgiver to evolve as it is for the forgiven to be worthy of forgiveness based on a genuine shift in expected behaviour over time. Both are fundamentally choices; whether or not a marriage can be repaired rests more upon a decision to grow by leveraging the hurt, as brutally painful as it is, and choosing to use it as a source of evolution, both individually and as a couple, rather than a rallying call for the destruction of a marriage and family.
“Julie and I found life-altering love and true fulfilment in our marriage after an affair By working through the pain and committing ourselves to both healing and designing a new relationship, we found the secrets to a stronger, more satisfying marriage”, confesses Ronald Ojok. Succeeding in love has more to do with becoming a person capable of loving than it is about finding the right person who will love us and meet all our needs perfectly. He adds that in relationships, we can complain or we can create. Our greatest freedom lies in deciding which of these choices we will give our time and energy. One leaves you victimized by the events and circumstances of life, while the other allows you to learn from the wisdom in every failure.
Recovery from infidelity is no different than any serious life challenge. Contained within its experience is both pain and opportunity. Julie and I chose to leverage the opportunity by accepting responsibility for how we had previously failed one another by making everything else in life a priority except the core of what brought us together.
Instead of blame we chose grace. Rather than vindictiveness we loved each other from compassion for how we hurt one another. Instead of being self-righteous and “right” about our story of the other, we became curious about how who we had been in the old marriage had contributed to its failure. Only then, rather than hiding in resentment, were we able to embrace forgiveness as a pathway to a new future.
Beneath the ashes of our burnt lives and within the debris of lies and heartbreaks , through forgiveness, a legacy of love can be created again.
