Sometimes Divorce is the Better Outcome
Sometimes Divorce is the Better Outcome
Dr. Glass, in Not “Just Friends”: Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity” cites many reasons that significant efforts to recover from an affair and rebuild the basic trust in a marriage may not succeed. Separation and divorce may be the final result when:
- Sometimes the unfaithful partner is seeking a way out of a marriage that has died a long time ago and the affair is an exit route.
- Sometimes the unfaithful partner makes a clear choice to leave the marriage to be with their lover.
- Sometimes the betrayed partner is not able to re-develop basic trust in their partner’s honesty and fidelity.
- Sometimes one partner cannot sustain their effort during the period of attempted recovery.
- Sometimes the unfaithful partner did not end the affair.
- Sometimes the affair was very intense with a combination of powerful emotional attachment and intense sexual involvement that is not possible within the marriage, so that the marriage has limitations that are not livable for the unfaithful partner.
- Sometimes both spouses had been involved with someone outside the marriage.
- Sometimes a younger wife, with no children in the marriage, realizes that the marriage was a mistake and wants release.
- Sometimes an older husband in a long-term marriage chooses/desires greater emotional involvement with another woman that is not feasible within the marriage.
- Sometimes either or both spouses have a lower commitment to rebuilding the marriage.
There are many other reasons that efforts to rebuild a marriage may not succeed. This is a difficult choice that each spouse and the couple must make for themselves, free of whatever bias or preference a therapist might have. If a sustained effort is made to rebuild trust and recover from infidelity is made, even without final success, the partners are more able to separate with greater peace of mind, knowing that a genuine effort has been made.
Dr. Solomon is a Clinical Psychologist in practice in Torrance. He is a member of the Independent Psychotherapy Network. Dr. Solomon can be reached at 310 539-2772 or dralanms@gmail.com
Copyright 2018 by Alan M. Solomon, Ph.D.
