Working Together to Rebuild Your Marriage After an Affair
Cooperation: Stage 4 of Affair Recovery for Couples
Written by Tim Tedder
“It’s been a year, and our recovery has been hard. Sometimes it still hurts, but it’s gotten so much better. We feel like our marriage is where it’s supposed to be. We talk about our problems and work through them together. We don’t always agree, but we feel like a team. Our marriage is more of a committed partnership now.”
Barely surviving an affair is one thing. Rebuilding your marriage into something new is another. The Cooperation Stage begins when both partners commit not only to stay together, but work together toward something better.
It’s not about grand romantic gestures. It’s about learning to show up as partners. Because before you become good lovers again, you must become good teammates.
Please note: This stage cannot be considered before previous stages have been adequately processed. You will be unable to focus on the normal pattern of your relationship before completing the Reaction and Clarity stages. Even then, the wound of the affair will continue to influence the interactions between spouses. That reality is addressed in the last section of this chapter.
Let’s start by recognizing the difference between your decision to remain married and the choice to be cooperating partners. It’s possible to experience the legal union of marriage without the unity of partnership. You can be together without working together.
Imagine me wandering outside one night and capturing a couple of outdoor cats in our neighborhood (depositing fleas in our yard, but don’t get me started). Now, picture me using a piece of sturdy twine to tie their tails securely together. What do you think would be the result?
Would they be joined together? Absolutely. Would they be living in unity? Absolutely not.
Your relationship was hit with a blow that likely pushed the two of you apart, perhaps far apart. From that distance, you cannot jump right back into a secure, consistently intimate connection. You have to learn to trust your partnership first.
You can rebuild your marriage in a cooperative partnership by following four steps.
First Step: Assess Your Relationship Patterns
Every relationship develops a unique pattern as each partner adapts to the other. At the beginning of most romantic relationships, when the brain is focused on personal attractions, adaptation seems easy. Because both want to be with the other, they tend to present the best parts of themselves. They focus on their partner’s positive attributes while minimizing the negative ones.
But this “easy connection” doesn’t last forever.
Eventually, the romantic highs that were an important part of initial bonding begin to settle into a sustainable attachment. Each partner gains a more realistic perspective as they become aware of their loved one’s flaws, weaknesses, and ability to hurt or disappoint.
This shift may seem disappointing (most premarital couples I counsel don’t want to believe they will experience any emotional letdowns), but in reality, it offers a context in which a deeper and more authentic connection can develop between two people.
It’s easy to love at the start of romance. It’s so easy that some men and women are enticed back to the “rush” of connection again by having an affair. Some only do this once. Others spend their whole lives jumping from one new experience to the next.
We all long for connection. Most of us want to find a secure bond with a partner who will share their life with us. We desire someone who will get to know us—every part of us—and still value and love us.
But this level of intimacy can only be experienced when we face moments of disconnection or disappointment and, in those moments, move into the vulnerable space between us to find connection instead of shutting down, attacking, or running away. (We’ll consider this further in the next chapter.)
Easy, right? You know it’s not! All marriages, even the “good ones,” struggle through difficult periods. While those difficulties drive some couples together, they push others apart.
The distancing begins when at least one person starts focusing on their dissatisfaction and blaming their partner for feelings of disconnection. They justify their right to think this way by emphasizing their partner’s faults and failures while ignoring their contributions to the problems.
Your Established Patterns
Each partner enters the relationship with their own relationship pattern, ingrained from childhood realities and shaped by subsequent experiences. The way they each adapted to their early realities (some have better family stories than others, but nobody has a perfect one) shaped the way they would eventually act/react in their adult relationships.
For each of them, this is their “normal.” They will justify it, defend it, and judge the other person for not thinking or acting the same way.
Here are examples of behaviors that are the norm for some people:
Todd hates conflict and will do whatever he can to avoid it.
Mary does not like to disappoint others, so she usually does what she thinks will please them, regardless of the cost.
If someone points out a small failure or inadequacy in Mark, he gets angry even if he knows it is true.
When Jennie feels criticized by her husband, whether he meant it or not, she will lash out.
After any argument, John refused to talk about it. His solution to conflict is to let enough time go by and then forget about it and move on.
Steve gets anxious whenever his wife wants to do something without him, even spending time with her friends.
Pam often attacks with sarcasm and then declares, “I was just kidding.”
Jack does well as a manager in a high-stress job, but reacts to negative emotion from his wife by shutting down and refusing to interact with her.
Since Sheri had children, the bond she created with them became more important than her bond with her husband.
Linda flinches every time her husband is angry and gestures with his hands, even though he has never threatened to hurt her.
Behaviors like these are not born out of a marriage; they are patterns adapted from early life experiences and repeated each time an emotionally familiar event triggers them. These ingrained reactions are powerful. Authors Milan and Kay Yerkovich, in their helpful book How We Love, write, “The fact is, we can never truly know our mates until we understand their childhood experiences.”
They go on to describe these past learned patterns as the “tunes” that each partner brings into the “dance” of their marriage. In their words:
“Old tunes from the past can so completely shape our beliefs that we don’t see that our current problems arise from old lessons we learned about how to handle feelings, needs, conflicts, gender roles, and communication. Our early experiences are so deeply woven into the fabric of our being that they determine how we respond in all our future relationships. And until we’re willing to go back and hear those old songs for what they are, we remain locked in our familiar but unhealthy, unproductive dances.”
Early in my counseling career, I’d be encouraged when couples nodded their heads in approval as I described how these old tunes turned into unhealthy dances. My optimism, however, was usually deflated once each began speaking enthusiastically about their spouse’s unhealthy patterns while utterly failing to recognize their own damaging tendencies.
Perhaps even now, as you read this, it’s easier to think about how it applies to your spouse than to you. If you want to be a cooperating partner, focus on your own change. Be honest about how some of your “normal” actions and reactions may have weakened your partnership rather than enhanced it.
As each partner takes responsibility for their tendencies, they can start identifying how their relationship pattern developed without blaming the other person for all the problems.
Understanding Your Pattern
In any encounter between you and your partner, you each make one of three “moves.” In each encounter, you are either moving against (pushing), away from (leaving), or toward (reaching) the other person. Intimate, trusting relationships are built by two people who are committed to reach toward connection even after they experience letdowns and hurts.
But moving away from (creating physical or emotional separation) or against a partner (sarcasm, criticism, anger, passive-aggressiveness, verbal pressure, abuse) is often easier than reaching toward them, especially if that response is part of the pattern we learned in our childhood. When triggered together, the partners’ self-protective reactions create various negative relationship patterns.
The Attack-Retreat Pattern: If one partner tends to shut down and the other tends to take charge or become aggressive, the pattern that develops is one in which one partner “goes after” the other while the other retreats. Each individual pattern reinforces the other: the retreat causes the pursuer to become more persistent, which causes the retreater to try even harder to get away..
The Mutual-Retreat Pattern: This occurs in marriages where both partners react to conflict (or potential conflict) by avoiding it. While these relationships may not show outward displays of anger or fighting, they fail to experience a strong connection because they are unwilling to enter into a vulnerable, honest encounter.
The Mutual-Attack Pattern: This occurs in marriages where both partners tend to move against each other in conflict. These relationships tend to be more explosive as each inflicts damage on the other.
There is a better way: the Mutual Pursuit Pattern, in which both partners commit to moving toward each other. When disappointment or conflict occurs, both partners recognize their old patterns, take responsibility for them, ask for forgiveness, and quickly return to reconnection efforts. Cooperating partners will do this again and again, building trust.
Every marriage has a pattern, and that pattern will affect the relationship after an affair. Genuine affair healing will not end with a couple having the same kind of marriage they had before the affair—that’s probably an impossibility. The good news is this: healing can create a stronger partnership between couples who cooperate in the process.
The pain you’ve both experienced can become a catalyst for creating a deepening bond between you.
Begin your cooperative partnership by assessing your relationship pattern. What are its strengths? What are its weaknesses? What are the problems that tend to show up again and again? What childhood experiences may have shaped how you respond to conflict? How do you make a good team? What disappointments became the accepted norm? Is each spouse aware of his or her contributions to the marriage assets and problems? What changes might be accomplished if you become cooperating partners?
Goals for Changing Your Pattern
Be honest about how each of you has contributed to your shared pattern and identify ways you might assist in changing it. These will be the goals that will move you toward change. An exercise is included at the end of this chapter to help you work through the four steps of the Cooperation stage. See also: the Relationship InterACTIONS online course for couples.
Second Step: Identify Your First Project
In an earlier chapter (Stage 3: Clarity), you were encouraged to find clarity in the future by identifying common goals that lead you toward desired relationship changes. These changes will not be accomplished in a single effort. Rather, you will build your new marriage by working on one project at a time.
What will be your first relationship project to rebuild your marriage?
In the previous step, you considered the patterns of your marriage and identified some areas that need improvement. Choose one of these to be the focus of your first cooperation effort. Here are some examples of good project goals:
Be more intentional about telling each other what’s going on in your lives.
Express more affection in ways that each partner appreciates.
Learn to handle conflict in a better way.
Be more interested in each other’s hobbies and interests.
Enjoy more recreational time together.
Find a satisfying balance in sex.
Create a more positive, inviting home life.
Regularly express encouragement and gratitude to each other.
Create and maintain a financial plan.
For now, focus on projects that benefit both of you—ones that benefit the marriage, not just one spouse. Talk about these together and choose one to be your first joint project. (If you have a difference of opinion, proceed with the betrayed partner’s choice and agree to work on the other one next.)
Third Step: Learn Together
Most couples say they want a good marriage, but not all of them are able to build (or rebuild) one. Why do some change while others do not? Why do some, who start out strong in their cooperation efforts, eventually revert to old, disappointing patterns?
Many fail because they lack one of the three requirements for change: desire, effort, or time.
Change requires desire.
A person will not change unless they want to change. Short-term shifts may be made due to outward pressure or manipulation, but long-term adjustments require internal longing. In a relationship, both partners must genuinely desire a common goal, or there is little hope for lasting change.
If you’ve made it this far as a couple, I assume you share a desire for change in your marriage. (If not, you need to go back to Stage 3 to clarify your future.) But desiring change isn’t enough; you have to be willing to work at it.
Change requires effort.
If building a great marriage were easy, most marriages would be awesome, and I would need a new job. But they’re not, and my counseling career seems quite secure.
Now that you’ve identified a relationship project, you need to do the work. Changing old patterns or creating new ones means you have to learn and practice new behaviors. You will most likely need help in doing this. Your experience and current knowledge may not be enough to guide you, so decide how you will learn together. Commit to gaining new insights and strategies to help you experience satisfying shifts.
Choose at least one resource to help guide you through your project. Here are a few suggestions:
Books
Online articles
Counseling
Conversations & interviews with other couples
Courses (offline or online)
Support groups
Podcasts or audio programs
Videos
Matt and Patti decided to strengthen communication in their marriage and asked their pastor for a book recommendation. Each weekend, they sat on their back porch, read the next chapter, and talked about what they were learning.
John and Alex wanted to find new ways of resolving disagreements, so they went to a counselor. In three sessions, they developed a common strategy for avoiding damaging conflict and making relationship repairs after an argument.
Steph and Brice realized their struggle to agree on money issues. They attended a weekend course that helped them establish a plan for spending and saving.
Lynn and Tom realized they needed to improve their expressions of appreciation and affection. They decided to use the Love Languages book as a guide. Lynn bought the paperback, and Tom purchased the audio version so he could listen during his evening run. After each chapter, they talked about what they had learned.
Choose a resource that works for you and start learning together.
Fourth Step: Commit to a Weekly Check-In
To realize change, you need desire and effort. You also need one more thing…
Change requires time.
Establishing new patterns that will last requires an investment of time. There will be moments of encouraging success and periods of disappointing failure. To build momentum that will keep you moving through discouragement, it is important to follow a strategy that will maintain your focus week after week.
Decide on a weekly time and place for both of you to meet and review your project progress. Use the time to encourage each other. If corrections need to be made, focus on your own changes rather than pointing out your partner’s failures. Commit to what you will do during the next week.
This weekly check-in doesn’t need to be long. It may take only 15 minutes to give attention to these three topics:
Encouragement: Recall at least one example of your partner’s work on the project during the past week. Be specific. Encourage and thank them for their effort.
Self-Assessment: Focus on yourself and reflect on how you may have neglected the project (by either failing to act or doing something contrary to the goal). If anything comes to mind, admit it and commit to the ongoing work of change. If you did well, give at least one example of your intentional efforts to help reach the shared goal.
Next Steps: Each partner should explain what they will do during the next week. What will be their contribution to the project? Is there any specific step of change they will work on? (It’s appropriate to ask your spouse for input, but don’t offer unsolicited advice.)
Cooperation: Unequal Effort
I’ve intentionally stressed the necessity of cooperation to rebuild your marriage. Moving toward relationship healing and renewal requires the active participation of both spouses. The betrayed spouse cannot simply sit back and say, “You broke it; you fix it.”
However, the partner who broke trust will carry more weight, especially in the early stages of recovery. They must lead in humility, responsibility, and repair, even while their healing is still in process. This doesn’t excuse the betrayed spouse from participating in the healing process. But it does acknowledge reality: rebuilding requires greater responsibility from the one who caused the collapse.
Linda MacDonald, affair recovery therapist and author, writes this about those who choose to rebuild their marriage after their affair:
“Successful Rebuilders choose the more difficult path of resilient perseverance. They know it takes guts to face the pain they have caused and the fact that their marriages are forever altered. But rather than fear this challenge, they choose to stay and do the hard work of recovery—both of their own broken states and the condition of their marriage.”
While trust is being rebuilt, the unfaithful spouse must assume greater responsibility in this partnership. Depending on the circumstances, this may take months or maybe even years. But in time, if both do their part, the balance will be restored. As that happens, the couple will transition from shared cooperation to intimate connection.
