Breaking Emotional Ties to an Affair Partner
Of all the challenges in affair recovery, breaking emotional ties with a former affair partner is one of the steepest. And too often, it’s where healing stalls. This article tackles that struggle head-on, offering honest guidance and a practical path forward using the D.E.T.A.C.H. Plan (downloadable), grounded in solid research and real-world experience. —Tim Tedder
Ties That Bind
One of the hardest challenges I encounter in my work is dealing with the emotional bond that sometimes forms between someone and their affair partner.
Not every affair creates that kind of connection. Some burn hot and cool down quickly, more about passion or escape than attachment. But occasionally the relationship grows into something that feels like love. When that happens, breaking free is not as simple as walking away.
For many, the struggle shows up as a choice: Do I go back to my spouse, or do I follow this new relationship? For others, the choice is already made. They’ve ended the affair and want to rebuild their marriage, but their heart doesn’t seem to fall in line. Lingering feelings for the person they left keep pulling at them, making it harder to give themselves fully to the work of repairing what’s broken at home.
If you’re struggling with ongoing feelings for your affair partner, this is written with you in mind. I want you to know this isn’t just a you problem. It’s a we problem, because I’ve been right where you are. After my own affair came to light, I found myself caught between two worlds: the life I had built with my wife and children, and the lure of a new experience with someone else. Even after deciding to stay and try to repair my marriage, my heart was divided.
If someone had offered me a surgery to cut out that longing, I would have signed up on the spot. Living in that tension felt unbearable at times. Even as part of me wanted to chase what was new, another part of me was tied to the promises I had made, and to my kids who didn’t ask for any of this. I wanted my marriage back, but I couldn’t let go of the desire I felt for someone I didn’t have, or find it again for the one I had vowed to love.
I wish I could give you a remedy to make this easier. I can’t.
For some, the emotional tie breaks suddenly in a moment of clarity. For others, it loosens slowly, almost painfully, over time. What I can offer you is this: encouragement from someone who understands. I know the tug-of-war inside your chest. I’ve felt the loneliness in a struggle that nobody thinks you should have.
Because here’s another truth: this isn’t the kind of experience that gets sympathy. Telling your spouse that you still have feelings for someone else inflicts more pain. And if you try to talk about it with a friend, the reactions you get often sound like condemnation or disbelief. “How could you still feel that way?”
So instead, you keep quiet. You hold it inside. You hope the feelings will fade on their own. But silence makes the weight feel heavier.
What you feel is real. It hurts. You’re not crazy for finding it hard to let go.
It IS Love (Kind Of)
One of the loneliest experiences in this process is the silence around what you feel. Nobody wants to hear you say you still love your affair partner. If you dare to say it out loud, you’ll usually hear one of two responses: “That’s not real love,” or “You just need to cut off contact and wait for it to die.”
The first feels like dismissal. The second feels like a hollow pep talk. Neither one seems strong enough to stand up against the storm inside you.
I remember sitting in the middle of that tension. During my affair, people tried to talk sense into me. They told me it was just a fantasy, just hormones, just an illusion. But to me, it didn’t feel fake. It felt alive—more real than anything I had felt in years. Their arguments didn’t touch me, because what I felt was powerful, intoxicating, even transformative. It wasn’t something I could argue myself out of, no matter how much sense their reasoning made.
That’s because the feelings are real. They are not imaginary. Psychologists call this experience limerence: the rush of dopamine, adrenaline, and bonding hormones that creates a state of infatuation so intense it can feel like destiny. In that state, your affair partner shines like a sparkling light, while your spouse fades into the dim background. Your brain exaggerates every positive trait in the new person, minimizes their flaws, and rewrites history to make your marriage look smaller than it really was.
Feeling this way for someone else does not mean you didn’t love your spouse. You are capable of loving more than one person. We all are. Marriage vows don’t erase that capacity; they define how we choose to direct it. The promise of monogamy means: I could, but I won’t. When we open the door to another connection, we may discover a relationship where love can grow. And when it grows in secrecy, under pressure, it can feel even more compelling.
I eventually started to love my affair partner. That’s the truth. But it was love born in brokenness—hers and mine. And like a plant rooted in unhealthy soil, it couldn’t last. If we had stayed together, I have no doubt we would have ended up another statistic, one of the 95% of affair-born relationships that don’t survive.
So when I say “it is love (kind of),” here’s what I mean: what you’re feeling is real, but it isn’t the whole truth. It is love mixed with distortion. Love doesn’t automatically mean health, or longevity, or goodness. The fact that you love someone doesn’t mean that the relationship will lead you anywhere worth going.
And this is where the real work begins, not in denying your feelings, but in seeing them for what they are: genuine, yes, but incomplete. Instead of denying them, you need to wonder what they mean. The answer is not likely to be either, “It must be the power of real love,” or “They were ‘the one’ for me.”
That’s what I thought. So I felt stuck.
A Snare or a Springboard?
I had to learn some lessons the hard way. This is one of them: when we get stuck, there is a lesson for us to discover. If we learn it, that snag becomes a springboard for change, and we grow. If we don’t learn, the snag becomes a snare, trapping us. No growth, no change, no resolution.
So this isn’t just a challenge to “get over” something. It’s a challenge to figure out what you need to learn. If you step into your struggle with a sense of vulnerability and curiosity, you may be surprised by what you discover.
Let’s consider four possible lessons to be learned.
Lesson 1: Understand Why It Feels Like an Addiction
If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t just “snap out of it,” let me give you some reassurance. There’s nothing weak or defective about you. What you’re experiencing is deeply tied to how your brain is wired. The longing you feel isn’t just emotional; it’s biological.
Brain scans show that early-stage romantic love activates the same dopamine-rich reward circuits that are lit up in people craving drugs like cocaine. Those neurological systems are the parts of your brain that scream, “This feels good, do it again.” When you see your affair partner or get a text from them, your brain gives you a chemical hit.
It’s a rush of dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin—a cocktail that fuels euphoria, arousal, and bonding.
That’s why no-contact feels so painful. Cutting off your affair partner is like cutting off a drug. Your brain craves another hit, and everything reminds you of them. A song. A restaurant. A smell. Even silence can feel like withdrawal. This is why so many people describe their affair as an “addiction.” It’s not just a metaphor; the parallels are striking.
Here’s what makes it even trickier: intermittent reward. In other words, you don’t get a steady stream of dopamine. You get it unpredictably—when they text back after hours of silence, when they look at you a certain way, when they take a risk to be with you. Or when you go for a while with no contact and then justify “one little check-in” again. That unpredictability wires the craving in even deeper. It’s the same principle that makes slot machines addictive. The reward is inconsistent, and that inconsistency strengthens the bond.
And here’s the kicker: the feelings themselves are genuine. They’re not fake, not imaginary. But they’re being fueled by a system that makes them feel stronger than they really are. Your brain is exaggerating the intensity. That’s why the longing feels overwhelming, and why you can’t argue your way out of it.
If this sounds discouraging, it doesn’t have to be. Understanding what’s happening in your brain doesn’t excuse your choices, but it helps explain them. And more importantly, it helps normalize what you’re going through. You’re not broken. You’re human. And once you see the experience for what it is, you can start to treat your longing less like an unstoppable destiny and more like a craving that can be managed, endured, and eventually overcome.
Lesson 2: Be Real about the Outcome
When you’re caught in the pull of an affair, the imagined future looks brilliant. It’s easy to picture a life with your affair partner as effortless, passionate, and free of the burdens you carry at home. But honesty requires us to pause and consider where these paths actually lead.
There are really only two possibilities:
1. The affair partner becomes your long-term partner.
It happens, but it’s rare. I’ve worked with couples whose relationships began in an affair and survived. I respect the courage it takes for them to face their choices and work hard to build something better. But here’s what none of them expected: the magic didn’t last. The “special” relationship eventually landed in the same everyday struggles that every couple faces—arguments, unmet needs, financial stress, parenting conflicts. And those challenges are often amplified by the baggage of how the relationship began.
Suspicion, insecurity, and guilt have a way of seeping into the foundation, making trust harder to build. Even if this is your path, it won’t be the fairy tale you’re imagining.
2. The relationship doesn’t last.
This is by far the most common outcome. Studies show that fewer than 5% of affairs become lasting partnerships. Most burn out within the first couple of years. Sometimes the very issues that drove you into the affair resurface in your new relationship.
Sometimes you discover incompatibilities that were hidden by secrecy and adrenaline. And often, the person who seemed like your rescuer turns out to be just as flawed as you are.
I’ve watched this happen in clients, like a man I’ll call Mitch. After his affair was exposed, he left his family for the woman he believed was his true love. For two years, he threw himself into that relationship, trying to prove it was worth the cost. But slowly, cracks appeared. The same frustrations he once had with his wife showed up with his new partner. Arguments increased. Trust eroded. And then, the worst blow: his new partner cheated on him. The relationship ended, leaving him with broken ties, alienated children, and a profound grief for everything he’d lost.
And I’ve watched it happen in myself. After trying, half-heartedly, to work on my marriage for a few months, I reached out to my affair partner again after a particularly painful conflict with my wife. Soon, I moved out of my home, and my affair picked up where it left off.
For a while, it felt like a relief. But over the course of the following year, as the relationship grew more normal, I started to see it for what it was. The shine wore off. The tensions of everyday life crept in. The future looked less certain. Eventually, I ended it. But by then, I was too broken and too shut down to return to my marriage in any way that could have made a difference. In the end, I lost both relationships.
I don’t share this to heap shame on myself or on you, but to highlight something I wish I had understood sooner: the future you imagine with an affair partner rarely survives reality. And even if it does, it will come with struggles you can’t see right now. The odds are stacked against you, and the cost of finding out is often devastating.
This is why honesty matters. Not to crush your hope, but to anchor it in reality. The affair relationship is not immune to the same gravity that pulls on every other relationship. What feels like an ideal escape is far more likely to collapse under ordinary pressures. And even if it doesn’t, the price of getting there may be higher than you ever imagined.
Lesson 3: See the Fault in How You Love
One of the most brutal truths I had to face was this: healthy, secure people don’t usually have affairs. They may end a relationship if it isn’t working, but they don’t form a secret attachment and live in deceit. If you’ve had an affair, it’s worth asking not just why it happened, but what it says about the way you love. Because unless you learn from it, you’re at risk for repeating the same pattern.
Attachment Theory offers a helpful lens here. It says that the way we connect in adult love grows out of the patterns we learned early in life. Psychologists describe three main styles beyond Secure Attachment:
Anxious Attachment: craving closeness but living in fear of being abandoned.
Avoidant Attachment: keeping people at arm’s length, uncomfortable with real intimacy.
Disorganized Attachment: a push-pull mix of both—wanting connection, but also fearing it.
Affairs often grow out of one of these insecure styles. An anxious person may chase the validation of someone new. An avoidant person may feel safer in a relationship that can never fully demand commitment. A disorganized person may swing between needing the intensity of the affair and the safety of home.
Here’s the opportunity: let your affair become a turning point. Instead of staying blind to the broken patterns, use this as a chance to get curious about them. Ask yourself: Why does this style feel “normal” to me? How has it shaped my choices? What would it take to begin learning a healthier way of loving?
The affair doesn’t define your future, but it does reveal something about your past. If you let it teach you, it can be the start of becoming a different kind of partner, one who can build love that is honest, steady, and secure.
Lesson 4: Make Your Choice Out of the Best Motive
When it comes down to it, you have a choice to make. You can’t always control what you feel, but you can decide what you’ll do. And the quality of that choice depends less on what you choose and more on why you choose it.
I’ve seen people stay in their marriages for the wrong reasons: out of fear, guilt, or a need to avoid shame. I’ve also seen people chase after an affair partner because it made them feel good in the moment, only to discover that the pleasure was temporary and the consequences permanent. In both cases, the outcome was shaped by motive.
Think of it this way: most of us are pulled by three primary motives.
Doing: choices based on duty, obligation, or the fear of disapproval.
Getting: choices based on the pursuit of pleasure, happiness, or personal gain.
Being: choices based on the kind of person you want to become, the story you want your life to tell, and the values that matter most to you.
All three motives play a role in life, but when it comes to making a decision as significant as whether to end an affair and fight for your marriage, being is the only motive that consistently leads to growth and peace.
If your choice is driven mainly by doing, you may stay in your marriage simply because “it’s the right thing,” but resentment will eventually eat at you. If your choice is driven mainly by getting, you may chase whatever feels good in the moment, whether that’s the thrill of the affair or the temporary calm of returning home, but you’ll keep ping-ponging back and forth whenever the feelings shift.
But if your choice is driven by being, you start asking more profound questions: What kind of person do I want to become? What story do I want to live out? What values do I want to embody, no matter what? This isn’t about choosing the easier path or the one that feels most rewarding right now. It’s about aligning your decision with the person you most want to be.
That kind of clarity doesn’t magically erase the pain or the longing, but it gives you an anchor. It keeps you steady when feelings waver or when the old pull tries to drag you back. When you decide out of your deepest sense of self—your “being”—your choice has the power to shape a healthier future, no matter what happens in your marriage.
If I Could Do It Over Again
If I could step back into the moment when my affair was first discovered, knowing what I know now, I would make very different choices. I can’t pretend I would have felt any less confused, any less torn, or any less drawn to the other relationship. Those feelings were real. I would have carried them with me no matter what.
But here’s the difference: instead of letting those feelings steer me, I wish I had chosen to anchor myself in the kind of man I wanted to become. I wish I had leaned fully into my marriage. Not halfheartedly, not with one foot out the door, but with everything I had.
That would have meant doing the hard work of facing myself honestly: my patterns of avoidance, my need for validation, my unwillingness to risk deeper vulnerability in my marriage. It would have meant opening up in ways I never had before, learning how to love my wife not only in the ways that felt natural to me but in the ways she most needed. And it would have meant finding the help I needed so I could do those things.
I don’t know if our marriage would have survived, because healing always requires two people. But if it ended, at least it would have ended with me doing the right kind of work.
Instead, I bounced back and forth between half-efforts at home and a secret longing for someone else. That indecision eventually cost me both relationships. I lost the marriage I had built over decades, and I lost the affair relationship I had hoped would somehow be different. The fallout scarred the people I loved most.
So if I could do it over again, I would have chosen to walk straight into the pain and confusion, trusting that the only way out was through. I would have planted myself in the soil of my marriage and done everything possible to make it grow again. Hard? Absolutely. Risky? Yes. But at least I would have been living like the man I most wanted to be, rather than the man who tried to hold on to both worlds but lost them both.
Love Like a Farmer
One of my favorite writers, Donald Miller, once said, “Marriage is more like farming than a fairy tale.” For a long time, I resisted that idea. I wanted love to feel magical, like something that swept me off my feet when I found the “right” person. That’s what the affair felt like: an escape into enchantment, a rediscovery of wonder. But enchantment fades. What endures is the kind of love you tend with steady hands, like a farmer working the soil.
Here’s the truth I eventually came to: what matters more than finding the perfect partner is learning how to love well. A farmer doesn’t plant a seed and expect fruit overnight. They prepare the ground, water consistently, pull weeds, and protect the crop through storms. It takes patience and persistence. But given time, growth happens. The harvest comes.
For me, farming love in my marriage would have looked like this:
I would have been more open and authentic instead of keeping things bottled up. Hiding my real thoughts and feelings didn’t protect my marriage; it starved it.
I would have practiced being braver by being more vulnerable. Vulnerability is risky, but it’s also the soil where intimacy grows.
I would have been more curious about my own patterns, especially the ones that left my wife disappointed. Instead of defending myself, I could have asked: Why do I love in this way? Where did this come from? How can I change?
I would have talked honestly about hurts and disappointments instead of holding them inside. My silence didn’t spare us conflict; it only deepened the distance between us.
These were the weeds I never pulled, the water I never poured. And because I didn’t farm my marriage with the care it needed, I went searching for fruit somewhere else.
Looking back, I wish I had leaned into the harder, slower work of cultivation. Because farming love (through honesty, vulnerability, curiosity, and steady investment) creates a bond that doesn’t just flare up and fade away. Its roots run deep enough to weather anything.
The D.E.T.A.C.H. Plan
Description: The D.E.T.A.C.H. plan is a simple, step-by-step roadmap designed to help you break free from the emotional pull of an unhealthy relationship. Instead of asking you to “just move on,” it gives you practical tools to manage cravings, quiet obsessive thoughts, and retrain your brain to find energy and satisfaction in healthier places. Each letter of the word represents a clear action you can take in minutes a day, backed by research on how people successfully let go of addictive bonds. If you’ve tried to leave but keep getting pulled back by longing, this plan offers both immediate relief and a pathway to lasting freedom.
Goal: To make urges weaker, shorter, and less frequent while you rebuild a life that feels good without the other person.
D - Decide & write it down (2 minutes, once)
Write a one-paragraph Why I’m Done note (what this bond cost you; what you want instead).
Put it in your phone notes. Read it when urges spike.
Why this matters: Naming your decision and reason boosts follow-through when emotions wobble.
E - Erase the easy access (one setup session, 10–20 minutes)
Block: numbers, email, social media.
Box: remove photos/gifts/keepsakes; store off-site or get rid of them completely.
Bypass: avoid routes, playlists, hangouts that pull you back at least for a month.
Why this matters: Removing cues lowers “automatic” craving and relapse risk—the same principle used in effective relapse-prevention programs.
T - Two-Minute Reset (use any time an urge hits)
Take these actions. If they seem silly to you, do them anyway. They’re effective.
Name it: “This is a craving surge; it will pass.”
Breathe 6 slow breaths (in through the nose, long out-breath).
Reframe: read your Why I’m Done note.
Do your IF-THEN: “If it’s still strong, then I will put the phone in the kitchen and go outside for a 3-minute walk.”
Why this works: Brief mindfulness + a prewritten “if-then” plan reduces craving reactivity and keeps you from acting on impulse. (Mindfulness-based relapse trials and implementation-intention meta-analyses back this up.)
A - Activate your day (10 minutes, daily)
Do one small thing that gives you a spark (not doomscrolling): brisk walk, quick workout, learning video, sketch, instrument, tidy a drawer—anything that leaves a visible “I did that” trace.
Why this matters: You’re training your reward system to get small, reliable hits from real life, not from the old bond. Short, doable actions improve mood and stress tolerance, which drops craving intensity. (This is also the on-ramp to the “self-expansion” piece below.)
C - Change the channel on loops (5 minutes, once/day + as needed)
When you catch yourself replaying the highlight reel:
Spot it: “I’m looping.”
Switch: for 10 minutes to a pre-chosen, absorbing task (call a friend, brain puzzle, podcast while walking, quick chore).
Schedule: any “what-ifs” to a single 10-minute worry “Time Box” later.
Why this matters: Shifting out of rumination reduces stickiness of longing and improves mood; process-focused CBT trials show benefit when people learn to catch and switch the mental loop.
H - Hack the fantasy (3 minutes, 3x/week)
When an idealized image pops up, dull the highlight reel:
Bring the image to mind for 10–20 seconds.
Move your eyes left–right slowly (or tap left–right on your knees) for ~30 seconds while holding the image.
Replace it with a truer scene that includes the actual costs and after-effects. Feel free to exaggerate for effect!
Repeat 2–3 rounds until the picture feels more accurate.
Why this matters: Brief dual-task “imagery work” reduces the vividness/emotional punch of sticky images; rescripting the scene shifts its meaning. Tapping and eye movement, as described here, are forms of bilateral stimulation. Evidence from imagery studies (and related trauma work) supports both steps.
