Sex After Infidelity: 9 Tips
This article is included as one of the chapters in the e-book, Good Sex: What Three Conversations about Sex Revealed about Shame, Intimacy and Reconnection after Sex, based on Tim Tedder’s interviews with Jocelyn Silva, Linda Landon, and Xanet Pailet. Download the entire e-book for free.
Not every couple wants anything more than what they’re currently experiencing. Some couples are honestly content keeping sex as a low priority. But most couples, it seems, want something better. Since you’re reading this, I assume you're one of them.
Here are 9 valuable tips to help you experience better sex.
1. If There Is Trauma, Pay Attention To It First
Let's consider two periods of trauma that might impact a person's experience of sex. One is current or ongoing: damaging events, including infidelity, occurring in a current relationship. The other is in the past: personal painful incidents like abuse or neglect. Both can shut down a sexual connection, and the second often goes unrecognized for years because it doesn't announce itself as trauma; it just shows up as a body that won't cooperate.
First, consider what happens in the aftermath of an affair. In some cases, couples try to rebuild their sexual connection while one or both of them are still in active distress. That rarely works, and the failure often gets misread as evidence that the relationship is beyond repair.
After infidelity, the first focus should not be on sexual reconnection in hopes that it will restore a sense of security. Stable intimacy comes in the last stage of healing, only after a couple has adequately processed their reactions, gained clarity about what happened, agreed on changes for their future, and addressed the issues that get in the way of being cooperative partners. (Read more about the 5 Stages of Recovery.)
Do first things first, then focus on what sex can become. For some individuals, it may take a long time for the trauma to stabilize enough for them to step back into the vulnerability of sexual intimacy.
So how will you know if you're ready? No timeline fits every couple. For some, as we'll consider later, a relatively quick return to physical intimacy may help. For others, it takes much longer.
Don't base your judgment on whether or not pain shows up. After a relationship injury like betrayal, that is certain to happen. A better measure is what the pain does once it surfaces. If the trauma-triggered pain results in inconsolable shame, sorrow, or shutdown, then it's too early to be having sexual encounters. They will do more damage than good. On the other hand, if the pain makes room for comfort to be offered and received between the partners, even the rough moments can be part of their healing process.
If you're the injured partner, be prepared for intrusive imagery whenever you start having sex again. Unwanted mental pictures of your spouse with the affair partner can arrive at the worst possible moment, with no warning at all. If this happens, you're not sabotaging anything, and you're not broken. Your mind is doing something predictable after a traumatic discovery.
What helps is agreeing beforehand that either of you can stop, and that stopping will be met with acceptance rather than hurt or defensiveness. I know that's harder than it sounds for the partner who broke trust. When sex halts abruptly, it's easy to hear it as punishment, or as proof that this will never be repaired. But if you respond with frustration or withdrawal, you teach your partner to stay quiet the next time it happens, and silence is one response that guarantees no progress. Pushing through without speaking teaches an injured body that the bedroom is a place where you can't tell the truth.
Older trauma surfaces here too. If touch brings up childhood memories, if sex has always been physically painful, if your body shuts down at the moment of vulnerability, none of that is resolved by trying harder. Linda lived with a body that refused penetration through relationship after relationship, and Xanet spent twenty-six years believing she was simply broken. Both of them eventually needed skilled help. A trauma-informed counselor or sex therapist, a physician, a pelvic floor therapist. Getting help isn't an admission that your marriage is unusually damaged. It's what people do when they run into something that requires expertise.
2. Stop Your Comparisons
After betrayal, an unseen struggle is usually going on. The injured partner is often carrying a wound that isn’t about trust; it’s about their body. They know their partner gave themselves to someone else, and they’ve likely been running a comparison ever since, even if nothing has been said.
If that’s you, you may feel like you’ve been measured and found insufficient. Xanet points out that for many people this wound predates the affair. The conviction that I’m not good enough was often already there, and the betrayal supplied what feels like proof. That’s important to understand because some healing requires internal work that no amount of outside reassurance can overcome.
If you’re the involved partner, you can still help: name what remains uniquely yours together. Recall the history, the private language, the experiences that belong only to the two of you — the things you genuinely find desirable, even preferable, about your spouse. Say them without being asked. Don’t fabricate anything, because your partner has developed a fine ear for flattery and may reject all your statements, including the true ones, if false ones are in the mix.
And don’t start a comparison ledger. Injured partners sometimes ask who was better at what. The curiosity is understandable, but those assessments will likely hinder far more than they will help. If you want to diminish the affair's ongoing influence, keep the ledger closed.
Focus on bringing your relationship back into the intimate place and leave all others outside the door.
3. Cultivate Connection Before Focusing on Sex
If sexual difficulty usually sits on top of relational difficulty, then the first move isn’t sexual at all. It’s rebuilding the sense that you’re on the same side.
Start with touch that isn’t going anywhere. Xanet worked with a couple recently on something almost embarrassingly small: a hug held for five minutes. Not a greeting, not a prelude, just two bodies staying still long enough for two nervous systems to find each other. Afterward, the couple told her they’d never done anything like it. It took only five minutes, after decades of marriage.
For couples recovering from betrayal, there’s an extra layer to this. After an affair, touch is rarely neutral. The injured partner is often braced, reading every contact for where it’s headed, unable to receive a hand on the back without calculating what it’s asking for. The involved partner senses that hesitation and stops initiating anything at all, which the injured partner then reads as further evidence of lost desire. Both people pull back while believing they’re being considerate.
The way through is an agreement said out loud: some touch leads nowhere, and we both know it in advance. A hand on the shoulder that’s only a hand on the shoulder. Sitting close on the couch with no follow-up. It sounds too small to matter. It isn’t. You’re teaching a startled body that contact is not a transaction.
The same principle applies to the rest of your life together. Xanet describes relationship drift as something that happens slowly, without intention, while everyone is busy managing logistics. Whatever attention you’re giving the relationship is the ground your sexual connection builds on.
4. If You’re Suddenly Having More Sex, Put It Into Perspective
One particular experience confuses many couples in recovery. Sometimes after discovery, sex becomes intense in a way it hasn’t been in years — frequent, urgent, charged. This is often called hysterical bonding, and it's fueled by particular impulses.
For some injured partners, this longing for sexual connection arises out of their need to secure the bond with their partner. They are driven to strengthen their bond with the person they’ve loved and to do it in the most intimate way available to them in the moment.
Others are driven by competition. Instead of letting the affair “win” by claiming something that was once only part of the marriage, efforts are made to claim it back again. In some cases, this includes an effort to prove “I can be just as good or better” than the affair partner.
Occasionally, couples can move quickly and certainly to a mutual commitment to each other and their relationship. Although there is still much work to be done, this confident commitment stirs intimate desire.
My counsel to couples in that season is always the same. Enjoy it. It isn’t fake, and there’s real comfort in it. Just recognize it for what it is. It’s not evidence that the relationship is repaired, and it won’t last at that intensity. Couples who mistake it for the finish line are the ones who crash hardest a few months later when it fades, and they conclude they’ve gone backward. They haven’t. The chemistry has simply stopped doing the work for them.
5. Have New Conversations
Most of the couples I’ve worked with have never had a serious conversation about sex. They’ve negotiated it, joked about it, argued about it, and gone silent about it, but they haven’t discussed it openly and honestly.
Xanet lived in a sexless marriage for twenty-six years, and by her own account, she and her husband never talked about it. It was simply decided, without words, over a couple of years. That’s more common than people think. The topic feels so loaded that couples will tolerate years of disappointment rather than risk one awkward hour.
Start somewhere manageable. What did each of you learn about sex growing up, and from whom? What were you told, and what did you absorb without being told? What have your expectations been, and where did they come from? These questions are easier to answer than “what do you want,” and they’re more productive because most of what’s in your way was put there long before the two of you met.
Then make a specific agreement. Linda takes penetration and orgasm off the table with her couples when they begin, and the effect is immediate. With no finish line, there’s nothing to fail at. Nobody’s being graded. Pick a length of time and say it out loud to each other; three weeks is long enough to matter and short enough to agree to.
Be clear about your reason too, or one of you will privately interpret it as rejection. The reason is that you want to find out what’s actually there when neither of you is trying to accomplish anything. What surprises people is that desire often returns during that window rather than after it.
[Need more help with sex conversations? Download the 1 Week of Sex Talk guide.]
6. Tune In to Your Own Sensuality
You can’t give directions if the way isn’t clear to you.
Linda’s approach to enhancing sexual pleasure starts with each person alone, learning their own body first. Many couples miss this because when connection is broken, their instinct is to fix it by rushing back to another attempt at connection.
The problem is, many adults reach middle age without knowing what actually brings them pleasure. Xanet said it this way: most of us expect our partner to somehow know our body, and it usually goes badly, because we’ve never mapped it ourselves. Two people, neither able to adequately describe their own experience, trying to satisfy each other by guesswork, then drawing conclusions about the relationship when it doesn’t work.
What Linda describes is simpler and less sexual than people assume. Close your eyes. Touch your own face, the bones of it, your neck, your hands, your forearms. Vary the pressure. Notice what you like, notice what you don’t, notice where you find aversion. She suggests leaving the genitals out at the beginning, because including them collapses the exercise back into the goal-oriented thinking you’re trying to interrupt. This isn’t masturbation. It’s learning to understand all the places and ways your body enjoys touch.
I know for some readers, this is where they check out. Many in my audience come from religious backgrounds (as do I), so let me speak plainly to the discomfort rather than pretend it isn’t there. You understand that sexuality carries real moral weight and belongs within certain boundaries. Nothing here asks you to abandon that. But we are sensual beings by design, and if you believe in a Creator, then the capacity to feel pleasure through your own skin wasn’t an oversight. It’s part of the divine intent.
You can hold firm convictions about the context of sexual expression without deciding that pleasure should be avoided. It’s a wonderful gift that too many hide away.
And how strange it is that we’ve made it shameful to know our own bodies while expecting our partners to know them intuitively.
7. Explore New Things Together
To be clear, novelty isn't the problem. Novelty as a substitute for connection is the problem. But once a couple has done the work above, trying new things stops being a distraction and starts being what it should have been all along: two people who feel safe enough to be curious together.
Start by being vulnerably honest. Linda has each partner show the other how they want to be touched. Don’t just describe it, show it. Her couples routinely tell her they've never done this, but discover that it's exposing in a way that intercourse often isn't, because you're taking the risk to say this is exactly what I like. Taking that risk together, with each partner willing to listen, observe, and learn, will help you find new satisfaction in your sexual interactions.
Then build new territory into experiences that belong to you together. Xanet told about a couple who had a playlist they'd always used when they made love, until the wife learned he'd used it with the affair partner. Every song on it became a landmine. Her counsel was to retire it and make a new one, and the principle extends beyond music.
Some things may have been contaminated by an affair and can't be reclaimed by force of will. Maybe you’ll need to let some of them go, then deliberately create new ones — new places, new rituals, new experiences whose entire history contains only the two of you. And maybe some of them can be reclaimed, denying the affair the power to steal all good things. You're not erasing what happened. You're retaining ground that doesn’t belong to anyone else.
You can expect to hit a wall. Linda tells her couples this at the outset, not as a warning but as preparation. It may show up as a fight, or a sudden certainty that this isn't working, or a refusal to continue. She tells them that hitting the wall isn’t the moment to quit; it’s the moment to recommit because that resistance usually marks the spot where something important needs to be processed.
Couples working on their own don't have someone waiting to catch them, which is why so many stop at the point of resistance and conclude they're beyond help. So be prepared. Decide in advance what you'll do. Agree that either of you can stop anything at any moment without immediate explanation. Agree that a pause is not a rejection. Agree that you'll come back to it within a day or two and talk about what happened rather than filing it away silently. Agree to get outside help if you need it.
8. When Necessary, Find an Alternative Path To Pleasure
Bodies change. Pain, erectile difficulty, hormonal shifts, medication side effects, surgery, illness, and ordinary aging all alter what's possible, and none of it responds to sheer willpower. Couples who define sex narrowly tend to believe these changes indicate an ending. Couples who define it broadly see them as a detour.
Linda's story is worth remembering here. She spent decades in relationships where her body shut down at the moment of penetration, and she assumed that was simply how she was made. It was at fifty, during menopause (the age at which she'd been told the whole issue would become mute), that she went looking and found a capacity for pleasure she hadn't known existed.
She writes about a couple in their late sixties and early seventies who were certain that the sexual part of their relationship was finished, then ended up inventing an entirely new set of enjoyable ways to be together.
Practically, this means separating pleasure from a single act. Touch, warmth, sensation, and closeness are available in a hundred configurations, and most couples have tried only two or three.
It also means getting appropriate help if you need it (a physician, a pelvic floor therapist, a menopause specialist, a sex therapist, a urologist) rather than quietly quitting. Many of the sexual problems that couples suffer are treatable.
9. If You Don't Want the Same Things…
Sometimes two people do everything right and still want different things. Different frequency, different acts, different amounts of adventurous play. This is common, and if that describes your relationship, it's not evidence that you’re with the wrong partner. It means you have to find connection by moving through your differences, not each of you fighting for your particular preferences.
Xanet describes the most familiar version of this. In an ongoing relationship, women often need emotional connection before they can open sexually. Men experience emotional connection through sex. So she says I don't want to have sex with you because I don't feel close, and he says I don't feel close because we're not having sex, and both are being honest while the distance between them grows.
Her advice is direct: you have to start with the emotional connection. Not because a man’s experience is invalid, but because the pattern shifts more certainly in that order. She has to feel safe for either of you to get what you're after.
What I'd add for the men reading this: it's worth asking whether you actually need less emotional connection than she does, or whether you were simply trained to want it less. Many of us built our defenses against emotional vulnerability so early that we mistake our defenses for the truth about ourselves. Xanet says it more bluntly, ”Men need it; they just don't know they want it.”
Other mismatches don't resolve so cleanly, and those require the kind of honesty Jocelyn describes: the willingness to say a true thing while sitting in the discomfort of your partner's disappointment. It's tempting to handle a mismatch by quietly complying, or by quietly withdrawing. Both are forms of dishonesty. Compliance builds resentment. Withdrawal builds distance. Neither one produces what partners actually want.
So say it plainly, and say it kindly. Here's what I want. Here's what I don't want. Here's what I'm willing to explore, and here's where I'm not, and here's why. A partner can usually work with that. They can't work with silence.
Of course, some differences cannot be reconciled. I’ve frequently worked with spouses who made promises in agreed monogamy only to find that one of them decides they want to change the boundaries. They want to have sex with more partners, and the other spouse feels pressure to either comply or lose the marriage. When one partner tries to shift the trust boundaries after they’ve already been established, it seldom ends well.
But the changes I’m encouraging don’t require moving your relationship's trust boundaries. You simply need to recognize all the unexplored territory within those boundaries and find the new pleasures waiting to be discovered there.
