Intimacy After Infidelity: How to Rebuild and Affair-Proof Your Marriage

by Steven D. Solomon, Lorie Teagno PhD

A Guide to Rebuilding Trust and Intimacy It's devastating to discover that the person you trust the most has betrayed you. You'll be facing some hard questions after learning of your partner's infidelity. You may choose to rebuild your relationship, or you may decide to move on. Whatever the right decision is for you, this book will help you figure out why your partner betrayed you and decide whether you can remain in your relationship. It will also show you new ways to relate that can help you and your partner become a lasting, loving, and committed couple. You'll start by taking a look at the phenomenon of infidelity and the three types of self-intimacy, conflict intimacy, and affection intimacy. Then you'll learn about the three kinds of infidelity—those of fear, of loneliness, and of anger—and what each reveals about your relationship. Then it's on to practical exercises that can heal emotional wounds and enable you to recover your ability to trust. Even if you decide not to remain with your current partner, the book will help you make wise relationship choices to "affair-proof" your future relationship.

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Ebony]

If you weren’t already feeling badly about being subjected to your partner’s infidelity, this book’s beginning will definitely make you feel worse. I didn’t like how they were putting lots of negative feelings in the minds of the reader. But I suppose it was all a set up. Make you feel awful so you need to feel better via their recovery plan. They promise to make sure infidelity never happens to you again. Tall order, I figured, but they did have a plan. First they talk about the four stages of a relationship: sweet symbiosis, soured symbiosis, differentiation, and synergy. Then they claim that infidelity only happens in stage two when a partner is feeling fear, loneliness, or anger. Some relationships stall in stage two and others regress back to stage two but in either case, they can fix that too. Self-intimacy, conflict intimacy, and affection intimacy will save and also “affair-proof” any relationship. In contrast to The Monogamy Myth there are no social contributors, there’s no responsibility on the victimized partner, the perpetrator became ruled by a fear, loneliness, or anger emotion and made a mistake. They called it a mistake and not a decision to soften the blow, I guess. Their goal is to save marriage. We follow the stories of four couples who did indeed survive or avoid infidelity. It seems super simplistic on the surface, but I can see how many infidelities could fall into their categories. Contrasting all those folks who say infidelity could happen for as many reasons as there are people, this book says there are only three reasons. I don’t know these folks. I found the book at the library. I’ve read no reviews. I don’t really know how credible they are, but they do have PhDs. For the moment, I am prepared to suspend judgment but I’d really have to spend more time with my data to see if these three reasons really are the only ones.

[Chinarut]

after reading lots of books that make the whole matter complicated, I thought this book was great in just getting down to basics. sure, there are probably a lot more complexities involved but this serves as a good starting point and for those looking for answers, being a quick read and giving a lot of food for thought can be important for some!

[Healing]

This book was really excellent. The authors are clear and concise in describing how and when affairs happen and why. Their exercises are equally helpful. My only complaint is the couples they use to illustrate their theories throughout the book. I got nothing from these and think the book would have been better without them.