With the break of trust it signifies, it can be really tough to bring a relationship back from cheating. For some, it’s impossible. That’s why, for so many couples, cheating automatically signals the end of the relationship.
However, it’s not always impossible to bring a relationship back. If both parties are willing to invest a serious amount of effort, and really work at creating a healthier relationship, it’s possible to recover.
What should you do to fix a relationship after cheating?
-Look into the bigger underlying issues
-Communicate your concerns
-Decide to trust your partner
-Have someone else you can talk to
-Agree to more checks and balances (at least until trust is fully re-established)
Address the Underlying Problems
The only way your relationship is going to recover from cheating and not just enter the cycle again is if you understand and address whatever caused it in the first place. This can be anything, and it doesn’t have to be someone’s “fault.” It may have been an emotional or physical need that someone wasn’t receiving, a drunken misstep or even a mistake that went too far.
Put everything out on the table and genuinely talk about it; you can’t leave these things unsaid. Communication is one of the most important factors of a healthy relationship, and you’re essentially building a healthy relationship from the ground up.
Be Open About Your Worries
The worst thing you can do while rebuilding trust is to hide your worries and fears when your partner does something you think is suspicious. After all, if it truly is innocent, you’re upsetting yourself and calling your partner’s choices into question over something your partner probably doesn’t even notice.
Some people worry about being open regarding these issues because they don’t want to be seen as “nagging.” However, the factor that makes the biggest difference is your intentions. If you’re really just trying to stay on the same page, you’re much less likely to come off as nagging.
Trust Your Partner
Although it’s important to bring up your worries, it’s equally important to extend a measure of trust to your partner. This can seem contradictory; after all, aren’t you rebuilding from a place where you trusted your partner too much? Shouldn’t you try to be more vigilant than ever?
Yes and no. Of course, you should be vigilant for the same signs you noticed the first time. It’s possible for your partner to go back to the same cheating ways. However, if you hover over your partner like an overprotective parent, your partner’s going to notice and start to feel resentful. Give your partner at least a small measure of trust, and you’re likely to find the relationship building back much more quickly.
Have a Trusted Confidante
Sometimes you need a third party to just sit and listen to what’s going on. Maybe you’re really upset about what happened with your partner, but your partner has genuinely been building that trust up again. You can’t just take it out on your partner, or you risk destroying that burgeoning trust.
That’s where this third party individual comes in. For some people, that’s a therapist; for other people, it’s just a close friend. It’s just important that before you start this whole process, you designate a person to whom you can talk and vent your frustrations before bringing them to your partner.
Commit to a More Open Agreement
In the process of re-establishing trust, something you may want to agree to (at least temporarily) is having a few more checks and balances. For example, say your partner used to communicate with the other person through text and phone calls. In that case, the two of you may decide together that you can check your partner’s phone whenever you want, then try to run texts and calls from numbers you don’t recognize through PeopleFinders.
PeopleFinders is a useful tool to help with this because it may you a lot of information about whoever owns a phone number. Your partner may claim that a certain phone number is a family relative, but is it really? When you perform a reverse phone lookup, you may find more information about the person who owns the phone number. You can try to match that information with whatever your partner is telling you and see if it fits.
Conclusion
Obviously, it takes a lot of work to rebuild a relationship after cheating. It can be difficult because you’re trying to determine where things went wrong as you’re rebuilding. Fortunately, you can try and use the tools at PeopleFinders to help you build a little more efficiently.
Image attribution: zimmytws – stock.adobe.com
