Already Having An Extramarital Affair?

If you’re having an affair I suspect you’re not reading this to find out how to enjoy your affair more!

So what are your concerns?

Are you worried you’re going to get found out and your main relationship will disintegrate? That your partner will never forgive you?

Are you looking for a way out of your main relationship? Or out of your affair?

Do you want to know whether your partner knows you’re having an extramarital affair?

Those are some of the common concerns. Let me take you through my thoughts on them.

Worried about being found out

When you have an affair many of your behaviours change. The time you spend on your new relationship. How you act around your partner. How the feelings of guilt affect you.

You may be very good at masking the changes, but the bottom line is that even the best seep out those signals that can be read. Depending on how able your partner is to read the signals you may or may not be found out. And if you’re a man, you’ve a much higher percentage chance of being found out as women are generally much better at reading the signs.

Will my partner forgive me?

I’m going to be particularly vague on this one. Some do, some never will. And I don’t know which camp your partner falls into. But finding out your partner has had an affair cuts to the very core of who we are as people. It leaves us questioning why we aren’t good enough, why you had to look outside of the relationship. It digs depths of feelings that are enduringly painful for most people and those depths of feelings are massively difficult to shed.

If you leave your partner to find out by intuition, from a friend or by any other method other than you telling them, then you are only deepening the pain.

If you truly do want to be forgiven then your best chance of it happening is to tell your partner yourself that it’s happening and that you’re going to get help to resolve it. WARNING: Even then there’s no guarantee that your partner will forgive you. All your doing is maximising your chances.

Looking for a way out of your main relationship?

Before you decide to leave, take as serious a look as you can at whether or not your new relationship is going to last and whether it’s the right move for you. I’d recommend getting hold of a copy of Finding Mr. Right (for women) or How To Identify Your Ideal Partner (for men) and make sure that your new partner really is suitable for you.

Why? Because it’s likely your affair relationship is in the initial phases, the romantic phase. This can extend even years into the start of a relationship. And the last thing you want to do is to jump into a ‘new’ relationship only to find that months or a few years down the road that this relationship doesn’t leave you feeling fulfilled either.

The romantic phase of a relationship leaves you blind to the faults of your partner. These faults will only become apparent to you and begin to grind and grate with you when you pass into the next stage of your relationship.

Also, if you have children, you want to be doubly sure that this is the right decision. Again, if your new relationship goes down the drain a few months or years onwards, your kids are going to have even less understanding of why you left their mother or father.

Another resource you may want to read through when considering whether to leave is Should I Stay or Should I Go. It’s a book we’ve written and published online on our website and is packed full of great advice and exercises on deciding whether leaving your partner is the right thing to do and how to stay or how to leave – whichever is appropriate.

Looking for a way out of your affair?

Really this shouldn’t be any more difficult than leaving any other relationship that was once great. So bloody difficult then! However, on the practical side, you need to make sure that you leave the person you’ve had the affair with as gently as possible. This may sound callous or devious in a way, but that person if they felt malicious enough could still wreck your marriage. If they feel dumped, cheated or deeply offended, what’s to stop them emailing your partner, phoning them or meeting them and telling them that they’ve been having an affair with you.

So as self-interested as it sounds, you need to make sure that you end the affair with as much empathy for that person as possible. Again, if you want some guidance on leaving someone, take a look at how to end a relationship or how to leave.

Want to know if your partner knows you’re having an affair?

The only way to know for sure is to ask them. Other than that you’re only going on your judgment, which is likely to be vastly distorted by the guilt of having an affair.

But more importantly, why do you want to know? Are you secretly hoping to be found out so that you can end your extramarital affair, or end your main relationship? You need to work out the real reason you’re asking this question and take action to resolve that.

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Extramarital affair