Is it reasonable to want
to talk about the affair?
continued
--If someone knows something you want to know (but won't tell you), it makes you feel like a child, creating an imbalance of power with no sense of fairness or equality in the relationship.
--If you can't trust your spouse to be honest about the past, how can you trust they'll be honest in the future.
--"Not knowing" is worse than any particular facts—because the imagination is worst of all.
--The willingness to answer questions shows a commitment to doing what's necessary to rebuild trust. (This willingness is even more important than the answers per se.)
It's reasonable to want answers
The bottom line is that it's perfectly reasonable for a person to want to talk and get answers to their questions. Each person needs to decide for themselves the timing of when/what/how much they want to know (and no one should be forced to hear things they don't want to hear), but if they do want to hear details, they deserve to have their questions answered.
I had been aware of the benefits of talking from all the years of hearing the stories of people who shared with me. The results of my Survey on Affairs confirmed that getting answers to questions and thoroughly discussing the details of the affair increase the likelihood of maintaining and rebuilding the marriage and increase the likelihood of recovering from a spouse's affair. For more, see my Survey Report.
While it's possible to stay married without getting answers to questions, it's likely to be a deadened, meaningless marriage. Answering questions is usually an essential part of being able to rebuild trust and build a strong relationship for the future. Since most people would prefer a "meaningful" marriage to a "deadened, meaningless" one, having their questions answered makes a big difference.
Most of the time when you can't get answers to your questions, your partner is hoping that at some point you'll give up and that this will just "go away" and no longer be an issue. It sometimes helps to make it clear that this will always be an issue—whether or not it is dropped as a topic of conversation. (While obviously, no one can "make" their spouse talk, they can make it clear that this will always remain as a barrier between them.)
It's unreasonable for the person who had an affair to expect their spouse to suffer alone in silence—"pretending" they're OK when they're not. It's like ignoring the elephant in the room or burying your head in the sand. And it won't go away just because everyone may wish it would go away. You can't just bury it—because that's actually burying it alive, and it will come back to haunt you and to be a barrier to ever fully recovering.
As I've said before, I've never known anyone (including myself) who completely recovered from the emotional impact of a spouse's affair in less than 2 years—even with the best efforts by everyone concerned. However, let me clarify the whole idea of discussing an affair. It's not that it needs to be discussed "over and over again;" it's that it needs to be discussed enough to feel there's some understanding of what happened, what can be learned from it, and how to proceed in the future. In fact, going "over and over" the same thing is not the point of talking in the first place. The importance of talking is for the sake of "moving the process along."
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