It depends. It can if this is the first indiscretion and both of you are open to working on rebuilding the marriage. To rebuild, here are just some of the factors you will likely have to address:


• Loss of trust

• Anger and resentment

• Feelings of betrayal

• Urges to lash out

• Confusion

• Depression

• Broken communication

• Fear of losing the relationship, the life you have together, and the future you had assumed would always be there

• Shame – about doing what you did, about others finding out, etc.

• Guilt

• Embarrassment

• Recurrent thoughts about what has happened

• Obsessive need to find out exactly what happened down to the minutest details

• Tendency to distrust everything, even those things that have nothing to do with the affair

• Periodic desire to give up

• Emotional upheaval – sometimes feeling optimistic and sometimes feeling hopelessness

• Obsessive thoughts about your partner being intimate with someone else

• Feelings of revulsion when your partner, who has been unfaithful, touches you

• Learning to love again

• Learning to forgive

• Becoming normal


A marriage can recover from an affair but the journey is thorny. You will need someone to guide you through it. Even then, the process is very difficult and painful and it will require a lot of work. In my experience, however, the result is always worth it in the end; so don’t give up.