How To Get Over Your Husband's Emotional Affair

Since you found out about or started to strongly suspect your husband's emotional affair, you have probably treated yourself to a number of very unpleasant images in your mind. While this is painful to do, it also is part of the natural human condition to be curious about just what form the affair took on over time. For example, you may have imagined your husband and the other woman doing things like:

* spending time with each other at work in ways that had little to do with the business at hand
* thinking about each other romantically before going to bed or when first waking up in the morning
* calling or e-mailing each other in secret
* giving each other hugs or holding each other just a bit too long to be appropriate
* being each others' "go-to" person for emotional conversations or to deal with private issues
* discussing together whether they should turn the affair into something more, like a full-fledged physical relationship
* buying things for each other
* having romantic meals together
* going on business trips together
* meeting each other secretly in various locations around town (or out of town)
* sharing with each other intimate things about your marriage

Running all of these types of thoughts through your mind can be a form of self-torture. But, it is almost inevitable and unavoidable to have these kinds of thoughts. After all, when he chose to have an emotional affair with her, he took advantage of your own vulnerability as his wife. Very thoughtless and unkind of him, but unfortunately all-too-common.

Now, at this point, all you have to work with is your feelings about this whole matter. You have to deal with and process your own emotional reaction to all of this before you can move forward with figuring out what to do next. For most women, when they learn the news of (or just figure out on their own) their spouse's emotional affair that's it: something snaps inside them and they get a little crazy for a while. Do yourself a big favor and avoid going to that kind of a place. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose from remaining calm.

On the inside, of course, you will continue to feel a lot. Common emotional reactions by women in your situation can include:

* sadness
* despair
* rage and anger
* loneliness
* frustration
* the feeling that your marriage is a lie
* the desire for revenge
* wanting to leave your husband and move on with your life
* the feeling that you want to try even harder than ever to make things work

Rather than "either/or," it is more likely that you will experience many of these emotions at once - even when they are conflicting. That is totally normal. But, regardless of what you are feeling, at the least for the time-being, it is very important that you act reasonably toward your husband in this matter.

In your effort to remain calm, it may help you to recognize the fact that, in the end, your husband is only human. This recognition in no way excuses him from the responsibility of making good choices; he had no inherent good reason for cheating on you. Still, by seeing him less as the enemy and more like a fallible human, your anger toward him might subside a bit.

There is no single, perfect formula dictating what you should do next in terms of his affair. The truth is, you are in one of the messier types of situations a married couple can be in. Getting over the affair depends on a lot of things, including

* whether you believe you can rebuild the trust between you again - and whether you even want to
* your husband's intentions and feeling about your marriage
* whether he is willing to end the emotional affair with the other woman
* whether the two of you can commit to working through all of this together

To get over your husband's emotional affair, it is important that you start by getting in touch with how all of this has affected your feelings toward your husband. You need to ask yourself whether you believe that you can rebuild the trust that was shattered by his affair. Of course, you will not be able to know the precise answer to that question with certainty, but you should have a fairly clear sense of what you need from the relationship.

Next, you need to continue to work on processing all of your feelings. Work with a counselor or a close, trusted friend who is willing to talk through all of this with you.

Finally, you need to develop an action plan for how to move past all of this - together. Only with mutual buy-in on a plan to rebuild the trust between you can you hope to overcome the negative effects of the emotional infidelity.