Can You Be Friends after the Affair?

Kirshenbaum provides a checklist of questions for people going through a divorce who may want to ascertain whether a friendship is possible or even worth it.  They are:  

1. Would you want to be friends with this person if he hadn’t cheated?
2. Is he or she really sorry:  so sorry that they are willing to pay a price?
3. Does he or she truly understand how hurtful and damaging what they did is?
4. Is he or she willing to work on improving the issues you have in your friendship?\
5. Putting the affair aside for the moment, is the former spouse an open, honest and trustworthy person?  

Unless a person can answer yes to all of these questions, a friendship may be out of the question, Kirshenbaum says. Of course, if there are children, things are different. “If you have kids, you have to be friends,” she says.  

In that case, Kirshenbaum would recommend therapy and family counseling until two people can at least pretend to be friends for their shared child. And there are benefits to a friendship for every formerly married couple, Kirshenbaum says. But they are different for every relationship.  

“Asking what are the benefits of staying friends with a spouse who’s had an affair — and what are some of the drawbacks — is like asking what are the benefits and drawbacks of taking in a stray dog on a rainy night. It depends on you and it depends on the dog,” Kirshenbaum says. “In the same way, if someone has had a great relationship with a spouse and they have many things they share and if the spouse is truly sorry and is otherwise a trustworthy person, then the benefits of staying friends can be enormous. But if someone has a very difficult time forgiving a betrayal of this magnitude and if the spouse can’t admit how wrong what he did is and isn’t willing to work on the friendship and if the friendship wasn’t that strong to begin with, then staying friends with the spouse will usually end up not feeling worthwhile.”
 
That was the case for Sherrie, a twice-divorced public relations professional in Mobile, Ala. In both cases, her marriages ended due to infidelity and in both cases, she saw no point in remaining friends. “I chose two men of the same type,” says Sherrie, who does not think that either man respected women enough to deserve her friendship. “I respected my marriage vows. They didn’t. Their infidelity was just part of their behavior patterns. It would not have been worth it to try to maintain a friendship.”  

After her first marriage, Sherrie went so far as to move 50 miles away from the town where she had lived with her ex-husband. “I had lost so many friends in the divorce,” she says. “I had to leave the community. It was just too small.”  

The physical distance helped her to break ties with her ex and she had little interest in rekindling them. Sherrie says she is grateful that in both cases, she was able to leave the marriages without children. But in the second marriage, she did have a stepson with whom she had become very close. Losing him was one of the hardest parts of the divorce, she says. “I left him and because of that, he would not let me see the children,” she says.   

Although she still has a distant relationship with the younger of her two stepsons, she is grateful that she does not have to maintain a relationship with their father. “I wish both of my ex-husbands well, but I do not choose to have them in my life," Sherrie says.

The friendships that do survive are rare, but they do exist, says Kirshenbaum. “Asking whether a relationship can survive an affair is like asking whether a car can survive a crash. It depends on the car and the crash,” she says. “In the case of an affair, it depends on who the people are in the marriage and on the marriage itself.  For things to get better you need the following ingredients: The cheated-on person needs to have a talent for forgiveness. Some people have this talent; some don’t.  There need to be real strengths in the marriage, whatever the weaknesses. And the cheater has to have a real desire to stay in the marriage and a willingness to do what it takes to heal the hurts. Healing the hurts is an ordeal. But if the cheater is willing to go through it and his partner has a capacity to forgive, then the friendship can not only survive but thrive.”  

For Ekroth, his profession may have helped him move toward forgiveness. He was able to recognize his ex-wife's actions were “nothing personal,” he says. And that his ex-wife was merely acting out in the only way she could at the time. Additionally, she understood his pain. “My former wife took responsibility for the actions that were very hurtful over the years,” he says. “That was a crucial part of forgiveness.  

Still, Ekroth knows he is in the minority. In his practice, he saw hundreds of unhappy couples and estimates that he may have only helped roughly 50 percent reach forgiveness. But for him, forgiveness was part of what has ultimately helped him heal. “Forgiveness is ultimately a self-helping act,” Ekroth says. “We are bigger than just being angry forever.”  


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Sasha Brown-Worsham is a freelance writer in Boston, Mass. who has written for the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Technology Review, Babble.com and many other publications.