Should i admit to having an affair

I feel incredibly guilty and am worried that if we come clean, we will lose the respect of our children and become pariahs in our community. Taking responsibility for something that has caused other people pain is hard, so I understand your concern about how much to tell your children.

This is because one problem with not telling the truth, or sharing only part of it, is that it will likely come out anyway, even if you and your partner do your best to spin the timing of his divorce and your subsequent relationship so that it does not appear to be what it was. This lie will become a family secret in not just one but two families, and family secrets have a way of being felt even if unspoken. What makes many family secrets so damaging is that there can be a sense that something is not quite as it seems, which creates a feeling of unease.

Generally, the secret eventually comes out—something is found on a phone, an offhand comment reveals a different timeline, someone in the running group strongly suspected or even saw evidence of the affair—and when it does, people feel angry and betrayed.

So the question is not whether but how do you tell the children? You say that you realize that this will cause his wife much pain, and that you take responsibility for that and will have to find a way to come to terms with it.

At that point, you stop talking. Give them space to react, and avoid responding defensively to their feelings by trying to justify your actions I was lonely ; their relationship had been dead for a decade.

For instance, they might not want to be around the two of you early on, and you will respect their feelings as they evolve. Your partner, of course, has a more difficult task. He needs to tell his wife first, and she may tell the children before he does. Give yourself some time. Finding out such shocking news can leave you feeling angry and hurt. Seek support from trusted friends, family members or talk to trained relationship counsellor in a free Live Chat. Talk to your partner. Although bringing the affair up with your partner may feel painful, it's important you can ask questions so you can assess exactly what has happened.

Find somewhere private to talk where you won't be interrupted. If you don't feel ready to talk together you may want to consider Relationship Counselling , where you'll have a safe and confidential space to discuss things. Avoid cutting in on what your partner is saying. You will undoubtedly be shocked and upset, but try not to start shouting or rush out of the room.

Ask your partner to tell you the truth, however painful. Recovery after an affair is always worse if lies are told early on.

The person who is cheating is just trying to keep everything stable, the same, not changing anything. The two other people, the lover and the spouse, are putting pressure on, if the spouse knows about it. If the spouse doesn't, she still is wanting more time, more fun. She puts pressure on anyway. Inevitably there are slip-ups. In the stories I hear, they find a gift in a pocket of a coat and they think it's for them and they're so excited, and then they never get the gift.

I mean, it's just heartbreaking. So it all blows up eventually. I've got to tell you that this is very, very important. I'm a person who is just an advocate of truth. I really will do anything to tell the truth, so it took me a long time to get to the point where I say, just don't tell. Because how does it make a person less guilty to inflict terrible pain on someone? Which is exactly what the confession does.

It puts the other person in a permanent state of hurt and grief and loss of trust and an inability to feel safe, and it doesn't alleviate your guilt. Your relationship is dealt a potentially devastating blow. Honesty is great, but it's an abstract moral principle The higher moral principle, I believe, is not hurting people. And when you confess to having an affair, you are hurting someone more than you can ever imagine.

So I tell people, if you care that much about honesty, figure out who you want to be with, commit to that relationship and devote the rest of your life to making it the most honest relationship you can. But confessing your affair is the kind of honesty that is unnecessarily destructive. There are two huge exceptions to not telling: if you're having an affair and you haven't practiced safe sex, even if it's only one time, you have to tell.

Again, the moral principle is minimizing the hurt. But this time, the greatest risk of hurt comes from inflicting a sexually transmitted disease, and I've never seen a relationship recover from that. You also have to tell if discovery is imminent or likely. If you're going to be found out, then it's better for you to be the one to make the confession first.

Before I did this research, I really thought that affairs were fatal for relationships, but they're not. It all depends on how you deal with it, and that's why I have two sections in the book on how to repair and rebuild and heal the hurts. You need all of that. TIME: Do people who decide, during an affair, to leave their marriage often end up staying with the person they cheated with, or is that just a way of getting out of the relationship?

There are 17 reasons people have affairs, and you've just talked about one of them. I call it the Ejector Seat affair. People use the relationship as a way to get out of the marriage. That is a real reason. They're afraid to leave the marriage, and they're hoping that an affair will end things. Either the spouse will kick them out or the lover will give them the courage to quit. If your motive is to see if what you've been missing in your marriage can be gotten with someone else, and if so does it make as much of a difference as you thought, then you're in a See-If affair.

This is subconscious for people. They don't actively say, "I'm going to go and heat up my marriage. Well, none of these are great strategies, but you have to assume that there's a hidden wisdom.

People are coping.