'What I learned about taking back an unfaithful husband.'

Are you considering trying to reconcile with your unfaithful husband? Although many women try at least once, and many try several times to reconcile, you could be getting more than you can deal with over the long run.

After discovering that my husband of 15 years was having an affair with a single co-worker, I tried every possible thing I could think of to convince him to come back home.

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Since had just moved across the country from our relatives and into a brand new home one year before for his work promotion, I was convinced he was having a mid-life crisis and would snap out of his selfish coma and come to realise the error of his ways.

I cried, hoped and prayed every day that he would return to help me raise our three children, who ranged in age from 3 to 13 years old. When our children asked where their dad was, I explained he needed time away from our home “to think about his decisions". Unfortunately for all of us, his concerns for me and the children ranked very low on his list of priorities.

During the months of our separation, he stopped by twice a week to see the kids and when I asked what his plans were he would vaguely reply, “It’s complicated". As February turned into May, I began to wonder whether he had any real intention of moving back home.

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One day in May, after getting the kids on their buses for school, I opened the front door and was served with a petition for divorce for irreconcilable differences. Along with it came a motion for a financial restraining order that informed me that I wasn’t allowed to use any of our joint credit cards from that moment forward - something that scared me to the bone as a stay-at-home mum.

Stunned, I called my husband home from work and demanded he explain to me if this was what he truly wanted. He came home from work briefly and calmly assured me he truly wanted a divorce. I then headed to a neighbour’s home for the rest of the day, devastated by his callous behavior and the shock of him serving me the divorce petition.

That evening, everything changed yet again when he came to me, promising to finally end the affair and saying he’d cancel the petition for divorce the next day. He assured me he'd suddenly realised he was making the worst mistake of his life.

At last I had WON my husband back from the other woman!

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But what had I truly gotten back?

Although I deeply cherished the values of marriage and a stable family life, I didn’t realise just how risky it can be to take back an unfaithful husband. I discovered the hard way that the collateral damages from blown-apart trust continue to cause life-altering after-shocks for mornings and afternoons to come.

Instead of allowing him to move back in right away, I wish I had taken more time for myself as I faced 3 Big Risks of Taking Back an Unfaithful Husband.

1. Trust is incredibly hard to re-build, even with counseling.

Although my husband went to marital counselling with me after he moved back in, he dreaded it and rarely participated in a meaningful way. My anger was so palpable that each session led to fighting both on the way there and on the way back home.

And during the sessions, anger about his on-going deceptions, his lack of true remorse and inability to emotionally open up to me overshadowed any efforts to effectively resolve our underlying marital issues let alone heal the trauma of the affair itself and re-build trust.

2. His heart may still be a hot mess.

After a brief few days of excitement during our reconciliation, he chose to sleep on the couch for months, barely touching me.  After weeks of his lovesickness and pining away for the other woman, I lost my patience and demanded that he show me some affection.

“You may as well be demanding that I go kiss the neighbour lady,” was his curt reply.

3.You know first-hand that he’s capable of damaging your trust to the core.

Can you really live with that every single day?

Although I read books about affair recovery, attended marriage seminars and tried many other things to rebuild our marriage and move forward, I still did battle in my gut with the fact that the man I trusted most in this world had a dark side that now had been exposed to the light.

Like a photo negative that is irretrievably damaged by exposure to light, I too struggled with feeling exposed as a weak person for taking him back and constantly worried about whether I had done the right thing.

I now saw my life as divided into two distinctive time frames: the time before I discovered his affair, and the bitter reality that split my family’s carefully planned life into shards of glass.

This post originally appearred on DivorcedMoms.com and has been republished here with full permission.