Is the best way to make it work after an affair to totally end your relationship? Yes. But that doesn’t mean you cant make it work. Surprised? Check out this video I did for Kids In The House:
Check out my Dating Skills podcast, “Recovering a Relationship after Cheating” with Dr. Tammy Nelson
Here’s an excerpt, but check out the whole thing for a great talk with Angel Donovan.
I think this is the first time in history you can cheat on your partner lying in bed next to them. We have a whole new definition of monogamy. I mean, you get married and you don’t say, “I promise to love, honor and tell you about all my Facebook friends and let you know when I’m tweeting too much with one person over another.” It’s a whole different definition of marriage, of committed partnership.
For over two decades now, we’ve still had the same amount of divorce in our culture; we’re still hovering at around 50%. But so many things have changed. We’re getting married at 28 instead of 18. We’re defining monogamy in a whole bunch of different ways. People know what polyamory means: “poly-” means “many”, “amory” means love – many love.
So we have this whole different language around marriage. We’ve never had the variety of possibilities that we have now. And it’s different than swinging in the ‘70s or having an open marriage. George and Nena O’Neill wrote the book Open Marriage in the ‘70s.
I think our focus on being parents and taking a village to raise our children will definitely change the way relationships look out of necessity. The technical piece of our lives, the sort of multi-attentive way we look at life, has changed the way we have this extended adolescence, so you don’t wait until marriage to have sex anymore because you’re 28 instead of 18. That’s changed how we approach marriage.
There were a lot of different ways to experience variety and excitement without breaking your monogamy bond. Pornography has never been as accessible as it is now, and perhaps people are using that to stay monogamous. It’s just a whole different twist on Internet monogamy that we’ve never had before.
So we can define it in ways we’ve never had to define it before. If that’s the case, if there are so many different kinds of relationships, we have to talk about it with your partner because there’s this implicit assumption that your kind of monogamy is the same kind as mine.
For more dating advice: Episode 71 of Dating Skills Review with Dr. Tammy Nelson
Leave a Reply