Learn to Have Sex With Your Husband & Save Your Marriage

Sex after an affair can reconnect you, or instill anxiety

Having sex after an affair is a difficult and awkward experience, wrecked with anxiety and confusion. Throughout the experience, you’ll experience a range of emotions that are incoherent and unpredictable, and pull your cheating spouse along for the ride. One night, you’ll pull your cheating husband closer; the next day you’ll push him away and withdraw. He’s annoyed and confused, but so are you. You wonder, “How am I supposed to do this again? How can I enjoy sex with a husband who cheated and feel normal?”In order to break past your barriers and this issue, you must completely accept these crazy ups and downs and the anxiety. Completely accepting that all of your hopes, fears, actions, thoughts and emotions will be jumbled, confused and anything but neatly organized will allow you to find a sense of peace within the turmoil. Allow all of these crazy emotions and feelings to coexist within you for now, and don’t make any excuses for it. Don’t oversimplify anything you’re feeling, and don’t discredit one emotion when the opposite emotion arises within you. Understand that fear may be ruling your judgment at the moment and allow all your beliefs to be what it is.

In You, Him and the Other Woman: Break the Love Triangle and Reclaim Your Marriage, Your Love, and Your Life , Dr. Paul Coleman states that allowing yourself to feel the full spectrum of your emotions and dealing with them effectively is more important than your choice to have sex.

Should you choose to have sex with your wayward spouse after he’s had a sexual affair, you can communicate your mixed emotions while asserting your decision. You can say, “I desire to intimacy with you and we’ll have sex but my heart is all over the place. I might not feel as intimate or close to you after we’ve made love, but I still want to do this.”

If you’re not interested in having sex, you can state the following: “I really want to enjoy sex with you again, but only when I feel comfortable and ready to do so. Right now, I’m not really feeling this, so let’s pass for now.”

At this stage of the game, while you’re trying to sort out your relationship and save your marriage, it’s incredibly important to accept your feelings without trying to discredit them with logic. You don’t have to express your wide range of feelings all the time; it’s actually prudent to restrain from acting on all your feelings at various times in order to keep your husband from pulling back from the relationship. (If he thinks he’s being rejected, he’ll pull back from you and you’ll take this as a sign he doesn’t care.) Make the best decision you can at the moment while still giving indications that you’re walking on eggshells and acknowledge that he’s doing the best he can.

To learn more about what you can to do to recover from infidelity and save your marriage, check out You, Him and the Other Woman: Break the Love Triangle and Reclaim Your Marriage, Your Love, and Your Life and read what others have been saying about it.