You already know the answer to this question in your gut: There's no way to be certain that your spouse won't cheat again. Human beings don't come with guarantees.
Your spouse could cheat on you again. It's possible. It's happened before, and that makes it more likely that it could happen again.
In my research over the years, I've seen it go both ways. I've seen people recover from affairs and build marriages that are happier than they've ever been, and I've seen people suffer through serial affairs.
Let me tell you, there's simply no way to be
certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt that your spouse won't lie to you or cheat on you again.
Studies have shown that even people who are supposed to be "experts" at detecting lies (like therapists, judges, or police officers) are generally no better than chance. Even the so-called "experts" can't tell you whether or not your spouse will cheat again.
Your spouse might cheat again. That's the truth. And it's better you understand that up front.
However, just because it's "possible" your spouse will cheat again doesn't mean it will happen. In fact, it doesn't even mean that it's "probable."
The probability of another affair could be determined by many factors. Even the experts can't know them all, but I can give you some ideas about how to swing the odds in your favor.
What You Can Do to Make an Affair Less Likely
#1: Communicate about Your Pain
In my opinion, the shortest way to improving your odds is to communicate your pain to your spouse. Either your relationship will survive and be better for it, or it won't. If it does survive, you have a much better chance that your spouse will remember and understand the consequences of cheating.
A good, two-way dialogue with your spouse should leave you feeling confident that
1. Your spouse understands your pain
2. He or she accepts full responsibility for his or her actions
3. Your spouse knows how the affair happened and how to keep it from happening again
4. He or she carries a reasonable amount of guilt for the offense, and
5. He or she is honestly trying to make the changes necessary to insure the problem won't happen again.
If you choose not to communicate your pain, you will always wonder if your spouse understood what he or she did to you and you will continue to carry the awful burden of your hurt emotions.
How can you enhance your intimacy with these bad feelings sitting in the background?
One of the most important things you can do to save your marriage or relationship is communicating. The quality of your communication (and whether or not your cheating spouse is willing to talk openly with you) will tell you a lot about whether or not your spouse is recommitting to you in a stronger bond.
#2: Make Your Relationship/Marriage Better than Ever
Before I tell you why it's important to make your relationship/ marriage better than ever, I want to make one thing crystal clear.
There is absolutely, positively NO excuse, NO good reason, and NO rationale for having an affair!
No matter how bad your relationship was before the affair, it doesn't justify what the cheater did.
The marriage vow says that when things get really awful in a marriage you have a lot of choices. You can yell and scream. You can argue. You can leave the house. You can go stay at your mother's place. You can go for marriage counseling.
You can even get a divorce.
But having an affair is not one of those options.
An affair is never the injured spouse's fault. Responsibility lies with one person and one person alone-the cheater.
Consider this example for a moment.
If a child slips the parking brake on a parked car and he is injured and injures someone else, are you going to worry about whether he should have done it or not, or are you going to find immediate medical treatment for him and the other people involved in the accident?
Recovering from an affair has some similarities.
Although the affair was only one spouse's "fault", repairing your marriage will take both of you working on your relationship.
Treating whatever problems were or are in the relationship becomes more important than placing blame, but this is after the cheater has unquestionably accepted responsibility for the affair.
If you want to save your marriage and make it less likely that there will be another affair, you need to work to make your relationship better than ever, because just getting the relationship back to how it was before the affair is obviously not enough to prevent further betrayal
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