Over the course of several years, psychologist/author Esther Perel contacted couples she had seen following an affair to find out more about the long-term impact of the infidelity. This posting is an abridged version of an article she published in 2010 (After the Storm: The Affair in Retrospective), in which she identified three basic patterns in the way couples reorganize themselves after an infidelity.
Infidelity: To forgive or not to forgive
Your partner has had an affair. Should you leave? Esther Perel, psychotherapist and author of Mating in Captivity (2006), maintains that to think of the affair as the sum total of a whole relationship, is to think in black-and-white. Sometimes, exploring and coming to an understanding of what happened in the relationship makes it deeper and more resilient. But how does one go about the process of forgiving?