Don’t think that your marriage can certainly be immune to an affair. If you think that way, you will easily let down your vigilance against potential threats to your relationship. You see, an extramarital affair still happened to many couples who should have had a very happy married life. And many people are remorseful after their extramarital affairs, and a lot of their words sound cliché when they are caught having an affair, such as “I never thought I would make such huge mistakes”, and “I would never want to cheat on you, but I did”. An affair has the potential to destroy a solid marriage, and not all marriages can recover after affairs. Therefore, you should focus on preventing extramarital affairs.
Here are 6 tips on how to prevent extramarital affairs:
(1) Maintain boundaries with people of the opposite sex:
If you find yourself sort of attracted to a person of the opposite sex, be careful, and consciously limit your contact with that person. After all, we are all human, and it is human nature that sometimes we have a feeling of extreme closeness and familiarity towards someone of the opposite sex; when we follow our instinct, we are naturally attracted to a certain nice and interesting person of the opposite sex. For example, women are naturally attracted to confident and physically strong men; and men are naturally attracted to those gorgeous and sexy women;
It is possible to meet another person of the opposite sex who has a strong appeal for you and entices you into straying at some point; so what should you do? You should timely remind yourself to steer clear of that person, as long as you are sure that you do not want to hurt your marriage. And understandably, sometimes you may suddenly feel an irresistible impulse to approach someone of the opposite sex. In that case, if you do not establish clear rules of contacting the people of the opposite sex in advance, most likely you will indulge your desire to further develop the relationship with someone in the heat of the moment. Surely, it is acceptable to unburden yourself to your family or intimate friends; but other than these people, if you frequently confide your marital trouble to a person of the opposite sex who is drawn to you, the odds are that you have already been on a way to an emotional affair.
Therefore, talk honestly and openly with your spouse about what kind of behavior is not acceptable outside the confines of your marriage, then set clear and mutually agreed-upon boundaries. Maybe you will encounter an attractive colleague of the opposite sex, or maybe you will meet someone who has an interest in you when you are alone in a pub… Anyway, avoid unnecessary contact with that person and be careful about sharing your private information or stories, although sometimes some conversations with him/her may be hard to avoid.
In particular, if you do not know how to establish and maintain clear boundaries with your colleagues and friends of the opposite sex, sometimes it can be amazingly easy for a simple colleagueship or friendship to develop into a complicated relationship that can wreck your marriage.
(2) Quit porn:
To some extent, pornography can contribute to sexual infidelity in committed relationships. You can’t ignore a truth – porn weakens a marriage by cutting through intimacy. In a healthy marriage, when one spouse has sexual needs, he/she should get the needs met with the other spouse rather than a third person. However, if a spouse is distracted by porn, he/she is bound to have less attention and time for the other one; and meanwhile, porn creates a fantasy world that is totally out of touch with reality, thereby causing a sense of dissatisfaction with the other spouse and cravings for alternatives to sexual partner.
To be honest, we adults all have sexual fantasies, we all have sexual urges, and it is quite normal to admire someone outside of our relationships, and even it is normal that sometimes a shameful thought of having sex with someone else flashes through our mind. Usually, when we are happy in our committed relationships, we can resist those sexual urges to mess around with someone else, and we do not allow ourselves to indulge ourselves in those unhealthy fantasies. However, pornography greatly weakens our self-control; as a spouse gets addicted to porn, he/she may tend to yield to an impulse to seek sexual satisfaction outside of the monogamous relationship, especially when his/her partner is far from enough to satisfy his/her sexual needs.
Since pornography can be so destructive and addictive, you had better avoid it.
(3) Keep your sex life healthy:
A lot of spouses secretly want to have better and more frequent sex with their partners. And when they are always stuck in a sexless or sexually unhappy marriage, the thought of having an extramarital affair is likely to strike them, and even some of them think it is justified to find sexual satisfaction outside of their stagnant marriages. And a lot of straying spouses eventually confess that they have better sex with other persons outside of their marriages.
To some extent, extramarital sexuality can be thought of as a result of unsatisfactory sex life – in a sexless or sexually unhappy marriage, one spouse may consider extramarital sex to test whether he/she can be sexually happy in an alternative relationship.
Therefore, if you realize that you and your spouse often struggle with sex, you must be alert that the unsatisfying sex life may be throwing your marriage into crisis; sometimes couples stray just because their spouses do not meet their sexual needs. There are indeed many things that can cause your sex life to wither, such as exhaustion, busyness, and emotional distance; probably in your or your spouse’s mind, those reasons you fall into a sex slump are valid. Anyway, unmet sexual needs must be addressed as long as you want to keep your marriage alive.
Surely, simply having sex is not always enough; in a committed relationship, sex needs to be physically satisfying and emotionally intimate; and the ultimate aim of having sex is to promote the feelings of connection and closeness that keep fidelity and love.
If you want to learn more about how to improve your sex life, you might go on to read the posts below:
What causes a sexless marriage – Why does a marriage become sexless?
How to survive in a sexless marriage – Is a sexless relationship doomed?
How to keep sex alive in your marriage – Common mistakes in bed.
If you are a wife who wants to get sexual intimacy back, the posts below are helpful for you:
How to spice up the bedroom for him – Get out of a sexual rut.
What to do when your husband rejects you sexually – What does it mean?
How to seduce your husband with words – Sexually arouse him.
If you are a husband who wants to maintain a healthy sex life in your marriage, you might go on to read the post below:
How to rekindle sexual intimacy when your wife becomes a roommate.
(4) Maintain emotional intimacy:
Surely, it is rather superficial to think that affairs are just about sex. Yes, in some cases, sexual dissatisfaction, a mistress’s or a lover’s seductive appearance can be a primary contributor in cheating; however, it is more often that an extramarital affair happens because of a constant emotional disconnection between spouses.
If either party often feels emotionally disconnected and unfulfilled in married life, the party may consider going outside of the relationship to fill the void. This type of affair is also well known as an emotional affair. And an emotional affair is very likely to turn into a physical affair if unchecked. In such a situation, the straying spouse limits emotional energy in his/her marital relationship but becomes excited to share with a third party intimate thoughts and feelings. As the straying spouse feels emotionally close to the third party, sexual tension or chemistry in marriage tends to sharply increase.
The importance of emotional intimacy in preventing extramarital affairs should not be overlooked. It has a long-term effect of cultivating each other’s feelings of attachment, desire, and connection. And physical intimacy also can not fill the void of emotional intimacy. But sadly, for a lot of long-married couples, they assume that their marriages have experienced many hardships and have already become solid enough; and when emotional intimacy is fading significantly in their relationships, they still let down their guard against it, and eventually, extramarital affairs happen. And plenty of research also found that old married couples are more likely to have an affair than young married couples.
Therefore, emotional intimacy is never an outdated topic when it comes to protecting a long-term relationship; and it may be also necessary for you to remind yourself to regularly maintain emotional intimacy with your spouse. Of course, it is normal that you have emotional ups and downs in this long term relationship. However, if you realize that you can’t recall the good time when you and your spouse have ever been happy together recently, it may be time to repair emotional intimacy between you.
For more tips on how to deal with emotional disconnection and emotional affairs, you may go on to read the posts below:
How to survive an emotionally disconnected marriage.
How to deal with a spouse’s emotional affair – Save the marriage.
7 tips on how to get back emotional intimacy in marriage.
(5) Remind yourself of your commitment:
Being attracted to someone or emotionally checking out is normal for anyone in a relationship. However, for people who are dissatisfied with their married life, they are more likely to allow their eyes and mind to stray, and even they may yield to intense temptations easily. By contrast, for people who are satisfied with their married life, when they are fantasizing about someone else, they are more likely to utilize the thought-stopping technique to remove those problematic recurring thought patterns in time – they refocus their attention to their partners in all sorts of ways. For example, they might choose to send their spouses a loving message or call their spouses to make small talk. In doing so, they remind themselves to put their marriages first, therefore they are more likely to act in the interests of their marriages and families.
After all, it is impossible to let your spouse watch your every move all the time. To prevent extramarital affairs, you have to learn to discipline yourself properly. And marriage means a lifelong compliment to your spouse regardless of any circumstances – it means saying no to all other competing possibilities once and for all. No doubt, this is the most important commitment that you made in your entire life. And your commitment is the soul of a marital bond; besides that, your being involved in an affair not only dishonors the marriage but also makes you suffer moral condemnation.
So don’t overlook the power of your marital commitment in preventing extramarital affairs. A lot of extramarital affairs could have been avoided if those cheaters could timely remind themselves of their commitment to their spouses and negative outcomes of affairs when in the face of temptations.
A slight error in thought may constitute a life-long regret. Hence, if you think an extramarital affair is just a momentary lapse, you must immediately change the attitude about your marriage and take it seriously.
Remember, a marriage is a serious commitment, and anytime you should never view your commitment to your spouse as empty words. So once you feel tempted to do something that may put your marriage in danger, don’t forget to remind yourself of the commitment that you made to your spouse.
(6) Don’t be chronically conflict-avoidant:
More often than not, conflict-avoidant couples are seen as ideal because they seldom come into conflict, but actually, they are more prone to infidelity than ordinary couples. In conflict-avoidant relationships, keeping the peace at any cost thwarts both parties’ self-expression; as couples side-step disagreements and prevent getting to know each other chronically, they are more inclined to withhold unmet needs. This creates loneliness that can be linked with unfaithfulness.
Conflict avoidant affairs usually happen to couples who are emotionally shallow. In any love relationship, one party must have some expectations of the other one, and one party must secretly want the other one to meet certain emotional needs for him/her. For people in a conflict-avoidant relationship, there is also no exception; but they fear that they will come into conflict with their spouses as long as they open up to their spouses about what they have in mind, and hence an extramarital affair becomes an alternative way to serve the purpose.
Therefore, if you feel that you are sort of conflict-avoidant in your marriage, don’t be afraid to handle conflict with your spouse; the more you escape conflict, the more the intimacy decreases in the relationship, and the more resentment you and your spouse may harbor towards each other. Long-term conflict-avoidance can lead to emotional distance between spouses, thereby further increasing the chance of infidelity.
So keep in mind that conflict is unavoidable in a marriage, what you should do is to learn how to deal with marital conflict in a constructive manner. If you want to seek more advice on this, you might go on to read the post below:
How to deal with marital conflict – Resolve conflict in marriage.
The final word on preventing extramarital affairs:
Although restoring a marriage after an extramarital affair is still possible, it takes great effort and a long time; and a lot of relationships fail after infidelity. Although an unhappy relationship is indeed more at risk of affairs because of a spouse’s strong desire to escape the unpleasant relationship dynamic, affairs also unexpectedly happen to a lot of relationships that should have been very happy. So for married couples, it is better to focus on how to prevent an affair and protect the marriage.
And nobody decides to have an extramarital affair without a reason, and that reason is usually rooted in unresolved marriage problems that may have existed long. Therefore, preventing extramarital affairs should be viewed as a process of improving your marriage; and if you want to have a better marriage, first you have to be a better spouse. Furthermore, maintaining any long term relationship requires continuous work – you need to work on your relationship every day, not just when you feel like something is wrong with it.
We are always surrounded by all kinds of unhealthy temptations, and we have to learn to resist them, and the key to preventing extramarital affairs is to insist on putting the marriage first.
If you are suspecting your spouse is having an extramarital affair but you have no proof, you might go on to read the post below to check for more signs of a cheating spouse:
Is your spouse cheating – Signs your spouse is having an affair.
If your marriage has already been shaken by an extramarital affair but you still want your marriage to survive after affairs, the posts below may give you some help:
How to save your marriage after your spouse cheats.
How to forgive betrayal and move on in your marriage.
Must-have boundaries in marriage – Communicate your boundaries.
If you are a married woman who wants to make your husband faithful to you, you might go on to read the post below:
9 tips on how to make your husband loyal – What he needs in the marriage.
If you are a wife who badly wants to gain an in-depth understanding of your man’s needs, you may go on to read the post below:
What a husband expects from his wife in marriage – A man’s needs.
If you are a husband and you are confused about what your wife wants from you, you may go on to read the post below:
A wife’s emotional needs – What a wife wants from a husband.
If want to seek more tips on how to fix a problematic marriage and prevents an extramarital affair from happening, you might go on to watch the video below to follow the comprehensive marriage-saving guidance that is offered by Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience: