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Could having an affair save your marriage?

by Susan Wagner on Jun 9th 2008 2:31PM

Filed under: Negotiating Speed Bumps, Relationships, After the 'I Do's'

Marriage therapist Mira Kirshenbaum has a controversial theory about affairs: an affair, she says, is not necessarily the death knell for a marriage. Instead, it can be the spark that saves the relationship.

Kirshenbaum's assertion comes with quite a few qualifiers, though: the affair has to be the "right kind," for one thing, one that is pursued for love rather than as a conquest, and the cheating spouse must NEVER confess to the adultery, because it is the revelation of the truth that does the real harm. In a new book released this week, When Good People Have Affairs, she asserts that one approach to an affair is to "think of it as a radical but necessary medical procedure. If your marriage is in cardiac arrest, an affair can be a defibrillator."

Her point, it seems, is that under the right circumstances, an affair can jolt a person back into a marriage, rather than destroying the marriage. And while many of her Kirshenbaum's peers disagree that the affair itself may be theraputic, they agree that an affair can indeed be a sign of other issues in a relationship. Says Phillip Hodson, fellow of the British Association for Counsellors and Psychotherapists, "Maybe this book goes too far, but we do need to take a sociological view of affairs. To think, 'what are we going to do about them?' rather than to say 'it can't happen', when it clearly does."

I find it hard to agree with Ms. Kirshenbaum, if only because I agree with part of what she argues: I think that an affair often is a sign of issues with a marriage, but I am resistant to the idea that the affair can save that marriage ONLY if it is kept a secret. But I have also never been down that road, so I am only speculating.

What say you -- could an affair be good for a marriage? Or is it always the end?

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