It is very normal to examine your appearance after your spouse cheats on you or has an affair. We wonder if we’re not pretty enough, skinny enough, attractive enough, or playful enough. We wonder if the other woman looks better than us and as a result we can be very hard on ourselves.
Worse yet, in the days after the adventure, we often just don’t have the energy to worry or focus on our appearance. We barely have energy to function let alone worry about non-essential things. And so, we can gradually “let go” at a time when we are all too aware of the way we see ourselves.
A wife might lament: “I found out that my husband had been cheating on me about four months ago. I asked him to leave. I didn’t want to see him. Lately, we have been talking but not living together. And this time period has been very lonely and difficult for I often walk my dogs in the morning and just think about things. Since I don’t want to go to an empty house, I usually stop at a coffee shop and have a coffee and danish. I also haven’t been to the gym in a while because I don’t I feel like being with people. As a result, I have gained a noticeable amount of weight. This makes me feel even worse about myself. One day, my husband showed up unannounced. I answered the door without makeup and in ragged clothes. My husband had a Small talk with me, but then he left soon after. His facial expressions made it pretty clear to me that he was surprised by my appearance. And now all of this makes me feel like I’ve taken a big step back.”
I want to suggest that you be kinder to yourself. As anyone who has ever had a cheating spouse knows, this is a pain like no other. This is not a time where you are expected to be at your best. And fighting is absolutely understandable. More than any other time, it is important that you support yourself. Calling yourself a fat pig is not in line with this and probably not accurate either.
It is also very normal to look for flaws in our appearance and personality in the hope that this will tell us everything we need to know about why our husband cheated on us. This is what you need to understand about it. The answers are not within us. They lie within it. And nothing in our appearance or personality could have led to this at all. Men with beautiful, sweet, understanding wives cheat. And this has nothing to do with the wife.
So if you’re looking for a reason, check it out. Not to you. Now, if improving your appearance will make you feel better, then I encourage you to go for it. Getting more fit was really very enriching for me during my recovery. And I have kept this change in my lifestyle because after the increase in my self-confidence, I noticed a great benefit in stress reduction and an overall feeling of well-being. I feel much worse physically and mentally if I don’t exercise. I want to keep those benefits and this doesn’t have a lot to do with my marriage, but it has a lot to do with me.
And it doesn’t have to be big changes or efforts you make at first. You don’t have to take on anything that feels overwhelming. Maybe you just have skim latte and skip the danish. Maybe you can walk home from the cafeteria or extend your walk a bit. I found Yoga and Pilates extremely comforting during my recovery. During that time, I tended to have a lot of tension in my shoulders. And I found myself literally hunched over and hunched over. Yoga and Pilates fixed this problem and strengthened my core so that I had a flat stomach for the first time in many years and the stress reduction benefits were enormous. This made a huge difference in how I looked and felt. And I never felt like I was draining myself or punishing myself. It felt like a treat to my body, actually. Learning to lean into my breath and breathe into my pain released so much tension and allowed my body to relax at a time when it drastically needed it.
But if you are going to make any changes or improvements, do it for yourself and for your own self-esteem. Do it out of love for yourself, but not out of a desire to change yourself because you think you’re not good enough or up to scratch. Because you absolutely are. If you think you could use some improvement in your fitness level, by all means go after it because there are benefits to this other than the way you look. But don’t beat yourself up or break down. None of this is your fault.
