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Four Rules to Marital Recovery:

1) PROTECTION: Avoid being the cause of your spouse's unhappiness. 2) TIME: Take time to give your spouse undivided attention. 3) HONESTY: Be totally open and honest with your spouse. 4) CARE: Meet your spouse's most important emotional needs.

STRENGTHEN FIDELITY

Affair-Proof Your Marriage

The 700 Club

He offered much needed insight into marriage with his popular best seller His Needs, Her Needs. Now psychologist and marriage counselor Dr. Willard Harley Jr. gives wise advice on how to recover from marital infidelity and how to prevent an affair before it starts.

TERRY MEEUWSEN: Well, infidelity is one of life's most painful experiences. Can a marriage be restored after such a betrayal? It's a question that I'm sure people ask all over this country every day because it's been such an issue in marriages. Well, joining me now is psychologist and marriage counselor, Dr. Willard Harley, who's also the co-author of "Surviving an Affair." Welcome to The 700 Club. Great to have you with us.

Dr. WILLARD HARLEY Jr. : Thank you. I'm glad to be with you.

MEEUWSEN: We all go to the altar thinking we're going to make it without ever experiencing something like this, and yet statistics show that a majority of marriages go through an affair. Why?

Dr. HARLEY: That's part of the problem. I think that people start out assuming it's not going to happen to them. And so they don't take the precautions. You know, we get inoculated for various diseases that we're likely to get, but we don't bother to get inoculated for an affair.

MEEUWSEN: Why do affairs happen?

Dr. HARLEY: Well, I think we're born with the instinct to have an affair, quite frankly. I think that we're all wired to have it. People that are given the opportunity and have not taken precautions to avoid it generally succumb to the temptation.

MEEUWSEN: Are there different kinds of affairs?

Dr. HARLEY: Yeah. There are affairs that are one-night stands that don't mean anything, that are just a tryst. But the affairs that I work with the most are what I call affairs that have a deep emotional connection and people feel that they're soul mates. I call them soul mate types of affairs because that's the way everybody talks about them when they're having it.

MEEUWSEN: I was surprised in the book that so many people come to you.

When someone makes a connection like that with a soul mate, usually they don't want to even hear about restoring a marriage. They want out and they want a new life and they see this other person as their avenue to that, and yet there seems to be something in people when they've made a commitment to a partner for life, particularly where children are involved, that they want to find out what they ought to do from here. How does someone survive an affair when trust has been broken?

Dr. HARLEY: The person that I'm essentially writing to in this book is the spouse who has been betrayed. Because the question that we get so much is: 'I just discovered that my spouse was having an affair. I had no idea it could ever happen to us, and I have no idea what to do next.' I do try to reach out to the person having the affair and, to some extent, I try to reach out to the lover as well. But I've often made the point that when you're having an affair, you lose half of your IQ, you know. And so it's very difficult to reason with a person who is having an affair because they're on such an emotional high and you're dealing with a person that's addicted. It's very similar to dealing with somebody that has got a cocaine addiction or other forms of addiction.

MEEUWSEN: If something's been missing from a relationship that has caused someone to even consider, much less get involved in an affair, I'm sure there's the fear on the part of the person who's made that decision that if I go back into this relationship, my needs are never going to be met.

Dr. HARLEY: That's always kind of a leading point, that there is something to that. There are reasons why people have affairs, but I often argue that there are no excuses. There are things that motivate people to have an affair and my argument has always been that you should settle those issues. An affair is no way to solve the problem.

MEEUWSEN: Right.

Dr. HARLEY: All it does is get you in deeper and you end up having a miserable experience, to say nothing about the miserable experiences of all the people you love.

MEEUWSEN: Speaking of people that you love, so often by the time someone gets into an affair situation, they've been married long enough that they have children. How are children affected in situations like this? Do they usually know about the relationship?