HOUSTON – A Houston couple said it took hours of counseling, but they have repaired their marriage after one of them had an affair.
We are calling them Mike and Kay to protect their privacy. They said Mike's affair nearly broke their family apart.
"I just took on an extremely narcisstic personality and was in dire need for attention that I did not feel like I was getting at home," Mike said.
Mike began seeing a woman behind Kay's back. Kay noticed he was acting distant, not himself, and she felt like something was off. When the guilt became too much, Mike confessed he was cheating.
"It just devastated me because I just never thought that him, of all people, would do that to me. Ever. Never even crossed my mind," Kay said.
Mike and Kay decided to seek help together and began meeting with marriage counselor Carrie Cole. Cole and her husband, Dr. Don Cole, learned techniques from Dr. John Gottman, a professor who used science to study behavior in thousands of couples.
"He looked at all of these couples, both healthy and unhealthy couples, and discovered that there are some real differences between the two groups," Cole said.
Researchers tested how healthy couples reacted to conflict, measured heart rates, studied facial expressions and used what they learned to create a three-prong approach to surviving an affair.
First: Disclosure, or confessing to your partner.
"There has to be some atonement, complete disclosure about what happened and complete transparency from that moment forward," Cole said.
Second: Attunement, or getting back on the same page:
"Kind of tuning back into your partner, emotionally engaging with your partner and working though some of the difficult things that need to be worked through," Cole said.
Third, attachment or rebuilding a bond, sometimes an even stronger one than before the affair.
"Through having healthy discussions around your conflict, you can actually develop greater intimacy, and that's our goal," Cole said.
Cole said affairs are often a symptom of other problems in the relationship and that not every couple will work through it. Mike and Kay said understanding why it happened helped them reach a new level of intimacy, but it took time.
"If you can move past the hurt and the pain of what happened and work on the why and how those things happened, you end up in a much better place," Mike said.
"If you feel in your gut it's worth fighting for, fight. Do everything you can to save your marriage, it's worth it," Kay said.
The Gottman Institute has an ongoing study on infidelity in the United States and Canada. For more information on the study, click here.