Infidelity is the most disheartening thing in a relationship and finding out about breaks your heart and throws your life into a tail spin. On the bright side, cheating within the relationship can be overcome given enough time. You can heal if you focus on your relationship and take action on working things out. Just be persistent.

The best thing to do is take all the time you need to discover what happened. Now if your partner isn't a chronic cheater, the cheating happened at some point (though this is never an excuse), and you need to find out just what created the situation to take place.

Maybe your partner and you are experiencing difficult times and your marriage or relationship is under considerablw stress. This would be a good starting point to look. At the risk of repeating myself, no matter how much stress is happening it is not ok for either of you to be with another person just to feel better about yourself. Whatever situation you both are facing is no excuse to engage in an affair.

You need to root out and fix the cause. You will most likely need the help of a therapist. After an affair, the hurt and anger can consume your life and make it difficult for you to work you're way through the infidelity alone.

If you and your partner understand that the healing process is going to take some time and be painful, yet you both are willing to do whatever needs doing, you have a high chance of salvaging the relationship or marrige and perhaps make it better then it previously was.

Now, if you or your partner have a history of cheating, then you have deeper issues to resolve than just fixing your relationship. If either of you cheats habitually, the best advice is to seek professional councelling to root out why the "cheater" thinks its ok to hurt others by their actions and to break promises made to their life partner.

Making a commitment to another person is a promise. Even if you verbally don't tell the person that you'll never sleep with someone else, once you enter into a commited relationship you've just promised you will not engage in such behavior.

You have problems if you think you can do whatever you please if your actions hurt other people. This may sound harsh to you, but the truth hurts at times, sorry.

If this sound like you, then before you do anything else, get help. Seek professional advice before you continue going through life hurting both yourself and anyone who has mistakenly fallen in love with you.

Tough love is just that...tough. We all at some point in life have faced tough decisions and choices. It's never fun or easy to make changes in relationships damaged by infidelity, but you need to start with you. Cheating within a relationship can be overcome and you can survive an affair if you're willing to put the time and effort into it.