How to love the unfaithful

My crying baby woke me this morning.Resentfully I stared at my husband certain he could hear our son. I gingerly got up, made him a bottle and got back into bed...cold and tired I dreamed that I was throwing my husband a birthday party and then proceeded to hand him an envelope with a note that said, "I want a divorce". I told him that since he wanted his freedom so badly, obviously this would be the best gift for him.

I determinedly pushed the dream aside, but it was to late- my mood had already changed. I woke up feeling bitchy, irritable and spoiling for a fight...

I managed to pull myself back from the precipice in the nick of time  thinking that yes he messed up before, but his doing okay now. And that thought alone has become a key mantra - its hard living with the reformed unfaithful - somethings can not be undone and some hearts will never completely heal, so what do you do? Well, I need to remind myself that just as he needs to work on his recovery, so do I.

I need to actively decide to forgive every day, when I feel like flogging him for choices he made in the past. I am in my second year of recovery now - and yet there are days when it feels like just yesterday I opened his facebook account and saw how my heart was betrayed.

I am still afraid that I will see an email,sms or internet cookie that spells out what he has been doing...and I am even more terrified that I won't. So how do you love the unfaithful, after you made the decision to stay in midst of such compelling fear? Well, I saw this show once when the pastor was talking about the different types of love. The one that got my attention, was Agape Love. The kind of love that is based on a decision and not a feeling.

I can decide to love my my husband, even though I might not always feel it and because of that - my love is constant - it does not waiver with the tug and pull of jealousy and rage. My love is a choice and therefore I can decide whether he is worthy or not - and I can decide when its worth the sacrifice or not. No other love can help a marriage like this - our husbands turned away because they thought that erotic love and sexual feelings for another somehow was more substantial than home you built together. While erotic love has its place, its the level headed Agape kind that really binds us together.

What I have found is that as I love him with my head, my heart has been given space to warm to his embrace without feeling the pressure to have to "feel" the love. And so genuine healing happens at its own pace and time, without the burden of having to romantically love someone, who didn't love you enough when it should have mattered most.