Can you fix a broken class-relationship?

Someone has developed a pattern of cheating over and over, they will continue to do it again (and again) until someone – hopefully you – dumps them brutally and they realise they can’t get away with it. No second chances in this .They should be even more miserable about the pain it’s caused than you are.

Your first reaction will be to want to cling onto him and not let him out of your sight.Don’t. There are two things you need to establish at this point: that you mean business and their behaviour is not acceptable and that you have dignity.

If you live together, get him to move out for a few days. You need this time to logically sort through your emotions.
If you don’t live together, say you don’t want to see them for a while. Start a diary of all your emotions and your questions and use it make a list of questions you need answers to at the end of the time apart.

This isn’t a kiss and makeup session. This is a meeting to decide if there is enough worth saving. Warn your partner there are lots of questions you still need answered. If they're not prepared to answer them, forget it. If they are, start asking.

This will be incredibly painful but it’s essential you get honest answers to what you need to know.

Armed with answers, do you feel reasonably confident you’ll both pull through and there’s still enough to work with?

Now’s the time to move back in or start seeing each other regularly again Your old relationship, the damaged one, is dead. You now need to build a new one.

Yes this is sad, but it’s also exciting. Just think! It may well end up even better than the first in lots of ways! What will be missing though is innocence and trust. The aim is to replace this with other qualities, like, ‘We are survivors – even this didn’t break us up.’

You will feel insecure and you will feel angry. You will fight about it, over and over, to begin with. This is normal. All of the above looks after you, the wronged party. 

But as much as it should be skewed to look after you, it’s unfair to discount your partner’s needs. Your partner cheated for a reason. What did they get from this new person that they couldn’t get from you? Who were they with the new person? When couples have been together a long time, it’s hard to reinvent yourself and get your partner to see you as someone ‘new’.