Sometimes I hear from wives who feel that everything about their marriage is now tainted due to their husband’s infidelity. In fact, some even begin to question her husband’s love and feelings for them. Eventually, she may begin to feel as if her shared history may be distorted or as if all the happy memories are in her mind.

I heard from a wife who said, “My husband’s infidelity has ruined absolutely everything. I don’t trust him. I can’t even bear to look at him. But you know what the worst part is? He not only destroyed our present and our future, but I feel as if he had destroyed our past too. These days, when I look back on the early years of our marriage or when we were dating, I feel cheated of what should have been. “I don’t even look back on happy memories without having a feeling horrible in the pit of the stomach. He used to look back on our early relationship with longing and nostalgia. Now, I wonder if he was looking at other women even back then or if he was lying to me in the past but I just didn’t want to see it. I am so angry about this. Because if my husband and I had gotten divorced for some other reason or if he was going to leave my life in another way, he could at least look back and think that we had some happy memories. Now, I feel like we don’t even have that anymore. Does it ever get better?”

I think it will improve. In fact, it is my own experience that improves a lot. And I know how this feels. I felt the same way. I would even look back on my honeymoon and wonder what I might have missed. I would think back to our early marriage when we were struggling but happily happy and wonder if I was the only one who felt this happiness or if I only saw what I wanted to see.

However, as time has passed and I have healed, I can now look back at my memories fondly. Yes, my husband and I reconciled and this may have something to do with my best memories. But, I hear from wives who eventually ended the marriage but eventually come to see their memories as positive feelings instead of negative ones. How is this possible? Are we all crazy or do we have an enormous capacity for forgiveness or forgetting? I don’t think that’s the case either. I will explain below.

When the pain is fresher, your memories will be more distorted: Please believe me when I say that I don’t want to be condescending or pushy. With my background, this is the last thing I want. But I know from experience that your memories will be the most negatively affected when your pain is most intense and most fresh. In the first few days after your adventure, you’re just not thinking straight (and that’s understandable). Your emotions are all over the place and you tend to see things at their worst. This is absolutely normal. But it is also about the worst that can and does. From there, little by little things are improving because they have the necessary time and distance to do it.

We tend to remember things as more romantic when we are happy and we remember them as more disastrous when we are not: Do you know I told you that I used to fondly remember the early years of my marriage when we were poor but happily in love? Well, if I’m honest, at the time we were having financial problems, I didn’t think borrowing money from my parents was that cool or that romantic. But, as time went on, I tended to blur the lines on how I really felt. And, when I no longer felt the frustration of not having enough money, I actually looked back longingly because other good things were happening in my life, like getting married and starting a family.

What happens is that we tend to forget how bad things were (and also how good they were) over time. The lines get blurry and the feelings dull. And, when you’re in pain, this can be a good thing. Now that a few years have passed since the affair, I can go back to that time and not feel like I’m going to throw up. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t remember it as a moment that I enjoyed or even tolerated. But, the truth is that all marriages have their fair share of burdens. I also don’t remember having to borrow that money from my parents as such a horrible thing. Similarly, I remember the time when my son was sick and of course I shudder because it was a bad time for us. But now that I know we’re over it, it doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. The same goes for infidelity. Once you get over it (and you get over it whether your marriage survives or not because you eventually move on), then it no longer has the same control over you or your memories.

Eventually, her authentic memories come back into focus as the healing takes place: As I mentioned, once you start to heal, this distortion doesn’t have as much control over you anymore. I can’t and won’t tell you that I remember the infidelity as a benign period of my marriage. It was horrible. I don’t want to repeat it again. But today, I can look back and no longer feel the full weight of emotions. And today, when I look back on our early years, my memories are genuine. The good times are still the good times. And the bad times are put into perspective, even the matter.