Journaling after infidelity: writing when you do not yet know what you want

The period after an affair is discovered is one of the loudest in anyone's life. Everyone who knows has an opinion, most of them firm, and almost all of them arrive before you have had time to work out what you think.

A private page is one of the few places where you are allowed not to know yet, and where the answer can change three times in a month without anyone treating that as weakness.

Write the facts down once

What you were told, when, and what you found out afterwards. This sounds cold and it serves a purpose: the story often arrives in instalments, and the sequence of what was admitted when is something you will otherwise lose.

It also stops you interrogating the same details at three in the morning. Written down, they stay written down, which is not the same as being over them but is better than reconstructing them nightly.

Separate the questions

Several different questions get asked as one and cannot be answered together. Do I want to stay. Can I trust this person again. Do I want to be the sort of person who stayed. What happens to the children, the house, the money.

On paper they come apart, and most people find they have clear answers to two of them and no answer at all to the others. That is a much more workable position than a single unanswerable question.

Track how you actually are, week by week

This period is not linear. A good fortnight is followed by a bad Tuesday triggered by something trivial, and it feels like proof that no progress has been made.

A record is the only thing that shows the trend. Six months on, the honest answer to whether it is getting better is usually visible in the pages, and rarely visible from inside a single bad week.

If you are the one who did it

There is a version of this writing for the other side too, and it is not self-pity. Writing honestly about why, without an audience to perform remorse for, is the part that makes any actual change possible.

It is also the place for the shame that cannot be brought to your partner, since bringing it to them makes them comfort you for something you did.

Start your own private journal tonight.

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Prompts for the decision

• What do I actually know, as facts?
• Which question am I trying to answer today?
• How has this week been, compared with a month ago?
• What would I need to see to trust this again?
• What am I deciding out of fear of what people will say?

Write what you want the next thing to be

Whether you stay or leave, it helps to write down what you want your life to look like in two years. Decisions made only in reaction to what happened tend to be worse than ones made against something you actually want.

Why this must be private

This is the clearest case there is. Everything here would be devastating if read by a partner mid-decision, and much of it is provisional rather than true. If it is not locked, it does not get written honestly, and then the thinking does not happen at all.

Innera keeps every story encrypted on your device, so you can change your mind on the page as many times as you need to.