Can a relationship ever survive an affair? Our expert shares what she’s learned over decades of helping couples in crisis

Agony aunt Mary O’Conor shares what she’s learned in her many years working as a relationship counsellor and psychosexual therapist…

"The hurt that has been caused by the breaking of the trust can take an awfully long time to get over." Illustration by Eoin Flynn

Mary O'Conor

Over the years, working firstly as a relationship counsellor and subsequently as a psychosexual therapist, I have witnessed at first hand the effect that one partner having an affair has had on the relationship. Ultimately, it is the relationship that suffers, sometimes irrevocably, when an affair is discovered.

I have to say at the outset that if an affair is undiscovered, naturally runs its course and ends, I feel that the person cheating should not own up and tell their partner they had an affair. This is because if they do, then the innocent party has the information dumped on them without asking for it and is devastated, whereas the cheater has used this more or less as a confession and feels much better for having done so. That is unfair, although when I said as much a few years ago on The Ray D’Arcy Show on RTÉ Radio 1, it appeared to be quite controversial.