Great job! You have completed the Affair Resilience Quiz, and received a rating of either Paper, Wood or Stone.
These ratings indicate your affair resilience – the capability of your heart, mind and soul to endure the journey that lies ahead, should you decide to try and save your marriage.
Your Affair Resilience rating doesn’t do the work for you. You’ll still have to go through many, many difficult days to get where you want to go.
However, your score helps you see where you’re at and what you need to work on to give you as much strength as possible to keep going.
List of Traits Measured By This Quiz
Before we get into the ratings themselves, I think it’s good to make sure we all understand exactly what we’re trying to measure with this quiz.
Here is a list of the traits this quiz is measuring you for, and why:
Desire To Reconcile
The stronger your current desire to reconcile, the more fuel you will have to keep going when things look bleak. Since bleak days are inevitably part of any affair recovery journey, being able to maintain that desire is just as important as starting with the desire.
Current Struggle With Images Or Details
I know there’s only so much you can do about this one, and every man needs to find his own way through the jealous anxieties that often follow in the wake of a cheating wife.
You have every right to ask for transparency and reassurance as you work to rebuild your marriage, and yet sometimes men hold on to their anxiety for far too long. In doing so, they artificially obstruct their wife’s legitimate – even if not perfect – efforts to rebuild Trust in the relationship.
Expectations For Affair Recovery
Expectations can fall into several different categories:
- How you currently envision your wife’s likelihood of affair relapse (question 4)
- The timeline of her recovery (question 18 and 15)
- Her ability to put in the same work at the same time as you (question 17).
I’ve seen many men come in with expectations like these, and they almost always end up disappointed. Some amount of relapse, if even a very soft relapse, is common. A lengthy and arduous recovery is common. An imbalanced input from her, at least for the first few MONTHS is common.
If you choose to persevere in your marriage, you need to know what your expectations should realistically be.
Fullness Of Forgiveness
… And that you take responsibility for choosing forgiveness. The more unconditional your choice to forgive your wife, the more resilient your loving and compassionate attitude towards her will be. It’s just common sense!
Ability To Communicate Feelings Well
Another fairly common sense one here. But it’s more important than you might realize, because the simple fact of the matter is that you are walking into this situation with some very difficult, very hurt feelings – legitimately so!
At some point, you will NEED to express that pain to your wife, and then ideally have her hear it and validate it back to you so that you can be at peace. You are more likely to get that response from your wife if you communicate your part well.
Hard feelings and hard conversations will be part of this process, so the better you are at keeping a level head in conversations like this, the better you both will fare.
Willingness To Get Help & Build A Support System
Nobody is prepared for infidelity. Nobody.
It is brutally painful and it will mess you up in the head. That’s just the plain and simple truth. You need somebody to talk to about this, somebody to vent to, some sort of third party who can truly hear your pain and help you process it. Ideally, more than one.
I suggest most men seek the support of at least a counselor AND a close friend during this time.
Remember the saying, the Lone Wolf goes fast, but the Pack goes far.
You need to be willing to get help (question 9), and then actually get that help when you need it (question 16).
History Of Successful Self-Improvement
This trait isn’t about trying to measure how good of a husband you already are.
Instead, it’s about assessing whether you have a history of consistency in your life, and a history of humility. Plus, coming in with more understanding of your side of the issues can only help.
In other words…
- Are you familiar with how long it takes and how diligent and humble you have to be to reach the biggest and most important goals in life?
- Have you already gone through significant self-improvement journeys, or overcome significant obstacles previously in your life?
If so, a lot of those same tools you learned then will come into play here now.
Ability To Take Responsibility & Empathize With Her
Even though her choice to cheat was undeniably wrong, and undeniably hurtful, you must be able to step back and honestly examine your part in allowing the relationship breakdown to the point that she was so vulnerable to temptation.
This is NOT saying it’s your fault she cheated, it’s just saying that you won’t get back to the marriage you want if your wife doesn’t have a voice in what that relationship looks like and what she needs from you to make it work.
Confidence Apart From Your Wife
More specifically, we’re looking to see if how you feel about yourself is not contingent on how your wife feels about you. Since your wife may be totally oblivious to some of the most significant sacrifices and efforts that you make to save your marriage, you need to be able to derive confidence from how you use the options available to you.
Ability To Envision A Hopeful Future
How connected are you to hope right now? Similar to the first question, the stronger your hope, the easier it is to keep going when the day-to-day is beating you down.
Understanding Your Affair Resilience Score
I want to remind you that wherever you scored is a measurement of where you’re at TODAY. Everybody can get better (or worse) over time depending on their priorities and the choices they make.
- If you scored lower than you like, read what your score means, review the traits that will help you become more resilient, and determine if the effort to develop them is worthwhile.
- If you scored higher than you thought, take some time to understand exactly WHY you scored highly on this quiz, so that you can cultivate those traits in yourself further. Become more intentional about your resilience so you keep growing!
All good? Everybody on the same page? Great, let’s get into the scores:
Resilience Rating:
Paper
Paper has no strength. It will not endure the elements. It crumbles under weight and blows wherever the wind goes. If someone told you to build the most resilient structure that you could, it’s likely that paper would be close to the bottom of your choice of materials.
So what does it mean if this is your score?
First off, many of you who score in this category have likely only recently learned of your wife’s affair. This is all still very new and shocking to you, and you are understandably struggling.
Even if it’s not that new to you, none of us came into marriage prepared to deal with an affair. There’s no handbook, and please do not take the low rating as some personal failure. Again, learning is the goal here.
Nonetheless, I need to be blunt with you:
You will not be able to endure the ups and downs of affair recovery with Paper resilience.
At this rating, you scored on the low end for most of the traits listed above. Your expectations are much too high, or your personal stability is too low, or most likely – both. Or, you might be stuck in victim mode, unable to see past the hurt and pain you’ve experienced (which to be clear, IS a lot, so I get it).
Look at the list of traits at the top of this guide. Where are you off the mark? Pick a couple, and start thinking about how you can shift your mindset to incorporate them.
Resilience Rating:
Wood
Wood is a perfectly serviceable material. It can hold plenty of weight. It can withstand the elements fairly well, at least for a while. It’s pretty strong! Plenty of houses are built of purely wood and do just fine. But…
Wood can wear down. It can decay. Harsh weather will eventually necessitate repairs or replacement. And you won’t find too many people building their tornado shelters out of wood. Even to build a house of wood, you’re probably supplementing the wood with additional treatment and materials to bolster its strength.
Most men who first take this quiz, if they’re being really honest with themselves, would end up in the Wood category without anyone guiding them otherwise.
Similarly, anyone who just plain hasn’t thought much about the sort of questions posed in the quiz also probably ends up in the Wood category.
And, let me make something else clear…
Just like how wood might not be ideal for a house, but is still serviceable… It is possible to reconcile with your wife even if you remain in this category.
This is different than with Paper.
This is especially true if your wife is one of the few who is self-driven in her desire to leave the affair behind. If your wife already has a legitimate interest in saving the marriage, if she has demonstrated any amount of repentance, and maybe her affair was fairly minor to begin with, then it’s possible that even without all of the ideal affair resilience traits in place, you and your wife working together can still make it through.
Still, I would personally like to see everyone taking this quiz move up and out of Wood into Stone resilience.
And, if your wife is more like the normal unfaithful wife, if she has resistance to ending the affair, then it is much more likely that you really do NEED to get yourself up into the highest resilience category to survive.
Resilience Rating:
Stone
Here we have the hardest of the naturally occurring materials – stone. The most reliable building material for the majority of human history. Stone can be made to support thousands upon thousands of pounds. Buildings built from stone have endured for thousands of years.
If you scored in this category, it means that you answered positively on almost every trait, and answered negatively on few or no traits. If you were being honest with your answers (and you’ve been through enough testing in your present circumstances such that you can trust your answers are really true), then
Congratulations – I am confident saying you have everything it takes to survive your wife’s affair, even though it won’t be easy.
Of course, she still has to do her part. You can’t force her to end the affair, see her own issues, or come back to the marriage. And there may come a day where despite your stone resilience, you make a reasoned choice to be done. But it will be a choice, not a gut-response.
Nonetheless, the point still stands…
If you look at the list of traits at the top of this scoring guide, and you find yourself nodding along at almost every single one because you recognize yourself in each description, rest assured that you are doing your part.
If you choose to keep going, keep going.
If you hit your limit, so be it, you’re allowed to make that choice.
But the men who have the resilience of stone will be the ones who are best equipped to survive the ups and downs that inevitably often do come with affair recovery.
What’s Next?
If you are new to Husband Help Haven, check your email tomorrow.
This is very important! I will be sending you one of my absolute best free resources for any man who is trying to solo save his marriage. It’s called From Separated to Reconciled in 7 Steps
It’s exactly what it sounds like.
I will teach you a bird’s eye overview of the exact process that most often takes place when I see a man successfully save his marriage after his wife wants out. This big picture process applies whether the reason for separation is loss of love, some sort of midlife crisis, or – as we’re dealing with here in this quiz – an affair.
So, check your email, read the guide, and then stay tuned after that because I’ll continue sending you a series of lessons to equip you as best I can for the road ahead.
Thank you so much for taking the quiz. Feel free to take it again in a couple of weeks if you want to see if you feel any differently, and as always…
Much manly love, – Stephen