Public or not, what motivates someone to stay after his or her spouse has an affair?

In her 25 years of research and consulting on extramarital affairs, DearPeggy.com's Peggy Vaughan says as much as 70 per cent of people stay in the marriage after infidelity. "Most people think all infidelity ends in divorce, but frequently they (the couple) just keep it quiet," she says.

The common yet judgmental question "Why did she stay?" implies that she shouldn't, Vaughan says. "It's an extra burden for all the women who stay to have to defend themselves to their family and friends. When somebody tells you 'If it were me, I'd ...' you can ignore the rest of the sentence because they aren't you."

She cautions couples from seeking divorce right away. "The people who get out right away second-guess themselves the rest of their lives," says Vaughan, founder of the Beyond Affairs Network and the author of eight books, including The Monogamy Myth. Vaughn and other experts say the reasons people stay say a lot about gender differences, and how we approach relationships.

From a young age, women are taught to value relationships, says Ray Campton, an ordained minister and marriage and family therapist in Berkeley, California. Men, he says, are trained to be lone wolves. "A woman may say, 'My pride and principle demand that I leave you, but I'm going to this divine place and I'm going to forgive you, and stay,"' Campton says.

That said, women stay for the "usual" reasons, Vaughan says. If they are stay-at-home mums or make less money than their husbands, they stay for security and the well-being of their children. They also stay for the same reason Hillary said she stayed with Bill: She still loved him and was able to recognise his other qualities, Vaughan says.

"Women are more able to see past it (the affair) and not filter everything about the man through it," she says. "For men, sex is such a critical thing, it (the affair) diminishes their opinion of their wives."

Vaughan says 40 per cent of her telephone consulting is with men who are victims of their wives' infidelity. "People just assume that a man will flee, but they don't, and when they stay, they can have a much harder time dealing with it," Vaughan says. In fact, her research indicates that suicidal tendencies following infidelity are higher among male victims than women.

Perhaps that's because men tend to view the world in more rigid constructs, says Scott Haltzman, a Brown University psychiatry professor and author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men. "They're really passionate about rules and agreements," he says. In the past two years, Haltzman has seen more cases of female infidelity than male infidelity in his private practice, he says.

In a chat room on Survivinginfidelity.com, a downtrodden yet hopeful Heftysmurf posts: "I just want to get to the next stage," he writes. "I do not want to sweep it under the rug. I would like to figure out how we should talk and what I can do to regain closeness. ... She messed me up for life and needs to own that most of all."

According to Vaughan, men stay for very different reasons than women. If they are fathers, men don't want to give up regular contact with their kids, since, in divorce, custody is often granted to the mother. Many also suffer a significant financial hit if they leave. Alimony and child support can put a damper on lifestyle and starting a new relationship, Vaughan says.
Moreover, she adds, men are more likely to stay because they want to prove that their wives made a mistake in straying.

"They have a natural sense of competitiveness and they don't want to give up what belongs to them," she says. Ultimately, for both genders, an affair is the "rocking of the boat of their life," Vaughan says. And the shared history can be enough reason to stay in the marriage, pick up the pieces, and come out better and stronger. Even if you never wanted the tragedy to happen in the first place.

"Like any crisis, it's how you use it to rebuild the rest of your life," Vaughan says. "I'm not saying everyone should stay. I'm saying we should respect everyone's reasons and decisions to stay."

Here are steps to rebuilding a marriage after infidelity from Peggy Vaughan, author of The Monogamy Myth and founder of the Beyond Affairs Network, an organisation of support groups coordinated through http://www.dearpeggy.com: