After you discover your spouse had an affair, your emotions could be all over the map.
At first, you might say to yourself, "Adultery in my marriage? No way!" You might think you can't save your marriage after it has been sullied by adultery.
You might want revenge.
Perhaps you're livid.
Maybe you're too shocked to think straight, or you might think the marital affair explains all of your spouse's unusual behaviors.
Or, perhaps you experience all of the above and more, one feeling at a time, one after the other, or even several at once.
If the cheating spouse is remorseful and wants to change and work on your marriage you might consider, among your other options, to keep your marriage.
This would also depend on the type and length of the infidelity and the number of affairs that took place.
If your cheating spouse had a true love affair for a long time or was a serial philanderer you are more likely to think it is hopeless.
In these cases it is also much harder to repair the marriage, though I have seen it happen.
This is only possible if there is an authentic commitment from the cheater to work on his or her own character to make life changing character adjustments.
If you and your spouse have decided to work on your marriage, then you have to know the steps to take to repair your relationship.
You also need to know possible stumbling blocks.
After years of experience working with couples in this situation, I see some common issues come up.
One of the immediate questions is, "How much should we talk about the affair?" There are no set rules.
The injured spouse needs to think about how much he or she wants to know in order to move forward.
I have worked with couples who repaired their marriages after just a little disclosure about the affair, and others who sifted through detailed knowledge of the marital infidelity.
If you are the injured spouse, you should take the lead and explore within yourself to decide what is best for you.
This should be your decision and not the cheater's.
I recommend you don't listen to anyone else's advice because each person speaks from his own point of view and not from yours.
You might as well make your own guess as to what is best for you.
Think about the worst possible scenarios that you might discover and the implications if you were to find any of these true.
For some people, more details are harmful.
Everyone is different and handles it in her own way.
Go with your gut feelings.
You can make changes as you go along, but you cannot "un-hear" something.
Thus, you might want to err on the side of caution.
Here is a sampling from many of the considerations that might influence your decision:

1. Your cheating spouse and the paramour formed a relationship that you were not privy to.
   They became an entity, at least to some extent.
   You and your spouse need to re-unite as the main entity in each other's lives.
   Information: Talking about the affair can help this happen.
   Spending time together and reconnecting also contribute.
   
2. You might want to know all the details so you would recognize early warning signs, and to comfort yourself with the idea that your unfaithful spouse would also see the red flags and put more energy into your marriage.
   Information: In practice, it is difficult for a couple by themselves to make this system work.
   
3. Perhaps the hurting spouse wants more details to gain an imagined sense of control over past activities that happened without that person's knowledge, permission, or control.
   Information: Sometimes this works.
   

I recommend that in order to fix your marriage the spouse who had the affair should temporarily cater to the injured spouse.
If you are the cheater, you might think of this analogy: Imagine you hit someone while you were driving drunk.
Wouldn't you want to take care of the victim? I wish you all success from your good efforts and difficult emotional work in putting your marriage back together.
I wish you a future marriage better than it ever was with the infidelity behind you.