Is it possible to forgive for cheating?

Nope. I don't necessarily believe the statement "once a cheater, always a cheater".

But I am a firm believer in the statement "It takes months, sometimes years, to build trust and only a second to destroy it."

I couldn't do it. Trust broken can never be completely fixed in my opinion.

Almost everybody has cheated at one point or another.(I haven't). I'm talking about judging the person who cheated on you. not about wheather or not they cheated on somebody else.

You asked if it could be forgiven. IMO, once that trust has been broken, no matter if you forgive or not, the relationship is over. Always that suspicious feeling.

Sadly, sometimes people do not get what they want from a partner and venture out to explore (or cheat) only to find their need was really unfounded.

So, in those cases someone cheated and came back, and the partner may never know about it and live happily ever after. So, that means there is hope for forgiveness depending on the circumnstances of why it happened.

Obviously, it would take a lot of work to rebuild that trust if one found out. And it's tough and the victim of the cheating will have a roll coaster ride of anxiety while working through things.

So to answer your question without answering anything, it will depend on situation to situation. I personally could not ride that roller coaster if there were no signs of discontent in the relationship, and would leave.

is it possible? sure it is.
another thing is what are the odds and how many of us would really manage to forgive it completely.

For example, I THINK (just think) that I might forgive it if that's scenario where it happened only once (not one affair, one sex) in some special situation (like, we are away from each other for some time) and despite fact that I would never find out she admits it herself. In that case I would try to forgive and continue relationship. I'm not sure if I would succeed. But that's the only situation where I would be willing to try.

I might be able to try, but i've been cheated on before and it didn't work out.

Is there somebody out there than can say for sure that they forgave their sig. other and stayed happy.

I don't think I could forgive. If my fiance cheated on me, I'd be shocked and horribly depressed. I don't think I could forgive him for it. All the trust and love that we'd built up would just be destroyed, and I couldn't just forget that he'd been with someone else. I told my last boyfriend that I'd prefer if he told me he wanted to be with someone else than just going off behind my back. I place complete trust in all my relationships. This leaves me very vulnerable, and if someone purposefully takes advantage of that, there's no forgiveness in my case.

However, I do know one married couple who survived cheating. They also became born-again Christians, so I think the faith helped them with that, but they're still together, and doing a lot better.

Define cheating and then I might be a 'yes'.

I've personally known two (married) couples who stayed together after one of them had sex with someone outside the marriage.

In one case, they were never able to restore their trust. Bella Dea was right...trust is very delicate: It's easily destroyed, and very difficult to recover. They divorced, but only several years after the cheating. In the meantime, they fought terribly for all those years.

In the other case, the couple spent a brief time in counselling, then said their marriage was "stronger than ever" due to this therapy. They too divorced when he did it again, but only many years later.

I personally would not forgive cheating, nor would my husband. If it were a long-term relationship, it would depend a great deal on whether we were living together at the time, whether we'd already agreed to see other people first, etc.....in other words, what we had agreed to as rules for the relationship.

Was this couple "casually" dating? Had they already agreed their relationship was exclusive?

I dont know that it is a question of CAN it be repaired, or CAN someone be forgiven.
i think it is a question of WILL they be forgiven/
Yeah, i can say I forgive, behave as i forgive, but will I do it? Completely? no.
In my life , my mind, it isnt ' once a cheater always a cheater' it is about the fact that my trust was shattered for some selfish reason. Wehter it be cheating or what have you, if someone is freely willing to shatter my trust so easily , then no. I wont do it.

Yes, it can be.

I can say that from experience... I won't give details, but cheating did occur in my relationship. It was a wake up call, and made us confront all of our weak points and approaching problems in our relationship. We had been growing apart, and had concerns and worries and just.. felt strained We were together, but not together at heart. It didn't occur because of selfish want, but out of dazed and sad confusion.

So... after it occured, we changed quite a bit. We re-evaluated EVERYTHING. We can't live without each other, so we basically recreated our relationship We found all the problems and solved them.
Thanks to that horrible and emotional time, we really are closer than ever. We're engaged now, and I can't imagine being with anyone else

Cheating wasn't an end for us, it was a beginning. It's almost as if the old "us" died and a new, wiser and more complete one emerged.

hard to explain, to really severe critics out there. But just to comment, I say Yes, it's possible. Most couldn't or wouldn't do it, but... that's a different issue

(I would say that it depends on the details of the cheating, yes: WHY and HOW it happened. If someone slept with someone else for fun, of course I wouldn't want to forgive. But in a case like mine, it was more based on a collapsing of our stability itself... so it wasn't as selfish or as intentional an act. I'd explain more, but I don't want to get too deep into details of such a personal thing )

My story is similar to Aurora's and don't want to get specific either. I think cheating is a relative thing and although our circumstances didn't involve a physical relationship, it was certainly an 'affair of the heart' and I felt cheated on. The lack of physical encounters was, in my mind, simply an issue of geography.

We discovered that there is a very fine line between absolute trust on one side and feeling taken for granted on the other. We had a long period of reflexion and rediscovery which might have been shortened had we used professional counseling but we were able to recreate the joy and passion of being together that we had at the beginning of our relationship. That episode was 6 years ago and I can say now that I have truly forgiven it and Mr B will never feel taken for granted again.

J_B and Aurora make some very good points. One thing that is synonymous with both of them was the "rebuilding."

The old foundation crumbles when someone betrays you. The key to making the relationship work must be forming a completely new foundation, and rebuilding on top of that. The old one just has too many cracks and patching it is only temporary.