The statistics on infidelity are alarming—some say as many as 60 percent of husbands cheat on their wives, while others report that figure is closer to 30 percent. If your husband is among them, you stand to lose not only your spouse, but your psychic sense of trust, certainty, and the security of family life as you knew it.

But there’s good news. Many recent studies reveal that very happy marriages are far less vulnerable to infidelity than unhappy ones, and that “extremely” happy marriages are even more secure from the threat of adultery. The close association between marital satisfaction and fidelity is critical because so many popular self-help books written about adultery to date are premised on now dated studies (based upon small sample sizes, questionable self-reporting methods, and retroactive accounts) that purported to find “even happy marriages” are vulnerable to infidelity. If that were the case, you, the wife, would be a powerless victim of circumstance, having no control over your marital destiny. My many years of practice as a licensed marriage and family therapist belie this claim.

To the contrary, I’ve witnessed how vigilant, vigorous, and skillfully administered mate guarding tactics, not to mention psychological insight complemented with positive communication methods and conflict resolution skills, can work wonders to ward off the wicked would-be “other woman” on the scene—or waiting to pounce. As an R.N., Ph.D., with more than forty years teaching psychology and thirty-five years treating couples whose marriages were nearly destroyed by a husband’s infidelity (as well as the “other women” who formed the third part of the trauma triangle), I wrote this book—with the help of my daughter, a divorce lawyer—to share the accumulated wisdom of leading experts on love, marriage, mate-protection, forgiveness and moving on punctuated by clinical examples from my practice.

With facts and theories from neuroscience, evolution, psychology, and sociology at your fingertips, you will gain the information, resources, and insight needed to decode what your husband is doing and why, while assessing the formerly inscrutable motives, approaches, and techniques of the “other woman.” Knowing what lies behind the impulse to steal another woman’s mate allows you to recognize when a danger is present; predict what could happen if left unattended; and most important, permit you to manage the situation by taking precise actions to eliminate the marital threat that you’ve discovered or that your husband has disclosed. As you’ll see, a wife who knows what to look for and how to react can take control before real trouble starts, making her marriage resistant to the well known stressors, circumstances, and noxious opportunities that arise in certain environments known to create fertile fields for extra marital interaction.

You’ll become expert at assessing your mate and the quality of your marriage and home life for infidelity vulnerability. I’ll help you explore your role in the marriage, as you obtain a realistic view of yourself a as mate and companion. You’ll learn if your wifely actions could be construed as mate-guarding or oblivious, with attitudes and actions—conscious or unconscious—that make an affair all but inevitable. Either way, you’ll learn strategies that can put you and your marriage back on a healthier track, even if an affair has already begun or has happened in the past. Remember, no matter who the other woman is, no matter what she does, it is possible to defeat her, so long as you are prepared, alert, and ready to act to protect what’s yours.

Available May, 2007