Yesterday, a friend on Facebook called my attention to an article by Sheila Wray Gregoire, on the danger of emotional affairs (http://tolovehonorandvacuum.com/2012/09/emotional-affairs/).
It's a very well written piece on a very sensitive subject. Making an emotional connection with someone outside your marriage has always been a danger, and its even more so now, with the greatly increased avenues of communication we have available.
And the reduced demand for accountability. We're not supposed to feel guilty about stuff. It's bad for our psychological health. I mean, guilt can set up an inferiority complex!
Well, HELL. If you start thinking the gal you met at the bookstore coffee shop understand you better than your wife does...and you stop there a few times a week after work to see her and talk about books or hiking or how lonely you sometimes feel...well, dude, you ARE inferior.
You're betraying a promise. Don't expect respect. Don't expect understanding for your having found your 'soulmate'. Cowboy the hell up and honor your commitments. Even when you're bored, and you don't WANNA!
The only way marriage works is with transparency and accountability. You have to be able to tell your spouse EXACTLY what you did, every minute of the day. You have to be able to share an email account, leave letters unsealed, let her listen in on phone conversations. You need to share the darkest corners of your soul? Too horrible for your sensitive wife? Fine. Talk to a priest.
Marriage is a bridge. Hide stuff up, and you're using duct tape instead of 6x6's to build the roadbed. Some day you're going to step through that carefully camouflaged lie or 'omission', and you'll fall into the abyss.
And who's going to catch you? Your soulmate, the lady who understands you so well?
No. Most likely the hand that'll pull you back to honor and forgiveness will be that of your wife, who you so casually backhanded.
Because when you dropped your honor in the road, as being too big a burden in this streamlined modern world, she picked it up, to carry for you both.
EXCELLENT post Andrew!!
ReplyDeleteIf I don't have accountability,then neither does John. If I don't keep my vows, then he should feel free to kick mine to the curb.
Who do we hurt? First, the kids, because they see everything. They do!! Children want and need four walls and loving parents. Then when the dust and filth settle, we have to face each other.
We have to face each other. How scary is that??
I don't want to be in the room when I unleash my anger on someone who betrayed his marriage vows, and he wouldn't to be there either.
Alot of women want that thrill of the romance, the electricity that comes from being courted. Alot of guys love the hunt.
My biological father chose his pregnant girlfriend over his pregnant wife and their two little kids.
If I ever meet him, I'll deck him and his soulmate too. Or maybe I'll let my brother at him, he's 6'1 and 225. When he was 4 years old, he'd sit on the front steps , and did so everyday for months, waiting for daddy to come home.
They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Add abandoned children to that list.