Marring the Landscape with the Grand-Scale Deceit of a Marital Affair

I very much appreciated Challies‘ link to this sobering, but extremely well-written, honest article on the allure and devastation of marital unfaithfulness:

A Roomful of Yearning and Regret

(And from the New York Times, too! I was quite surprised.)

The author speaks from her own experience of having cheated on her husband and having been cheated on by her husband. She has many beautifully phrased illustrations that help us to picture and experience what she is describing, but here are just a few of my (tragic) favorites:

• “I’m not saying these feelings aren’t legitimate, just that they don’t legitimize what you’re doing. If you believed they did, your stomach wouldn’t drop on your way out the door to your lover’s. You wouldn’t feel the need to shower before climbing into the marital bed after a liaison. You wouldn’t feel like a train had struck you in the back when your son asked why you forgot his lacrosse game the other day.”
• “Once the affair is out in the open, you will strive mightily to justify yourself. You will begin many sentences with the phrase, “I never meant to — ” But one look at the hollow-eyed, defeated form of your spouse will remind you that such a claim is beside the point. You can both get over this, yes. But the innocence will have gone out of your union and it will seem as if a bone has been broken and healed, but one that rain or cold weather can set to throbbing again.”
• “But as the writer Paul Theroux says in one of his travelogues, “It is very easy to plant a bomb in a peaceful, trusting place.” That is what the cheating spouse has done. Then detonated it.”
• “Sooner or later your illicit, once-beloved object of affection will become tawdry, wearying. You will come to long for simple, honest pleasures like making dinner with your sons or going out to the movies without having to look over your shoulder.”
• “I look at my parents and at how much simpler their lives are at the ages of 75, mostly because they haven’t marred the landscape with grand-scale deceit. They have this marriage of 50-some years behind them, and it is a monument to success. A few weeks or months of illicit passion could not hold a candle to it.”
• “If you imagine yourself in such a situation, where would you fit an affair in neatly? If you were 75, which would you rather have: years of steady if occasionally strained devotion, or something that looks a little bit like the Iraqi city of Fallujah, cratered with spent artillery?”
• “From where I stand now, it all just looks like a cheap hotel room, whether you’re in that room to have an affair or to escape from the discovery of one. And despite the sex and the excitement, or the drama and the fix of everyone’s empathetic attention, there is no view from this room that is worth having.”

 
As I review those words again, faces and conversations are flashing before my eyes: mediation clients (seeking divorce, seeking reconciliation); women at my speaking events (pouring out their own sin—sometimes from DECADES ago that they had never told anyone; grieving as a result of their husband’s sin); dear friends—in my living room, in my hotel room, on a telephone call, in an email. The shock of it. Like cold water or an electrical jolt. And I’m not even the one who was betrayed. How much more so when it is your 35+ year marriage; your daughter’s new marriage; your ordained husband.

Oh, friends. Our sinful hearts truly are depraved. Satan is real. The world is vile. And all three hate God and hate marital faithfulness.

Please read this article and be warned. Then—be wise. Be careful. Get help!

I have seen marriages thrown away and I have seen marriages restored. I know what hatred and bitterness look like. And I know what mercy and forgiveness look like too. There is hope! But this is serious.

May God have mercy on us all (and on our marriages/purity as single people)!

Yours,
Tara B.

PS
One of my favorite recent books on the doctrine of sin and spiritual warfare is Russell Moore’s Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ.  Once you read his illustration of being (briefly) tempted by a beautiful woman in a hotel lobby, I doubt you will ever forget it. And, I think you will hate the devil and your sin and love Jesus just a little more. I know this is true for me.