We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together

Forgive me for the title this week. I have a soft spot for Taylor Swift songs, a bit of a guilty pleasure. We both share a fascination for dissecting broken relationships. Her tunes have a tendency of replaying nonstop in my head. With my book, House on Sand launching on July 31st, I wanted to have a little fun with this blog, especially since the topic is weighty. I’ve been fielding questions on my computer from women desperate to save their marriages after discovering an extramarital affair. They always have the same questions: Can our marriage be saved? Can we return to where we were? Despite the title of this blog, I don’t believe it’s impossible to save a marriage after infidelity, but I do think it’s rare. A marriage can certainly be saved, but you can never return to the relationship of the past. This is a difficult reality that every woman must learn to accept whether or not her marriage survives.

When I first learned about my husband’s infidelity, I was shattered and desperate to save our marriage. As a Christian woman, I had been taught the evils of divorce from a young age. I took his affair personally and I truly believed that his actions were proof of a failure on my part. This may be why many Christian women struggle with guilt, even over events that they cannot control. We believe marriage is a sacred bond. When a marriage unravels due to a spouse’s infidelity, we take it personally. I encourage you to let go of these feelings. Do not wallow in despair over things you cannot change. Remember that self reflection and awareness are healing, but guilt is a form of self-hatred and attacks your self-worth. I had to break free of this unhealthy pattern of thinking. Although we should take a failed and broken marriage seriously, we must also release ourselves from feeling moral responsibility for a spouse’s actions.

Jesus defined divorce as sin in almost every case except for sexual impurity. In Matthew 19:9 Jesus said, “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” Jesus’ teaching reveals understanding of the deep fissures that are created when one betrays the sexual intimacy between married partners. In addition to the pain and heartache an affair causes, sexual impurity is a symptom of a deeper problem: a rebellious heart revolting against the very fabric of the marriage. Infidelity is a catastrophic attack on a voluntary union between two people. A person who cheats on their husband or wife reveals in this act that on some level they don’t want to be in the marriage. This is the reason recovery from infidelity is rare and difficult. In my own marriage, I was absolutely committed to the union and was willing to fight for our relationship. My husband went through the motions of counseling and repairing the damage, but I sensed the fight wasn’t there. An overarching “meh” characterized his body language for months. I learned later that the relationship with the other woman continued despite our efforts to repair the marriage. I had no power in this situation to make him fight for me or to make him leave the other woman. I did everything I knew how to do to make him choose our marriage. I had dozens of convincing arguments, spiritual rationales, emotional manipulation, pragmatic financial arguments,…the works. I’m pretty persuasive when I need to be, but…the bottom line is: you can’t make other people feel the way you feel. I realized I was beating my head against a wall and accomplishing nothing excepting heaping more emotional exhaustion on my already heavy shoulders. I had to adjust my own thinking and make room for God to come into my life and point me in a new direction. I was only responsible for my own actions. I had to let him go.

Christianity in its essence is a faith rooted in free will and our own walk with Jesus. We are part of a community of believers and we walk with others, but we do not have control over other people or their actions. The same principle applies to marriage. Two people come together because they love each other and want to be bonded together voluntarily. We mold and shape each other through mutual love, but cannot and should not try to control our mate. Sleeping with someone outside your marriage is an act of defiance, an outright rejection of the mutual love and respect that joins two people together. It is an act of mutiny. For some, an affair may actually be a moment of crisis or delusion. The cheater is devastated by their actions, comes to their senses, begs for forgiveness and puts their full resolve into making what went wrong, right. If this is your situation, and you are equally committed to making your union work, your marriage likely can be saved, but for many women this simply isn’t the case.

In 2 Corinthians 6, Paul talks in length about the need for Christians to be unified in their common goal of serving Christ and avoiding the lure of idolatry. In verse 14, Paul says, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?” This verse has often been quoted as evidence as to why Christians should not marry non-Christians. There is certainly truth to this. People with opposing world views and expectations will not be compatible mates, but the metaphor delves even deeper into the dynamics of a marriage itself. Let me offer a brief analogy.

My sister is a competitive bikejorist. She has three huskies that pull her on her bicycle and she races across the Pacific Northwest. I love her dogs. Each one is special and unique in its own way. Two of the dogs work beautifully together. Yukon, her biggest husky takes the lead, while Cannon the older, more passive brother is able to anticipate his younger brother’s every move. Although more subservient, he is always watchful and committed to following his brother’s lead. Both dogs live for the race and love the harness that binds them. They take joy in the task of pulling my sister over the finish line. Of course they squabble from time to time, but they are happiest and most content in the task of working together. Then there’s Chinook…She is smaller than her brothers. Her independent mindset has made her resistant to the harness. She would rather chase a squirrel or run free on her own. She gets cranky when harnessed to her brothers and can nip and bite at them. After observing her behavior and factoring in her size and temperament, my sister practices caution when harnessing Chinook. She finds less joy in the race. She fights and resists the yoke.

Successful marriages are similar to the successful racing dogs . They involve two parties who are both fully committed to the task of getting to the finish line. They live and work for each other in a beautiful harmony. They don’t have to be evenly matched in every gift and ability, but they are unified in their love for each other and their common goal. The harness that binds them is not viewed as a punishment or enslavement, but the object that allows them to come together to do what they love. The harness is freedom and they are ready to give everything they have to the race.

People who step out on their spouses are more like Chinook. Like the scriptural idolaters, they do not share the same common goal. Their heart is not in the marriage, but somewhere else. They feel enslaved by their vows. Where others see joy, they experience bondage, a life stretched out before them leading only to old age and death. Like Chinook they are distracted by every squirrel, alert to every chance of escape, open to every temptation. They run a poor race. The joy that was once in their marriage has left them. I’m a romantic at heart. I wanted a marriage built on love and freedom, not pain and bondage. When it became clear to me, that my husband considered his life with me a form of imprisonment, I wanted no part of that. I was finally ready to let him go.

When we’re in pain, we often don’t really know what we want. For those of you experiencing a similar dilemma I would pose these thought questions. Consider why you are clinging to the marriage. Are you motivated by love for your partner or fear of being alone or shamed? Is your spouse committed also to saving the marriage? Are they truly repentant of the sin and invested in rebuilding the trust that was broken? You might not receive answers to these questions overnight. In my case, after a time of reflection, prayer, and processing, which took about a year, I realized that one person could not hold a marriage together alone. When you are in that place of pain, it is hard to imagine that you could survive, even thrive without your spouse. Have faith, my friend, because God can heal you and you can thrive and find joy greater than what you could possibly imagine. Sometimes the greatest freedom is in letting go.