The Other Bond

Every Tuesday we’ll post something to do with restoring marriages. Hope it helps.

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The Other Bond

Adultery is trending. Anna Karenina opened in movie theaters last week, updating one of literature’s most renowned extra marital affairs. Liz and Dick, the Lifetime Channel’s biopic on the notorious Taylor/Burton relationship which began with infidelity and became a national obsession, aired Sunday night. And, of course, we’re still sorting out the confusing, tangled elements of the Petraeus scandal. So the act of straying outside covenant bonds may have lost its shock value, but its entertainment appeal is solidly intact, since the sin of saying I Do to one then Let’s Do It to another still draws onlookers like a bad car accident – tragic and revolting, but just try looking away.

Which is too bad, because what we get accustomed to becomes a mere step from what we’d indulge in, and if there’s anything valuable to glean from these tragedies, it must be something along this line: it could happen, to virtually anyone, given the right (and quite common) variables.

I should know. I married very young (18) back in 1973, then after five years began a brief but intense affair with a friend’s wife, culminating in an abortion and two shattered relationships, then five years of backslidden promiscuity and perversions. My wife rightfully filed for divorce and, I later learned, remarried by the time I had come to my senses and repented in 1984. This was all long before I met Renee, my wife of 25 years and mother of my two incredible sons, and while I rejoice in the forgiveness and second chance I received, I still retain an emotional limp that can’t quite, in this life, ever heal. So no one needs to tell me about the wounds adultery inflicts on both the guilty and innocent parties. I’ve been part of the problem; my earnest hope continues to be that I may be part of the solution as well.

Preparedness, i.e. facing some cold essentials, also plays into the solution. We are bonders by nature, a fact marriage hardly changes. So we bond legitimately with our spouse, sexually, emotionally and spiritually, two becoming one with little or no thought of a third party’s contamination. But our capacity for bonding with others remains, and with time, along with the bumping and bruising the best of marriages brings, an outside illegitimate bond can offer any number of “benefits”: validation, distraction, compatibility, excitement, passion. The adulteress Solomon described nailed it when she crooned “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”  (Proverbs 9:17) Affairs are, admittedly, powerful and mysterious experiences.

Underscore the “experience” part. I’ve often wondered if what a person bonds with during adultery is not so much the person, who often remains largely unknown because time and circumstance prevent the normal light of day investments relations are made of, but rather the experience. It may well be that the breathless I Love You’s that come with affairs should be directed at what the person is feeling – ecstasy, power, thrill – rather than towards the shadowy partner. The other bond is often, perhaps, a bond with what one feels more than with the other person, so it could more rightly be said “I love what I experience with you” rather than “I love you.”

Regardless, bonds can happen to anyone, especially the unprepared. The good news is that we’re not idiots or instinct-driven animals. We can catch the early symptoms of mutual attraction, take them as alarms, and pull ourselves out of the spark before it inflames. In Anna Karenina, which Renee and I viewed Sunday, Anna is reminded of all she’s throwing away – family, reputation, security –  for the sake of an affair, and she retorts, sincerely but stupidly, “You’re forgetting that we love each other.”

Well, yes. We could argue about the nature of such love, but for sake of discussion let’s allow that passionate, strong love can and does occur within infidelity. And?

And nothing. It constitutes another bond, that’s all, one that’s neither legitimized nor viable just because love is present. Just as surely as we have the capacity to bond with the wrong person, we have the capacity to protect the pre-existing bond we have with the one we committed ourselves to and, in the end, that protects the partnership we’ll grow old with, draw on, and thank God for.

“The sanctity of marriage” is a rallying cry among conservatives when the subject of same sex marriage is raised. Fair enough, and I agree. But before arguing against deconstructing marriage in the culture, let’s be sure we first are recognizing it’s sanctity in our own homes, protecting our own futures by fiercely protecting our own bonds. The other bond may always be an option; sometimes, in honesty, a very appealing one. But mirages by their nature have appeal. Try making use of one and see how far you get.

“Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?”, Solomon asked rhetorically. “Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?” (Proverbs 6:27-28) Hardly. And ironically, just as he describes here, what starts off as something hot becomes all too quickly something wildly out of control, burning down what should by all rights have been allowed to stay intact. There’s a catastrophe all of us can fear, recognize, and avoid. So be it.

(Oh, and for what it’s worth, I found Anna Karenina so boring that I was sound asleep within the first twenty minutes. I only woke up because the snoring of the man directly behind me startled me. But it got rave reviews, so what do I know?)