The Other Bond

“Bad marriages don’t cause infidelity; infidelity causes bad marriages.”

-Frank Pittman

While watching a remake of Anna Karenina (Tolstoy’s classic take on infidelity and tragedy) I was reminded that adultery, once a scandalous topic,  is now the stuff of everyday news and routine tv shows. It’s one of the commonest sins practiced today, 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 – sad 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 the stories of ruined marriages, it must be something along this line: it could happen, to virtually anyone, given the right, place and circumstance.

So preparedness, i.e. facing some cold essentials, is called for. 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, the key figure in the story 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. God grant that we do.