Wendy Plump has written an article for the New Yorker about the consequences of breaking one’s marriage vows. As Justin Taylor observed, in a post with the title The Empty Horror of an Extra-Marital Affair, it is not pleasant reading.
However, in a culture that continually spins the lie that there are not consequences to sin, unpleasant reading is needed. Plump concludes:
IN the end your marriage may not need to be trashed, though mine was. The affairs metastasized in our relationship from the inside out. By the time all was said and done, there was little left to save. Our marriage had become like a leaf eaten away by caterpillars, where the petiole and midrib remain with some ghostly connective tracery in between. Not enough to hold even a drop of rain.
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.
Read the whole thing here.
Painful reading? Even more painful living. Adultery is a choice…..a million tiny steps down the road to destruction. Destruction of trust, destruction of faith, destruction of families, destruction of children…….all in the name of self.
And at the end of this journey, as the adulterer looks back on the rubble they have left behind, they will find themselves just as needy and alone as they thought they were when the journey began.
Julia, those are very wise words. I pray that people will read them and reflect on them.
What people often do not realize is that adultery
affects not only the husband and wife but it spreads to
all who care about them. If it happens within a church family
it can be devastating to all in the congregation. Sin never just
touches the person involved. It spreads like ripples in a pond
when a rock is dropped. Thanks for addressing this.