Infidelity: Boundaries to Protect Your MarriageНамуна

MARRIED FRIENDS DEALING WITH A MUTUAL ATTRACTION

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where, without your spouse’s knowledge, you began to develop feelings of attraction for the spouse of a close friend or business partner that have progressed beyond wayward thoughts or random impulses ? Were those feelings mutual? Are you by any chance facing a situation of this kind right now? If so, you and the other person need to do something about it before things get out of hand. To be specific, you need to find a way to put some safeguards in place to protect your respective marriages and preserve the integrity of your relationship with the Lord. The key is to establish some form of accountability, even at the cost of jeopardizing a longtime friendship or business partnership.

The solution is fairly straightforward. Each of you needs to locate an objective third party — a mentor, “confessor,” counselor, or prayer partner of the same sex — with whom you can talk and pray about your feelings in strictest confidence. It would be best if this person were someone who knows both you and your spouse. He or she should definitely be a Christian believer who values biblical truths and principles. Your confidant should also be committed to keeping your secret and protecting your reputation, and genuinely concerned to help you preserve the integrity of your marriage.

Once you’ve selected your mentor, we’d advise you to ask him or her to come alongside you in your efforts to build hedges around your marital relationship. Work together to come up with a specific strategy for resisting temptation. Don’t naively assume that it’s enough to acknowledge your feelings. Those feelings constitute a huge red flag for you — spiritually and psychologically as well as relationally — and you need to take some definite steps to nip them in the bud.

Bear in mind that an “emotional affair” of this nature isn’t really about the affair. It’s about something else that’s going on at some deeper level in your marriage — some problem, difficulty or insecurity that you’ve probably been wrestling with for a long, long time. In all likelihood, the feelings that have developed between you and your friend’s spouse are related to the troubles you and your spouse are experiencing in this hidden place. Your first job, then, is to deal with these marital issues. Only then will you be able to clear away the emotional cobwebs that are clouding your relationships with other people. This can best be accomplished with the help of a professional marriage counselor. Ideally, you should begin the counseling process as an individual. Once you and the therapist have had a chance to work through some of your more complicated personal “stuff,” it will be important to bring your spouse into the mix for a series of sessions as a couple.

A word of warning: it may not be possible to resolve this problem and to preserve the friendship or business partnership at the same time. When all’s said and done, the original relationship may have to be left behind in the interest of getting back on the right track. But the sacrifice will be worth it. Neither the loss of a friendship nor the dissolution of a company is too great a price to pay for the preservation of your marriage. You and your spouse have made sacred vows and promises to one another in the presence of God and His people. Your first priority is to stay faithful to the charge you took upon yourselves at the altar, no matter what the cost. It’s a question of remembering where your real loyalties lie.