On fidelity

My sister has this post up today on trust. We all have a number of friends who have succumbed to temptation of infidelity, including members on both sides of our families.


Most recently an old friend left the man who had been her husband for over 12 years, her four children, whom she was homeschooling, and the church and co-op to which she belonged to get back together with an old boyfriend. She told me she felt God was calling her to do this because of the way everything was falling into place. She was perhaps the last person I thought would have a broken marriage. I remember crying and crying 25 years ago when she said her parents were getting divorced; maybe I thought that would make it harder for her to leave, but she said it made her realize that kids can survive a broken home.

Then my husband comes home frequently with stories of military wives who have run off with all the money and the household goods while their husbands are off deployed for months. Not that while on deployment all these men are living chaste lives.

It’s easy to cast judgment on those who fail, especially when everything at home is going so well that I’m buying pregnancy tests. But then there are the days when a coldness creeps in – perhaps not because of some attraction to someone else, but because of some perceived injustice or selfishness that is nursed along. When provoked by some slight, I’m guilty of inflicting the silent treatment that can fester for days. I woke up stiff with fear in the middle of the night not long ago after a nightmare about my husband sleeping with 125 women. Then I remembered a diary entry that I wrote back in high school after I started reading novels on a college prep list from my English teacher. It seemed like 95% of these books (some Shakespeare, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, etc.) were about the fall-out of infidelity, so, feeling very big-hearted, I wrote about how I would forgive my husband if he ever cheated on me. Infidelity didn’t seem like such a big deal for me at the time, probably because I had never really loved anyone whose leaving would kill half my soul.

The majority response to adultery is end it all. Dump him! Who can trust again when trust has once been violated? Who can love again when love is rejected? My sister’s response is that we can’t really trust another human being because we are all guilty of tiny infidelities: moments of resentment and acts of selfishness. We can only really trust God, so we should be prepared for people to let us down.

Granted. If classic novels teach anything, it’s that human beings are always betraying each other. But if infidelity is part of the human condition, so is our ability to forget pain. We don’t stop trying to trust. We keep forgiving and saying we’re sorry, if not necessarily with words, with some little gesture that says as much. We fall in love again.