I quoted this line from Iris Krasnow yesterday.
When we think about not serial adultery but single instances, the obvious question is, How do you restore trust, respect and intimacy in the face of infidelity? Well, I'll be writing about that over the next two days. Today I just want to note a crucially important fact.
When Krasnow says "salvageable" above she is really saying, whether she realizes it or not, is that pretty much anything that troubles a marriage save these two offenses is forgivable. "Forgivable" means nothing unless someone forgives.
A woman the Serpentine One and I heard talk about marriage a few years ago now told us about an interesting bit of research she did. She'd given questionnaires to a whole lot of young couple about to get married and asked them what they could imagine forgiving and not forgiving. They all agreed they could NEVER forgive infidelity. What's interesting about that is that in practice, couples actually have a fairly high success rate of dealing with infidelity.
No, I'm not saying go ahead and cheat. What I am saying is, go ahead and become the sort of person who would forgive their spouse for cheating. We never spend much time thinking about that do we? Most people wonder if they'd ever cheat and most people can imagine their self righteous anger at someone else cheating on them. But imagine* forgiving someone. What would that take?
More tomorrow and Friday.
* By the way, one really interesting aspect of the famous John Lennon tune is that he only imagines achieving peace by eliminating things be believed to cause strife between people. There isn't so much as a single hint in the song about forgiveness. That says an awful lot, and none of it good, about the people who believe that song says something profound and important.
Save abuse or serial adultery, every marriage is salvageable with a big caveat that there’s “trust, respect and intimacy, both emotional and physical".I think that is right. You might call it an update for our times of Matthew 19:9. And let's note in passing that while women are somewhat less likely to cheat and far less likely to be serial adulterers, there is credible evidence suggesting that women commit abuse at least as often as men do.
When we think about not serial adultery but single instances, the obvious question is, How do you restore trust, respect and intimacy in the face of infidelity? Well, I'll be writing about that over the next two days. Today I just want to note a crucially important fact.
When Krasnow says "salvageable" above she is really saying, whether she realizes it or not, is that pretty much anything that troubles a marriage save these two offenses is forgivable. "Forgivable" means nothing unless someone forgives.
A woman the Serpentine One and I heard talk about marriage a few years ago now told us about an interesting bit of research she did. She'd given questionnaires to a whole lot of young couple about to get married and asked them what they could imagine forgiving and not forgiving. They all agreed they could NEVER forgive infidelity. What's interesting about that is that in practice, couples actually have a fairly high success rate of dealing with infidelity.
No, I'm not saying go ahead and cheat. What I am saying is, go ahead and become the sort of person who would forgive their spouse for cheating. We never spend much time thinking about that do we? Most people wonder if they'd ever cheat and most people can imagine their self righteous anger at someone else cheating on them. But imagine* forgiving someone. What would that take?
More tomorrow and Friday.
* By the way, one really interesting aspect of the famous John Lennon tune is that he only imagines achieving peace by eliminating things be believed to cause strife between people. There isn't so much as a single hint in the song about forgiveness. That says an awful lot, and none of it good, about the people who believe that song says something profound and important.
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