The following is a chapter from our book,
Healing Infidelity: How to Build a Vibrant Marriage After an Affair. It is an attempt to discern what it means to say "I love you" especially in the context of an affair and spouses rebuilding.
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A common statement
among unfaithful spouses is that they fell in love with their affair
partners. I've heard them say statements like, "She made me feel
more alive than I ever have." The rush of an affair-generated
love can be addictive. But is the unfaithful spouse really in love
with his affair partner? Also what does he mean when he says he still
love his spouse despite that?
Likewise, when a hurt
spouse discovers the affair, his love for his spouse can take a hit.
Some, over time, end up "falling out of love" with their
spouse. This causes them to be less motivated in rebuilding or even
caring about their spouse. If they stay in the marriage, it is more
for the sake of the kids or financial reasons than loving their
spouse. Some hurt spouses are unable to ever get over the rejection
that the affair caused them to experience, either due to the
unfaithful spouse not doing the needed actions to help them heal, or
sometimes because the hurt spouse is too wounded from it to heal.
In either case, love or
the loss of it becomes involved. It is therefore important that we
look at what love is and within the context of an affair and
rebuilding, how it can help or hurt as the case may be.
I intend to show why we
feel love of various kinds and how they interact to form a full
experience of love, and how when extracted from that context, get
perverted into a false love. To do this, we need to first understand
the four types of loves. C. S. Lewis, in his book "The Four
Loves," lists four Greek words most common to understanding
love:
storge, philio, eros, and agape.
I know, I know. Many of
you have heard all this before. Before you jump to conclusions about
what I'm going to say, press reset for a moment and let's take a
fresh look at these in the context of infidelity.
Eros
We're starting with
this word because out of the four, it is the most misunderstood word.
Perhaps because it is never used in the New Testament, the word tends
to be restricted to sexual love. But this is too restrictive, not
only in classical Greek usage—Plato uses it in non-sexual
contexts—but in the Early Church Fathers, who often used the Greek
word,
eros, to describe our love for God.
The word that sums up
the meaning of
eros is
passion. It is emotional, and a
strong desire that moves us to action. It excites, activates, and
moves us to act.
This is the type of
love that appeals to help the starving children. Most any appeal, to
be successful, has to pull this type of love from you. Seeing
pictures of starving children is designed to get you to donate
because your pity motivates you, gives you enough passion to move you
to act. This is why the Church Fathers used the word in relation to
God. We were to have a driving passion for God, and without that, you
wouldn't have the motivation to stand up and be martyred for Christ.
Passion itself is a
misunderstood term. It comes from the Greek as well and means "to
suffer." So the "passion of Christ" refers to the
suffering of Christ. How does this get from there to excitement that
motivates? Simple. All passion is driven by suffering a lack of
something perceived to be needed. In short, when you see something
you want, you are suffering because you don't have it. You are in
"pain" and are motivated to resolve it by fulfilling that
desire.
Added to that, God has
built into us a survival mechanism, usually related to hunger and
other desires that we need to live. Sex falls into this realm too.
When the brain perceives a feeling as pleasurable due to the infusion
of dopamine firing off the brain synapses, it stores that as a need.
If the dopamine levels are high enough, the brain can rate it as
highly needed for survival. This forms the addictive pattern which
can eventually—if reinforced enough times—lead one to having an
addiction to a specific desire.
This dopamine response
pattern can be fooled into perceiving something as a survival need
that really is not. Nowhere is this more evident when an unfaithful
spouse perceives he can't live without his affair partner, that
dumping her means he is missing out on an important part of his life.
This derives from the brain seeing the feelings the person receives
from his affair partner as a "survival need" when in truth,
he will survive just fine without her. Especially evident when he
consider that he once felt that way about his current spouse, which
is why he married her.
At its heart,
eros
or passion is a selfish love. It is having a need and seeking to
fulfill it. But the other side of the coin is if we don't care,
perceive something as not a need, we neglect that object and leave it
to rot. Without this love, rebuilding will be much harder simply
because we are not motivated to do the hard work of rebuilding. We
don't perceive it as a need. Meanwhile, the unfaithful spouse still
feels that passion for the affair partner. He has an
eros love
for the affair partner, but a different kind of love for the spouse.
Eros love, then,
is a desire and need based love. It is motivated for what we will get
out of it. Ideally, in conjunction with the other loves, we are also
giving to someone else what they need for their passion. When that
happens, you have what is generally termed as "romantic love"
in our day. This gives us some insight into how this love works both
in marriages and in affairs.
Romantic passion
usually starts up in a relationship automatically. That is, most
people feel that it happens naturally, without any effort on either
person's part. Often it is described as a chemistry between two
people. Or the most common term, "falling in love." For
true marital love, this love acts as the priming of the marital love
pump.
We usually refer to
this experience as infatuation. When romantic love fires off between
two people, they are both excited about each other. They both fail to
see the failings and negative aspects of each other, or if they do,
they make excuses or believe they will change, because this powerful
love they feel will conquer all, or so it seems.
It should be noted this
is the same type of love that one feels during an affair. It produces
the "fog" we spoke of in Part 1. The feeling of new love is
so powerful that it tends to put blinders on a person so that he
cannot see the negative aspects of what he is doing. He only know one
thing: "I can't live without having this feeling of love in my
life. I must have it." Like a drug addict who is willing to
spend their life's savings on the next high, those in affairs don't
consider the negative consequences of what they are putting at risk
in an affair.
But whether we are
talking about a relationship that ends in marriage or one that ends
in an affair, eventually this love dies if left unattended. This
especially is true with a marriage because of the many distractions.
Jobs, bills, children, sports, hobbies, school and many other
responsibilities of married couples work to kill off romantic love.
Passion dies off like a fire running out of fuel. But even for an
affair relationship, eventually it gets old, is not new, the
excitement dies off and the two at some point start to feel a
responsibility to each other, not to mention the constant worry that
they will be discovered and it all come to a sudden end.
This dynamic, the
excitement of a new relationship, has led some to conclude that we
were not made or created to be monogamous. Most who posit an
evolutionary creation of man, point to this as the basic instinct of
man that allowed him, especially when man was a small number, to
spread his seed as widely as possible for the survival of the
species.
However, this fails to
account for the totality of love. It places
eros, passion,
romantic love as the only real love, at least as it relates to
marriage and creating a family. As we will see, this is an incomplete
picture of love. It is only one part, important as it may be. A part
that can easily be perverted toward destructive actions in the name
of love just as much as the drug addict is willing to steal and kill
in the name of his love for the drug.
Because this love is
based on an emotional needs-based feeling of well-being, it will
naturally go up and down over a period of time. The "honeymoon"
eventually dies off. So if we need this type of love in a marriage,
how do we keep those fires burning?
This is where the book,
His
Needs, Her Needs: How to Affair-proof Your Marriage by
Willard F. Jr. Harley, comes into the picture. This topic is way too
big for one article, so I would highly suggest this book be obtained
and read for a full understanding, but here is a summary that applies
to what we are discussing here.
Men and women tend to
have different needs to feel love for someone. One person may
perceive a hug as saying, "I love you." Another may feel
that when the other does some type of act of service like washing the
dishes for them. Another when the person joins them in an activity
like a sport or a hobby. While men and women tend to have opposite
needs, each person is different. What makes one woman feel loved is
not the same for another woman, or one man to another.
Doing the actions that
say "I love you" to someone causes them to feel love, and
fills what Mr. Harley calls the "love bank." As long as the
deposits exceed the withdrawals—doing something that doesn't make
them feel loved—the romantic fires are kept going.
The reason that it
feels natural in the beginning of a relationship is because each
person has an excitement about the relationship that causes them to
invest as much time as possible with the other person. When that
happens, it makes the other person feel loved. You are each motivated
to do for the other the things they want to do. You find yourself
spending every spare minute with them.
When I dated Lenita, we
were together every evening unless otherwise prevented. When we were
together, we focused on each other. I'm sure if I added up the time
we spent together, it amounted to at least four to five hours a day
on the average. That means we were together, focused on each other,
for around 28 hours a week.
But what happened to
us? Like all marriages, jobs and children pulled us apart. Over the
years, our time spent with each other shrank to minutes a day instead
of hours. Often those minutes weren't focused on each other, but on
daily issues, taking care of this or that, or attending church. We
rarely took time to make deposits into each other's love banks. We
had some of the other loves we'll be talking about, so we felt we
loved each other, but this love became neglected over the years. It
would get fed only on special occasions like Valentine's Day or our
anniversary. But nothing like we did during our dating time.
The key then is
spending quality time together. Not focused on responsibilities, the
children, or a job, but upon each other. Only by spending enough time
together can either of you hope to make deposits into the love bank
"naturally." Filling those needs comes through quantity of
contact. Mr. Harely recommends spending at least 15 hours a week
together. That can seem like a lot, but it is an issue of priorities.
If one's marriage is important, one will make the time just as easily
as you make the time to watch a football game or meet with the guys
or any other number of hobbies we may have.
Since discovery day and
reading
His Needs, Her Needs, we've gone from spending a total
of one or two hours a week focused on each other to over 15. The
result? Despite the affairs, I've never felt more in love with my
wife. Even more so than when we were first married.
What occurs naturally
at the beginning of a relationship is spending time with each other
long enough that we naturally do the actions that say to the other,
"I love you." Words are good, but those actions make it
real. But as the relationship moves forward, the time together
naturally goes down unless the couple makes a conscious effort to
counteract it. This requires more than having a night out once a
week, though that is a good start. But to make a difference will
require spending 15 hours together at least. Find activities you can
participate together in.
For instance, here is
our usual weekly schedule. Most nights find us swimming at the local
gym for around one and a half hours on average including drive time.
That amounts to a weekly total of 7.5 hours. Weekly we spend our time
on Saturdays going to church together. The car ride is 45 minutes
each way, for a total 1.5 hours. Usually she reads a book on marriage
enrichment or initially about affairs and dealing with them. That ups
the total to 9 hours. We have a weekly eating out together, which
invests another 1.5 or more hours a week, bringing it to 10.5 hours a
week. Every week, I help her with a cleaning job at an office 30
minutes away. Another hour of drive time alone together, making it
11.5. She usually calls me on her lunch breaks and when she's
traveling between jobs, and we talk. This is harder to estimate, but
that amounts to at least one hour a day. Add five hours to the total
and we spend at least 16.5 hours a week together, focused on each
other.
We could add in more
smaller pieces, like our texts back and forth, our time in the room
when we share things we've found on the computer or discussing some
of the issues we've run across on the support forum, but you get the
picture. Whereas before the affair we were lucky to spend five
minutes focused on each other a day, now it is back to hours. Invest
that much time into a relationship, and it becomes hard to not feel
loved by them because you are both saying to each other, "You're
worth investing my time to be with." Not doing that can't but
help to say the opposite.
But that shows how
eros
love works in an affair and why some people become so addicted to
that new-relationship excitement, not knowing how to keep it alive,
they end up going from one person to another each time the
relationship seems to lose its spark and excitement. They don't
realize that if they would simply invest the same amount of time with
their spouse as they want to do "naturally" with the affair
partner, that they would soon feel the same exciting romantic love
for them as they do their affair partner.
Romantic, passionate
love will rise and fall through a marriage, but if a couple doesn't
learn to preserve the time for each other in the face of the other
demands, it will fall and rarely rise up. What was natural, spending
loads of time with them, now has to be done intentionally. Or more
appropriately, the couple needs to intentionally preserve that space
and not let other, less important responsibilities, overgrow the love
in a marriage. Like weeds need to be pulled from a garden to keep the
plants healthy, the marriage has to be tended after planting the
seeds through infatuation. Failing to do this is saying the marital
garden is not worth saving or preserving.
The danger for the
unfaithful spouse, on the other hand, is failing to realize the love
they often feel for their affair partner is mostly, if not all,
passion, but not the fullness of what love is. The infatuation is the
starting gun to trigger a more fuller love, which we will discuss in
the next sections. But too many, when they experience this exciting
new-relationship romance, mistake it for what love is. By itself, it
is a fickle and emotional response to having one's love-needs met by
someone else. It is the instinctive response to those triggers that
gets romanticized in popular culture as to what love is.
Phileo
The keyword to describe
phileo love is
friendship. Most people understand this
one well enough. It contains elements of the other loves in a unique
combination. Like
eros, it deepens and is enriched only when
we spend time on it. Another more descriptive word, however, is
companionship. Unlike
eros, it isn't totally need
based, can involve sacrifice, and isn't sexually oriented.
It is when one combines
phileo love with romantic love that one hits a version of
marital love. Yet, even this is not the fullness of marital love. It
requires more ingredients. Yet, a marriage that lacks a sense of
companionship is a weak marriage indeed.
One of Lenita's songs
she always said was our song was "You're My Best Friend" by
Queen. We've always had a sense of that friendship, and the
subsequent love. But we allowed the companionship to die. We still
felt we were friends, we still felt we loved each other, but we had
allowed our zest in our relationship to shrivel. It was that lack
that her second local affair partner filled, as he talked with her
and spent time with her while I was involved in my own world,
oblivious to it all.
This thin line between
friendship and romantic love is the premise behind the most popular
book on the topic of infidelity,
Not
Just Friends by Shirley Glass. Friendship can entail intimacy
to a degree, and intense love for the other person, only minus the
more sexual overtones and romantic love. If two people who become
close friends find they are becoming romantically attracted to each
other, it becomes very easy to justify to one's self that "we're
just friends." As Lenita thought at the time, "I can handle
this and not let it evolve into an affair," all the while she
was already neck deep into the affair. Blurring the lines between
friendship and romantic love is the fertile grounds for affairs to
blossom.
How does one identify
if a friendship is moving into romantic love? One can identify it by
answering the following questions. Do either of you flirt with the
other? Do you spend more time talking and interacting with the friend
than your own spouse? When you talk, do you regularly discuss
intimate details like marital problems you are dealing with, or
sexual preferences? Do you make contact via text, phone, or
email/messages multiple times every day? Do you think about them
daily? Do you sense an attraction to them, or what many people would
call "chemistry"?
If you can answer yes
to any of these questions, it should serve as a warning flag that
this relationship has the potential to be more than just friends, and
you should take steps to establish firm boundaries and prevent alone
time. Limit contact and use techniques to guard your thoughts so as
to not allow the spark to start a fire.
If you answered yes to
several of these questions, you are likely already involved in the
early stages of an affair, whether you've even kissed or held hands
yet. Pulling back and dialing down the contact to once or twice a
week is the only way to preserve the friendship and avoid damaging
your marriage.
True friendship is a
great blessing. Each person in the marriage can benefit from having
friends outside the marriage. As John Gray says in
Why
Mars and Venus Collide, it is important that each spouse find
other sources of friendship outside the marriage so that the spouse
isn't left to provide all of one's well-being. Women need other women
to talk to, and men need other males to interact with. Our society
has more and more limited friendships, especially among men.
When dealing with
friendships of the opposite sex or any person one may be attracted
to, boundaries are important. It is usually the ignoring of those
boundaries that leads to a friendship evolving into a romantic
relationship. Avoid spending alone time with such an individual.
Always have someone else with you. Avoid discussing marital issues or
other intimate details reserved for a marital relationship or
professional therapist. If he wants to text or contact you
frequently, send signals you're not available all the time, like
waiting for a few hours to answer a text, or a quick text back that
you are involved in something and can't chat now. Enough of those and
he'll get the signal in most cases.
When you see several of
these warning signs growing, that is the time to run. Don't think you
can handle it. You're already hooked if these things are happening.
The deeper in you go from there, the harder it will be to stop the
affair and the more danger to your marriage as the addictive nature
of what you are feeling takes over.
Perhaps you have heard
some unfaithful spouses say they just wanted the sex, not a
relationship. In effect, they wanted the
eros love without the
phileo. They want the pleasure of sex without the
entanglements of a relationship. They are in love with the feelings,
not the person. Therefore, they don't care from whom they get them,
just so they get them. Is this possible?
In short, yes, to a
degree. It is possible for someone to want only the sex and not love
the person involved or desire a friendship with them. That was the
attitude of Clyde, Lenita's first affair partner. He didn't want to
know about her, her family, or any details of her life and history.
He just wanted sexual favors, period. In effect, he didn't want to be
one with her emotionally. This is the basis of prostitution. A man
can pay for it, and not have any strings attached. He may never see
that girl again.
However, to say this
creates no emotional or marital bonds is a secular view of sex as a
form of recreation and not much more. Only when it is linked with
love for the person does it take on any meaning whatsoever in a
bonding fashion, per that view. As we will see in the next chapter,
this is an incomplete picture of sex. Rather, sexual intercourse
involves making the two into one flesh. Whoever one has sex with,
joins with them in the basic act of matrimony. A bond is created, no
matter how much love is or is not felt for the person. In other
words, yes one can avoid
phileo love with another individual,
but
eros love has its own bonding with the other that cannot
be escaped.
Storge
The two words that
describe this type of love is
comforting affection. Its use in
Greek is mostly restricted to family relationships, but can expand
into a more broader "family" among friends.
In the popular TV show
of the 80s, "Star Trek, the Next Generation," one of the
characters was named Data, a sentient android. In seeking to define a
friend or even romantic relationship, he described it as, "My
neurological pathways have become accustom to your presence."
This is the essentially the definition of
storge love, but in
a more biological sense. We become accustom to those around us,
extended family and friends, and develop an affection for them that
we find comforting. We enjoy being with them because we find security
in their presence. It also tends to include biological connections,
though not exclusively.
Often when a hurt
spouse learns about the affair, he will bounce between hate and love
for his unfaithful spouse. He is angry that the spouse chose someone
over or in addition to him, equating to a rejection of his love. This
negatively affects his romantic and companionship love. Yet, he is
accustom to the unfaithful spouse's presence and doesn't want to lose
the security of that relationship, especially if they have been
together for years.
This love also
interacts in concern for the children. Not wanting a broken family,
some stay together for the sake of the children.
Storge love
is involved in such decisions. The hurt spouse doesn't want to deny
the children the relationship with their father or mother, so for the
sake of the children and keeping the family whole, they stay together
even if the love between them is dead or dying.
The unfaithful spouse
experiences this love when he feels he loves his spouse and doesn't
want to divorce, but he no longer feels "in love" with the
hurt spouse. What he means is he no longer feels any
eros
love, especially when compared to the excitement of the affair
partner, but he still feels the bonds of
storge love with his
spouse, the mother or father of their children. That relationship is
familiar, comfortable, and provides security. There is a history to
that relationship, unlike with the affair partner.
In a healthy marriage,
this love grows with time spent together. As the years pass, each
grows accustom to the other's presence. With the advent of biological
children, this bond grows exponentially. A family is created, and the
love for one's child extends to the spouse who is also a parent and
who contributed their DNA to create this child bonding the two into
one, literal flesh.
To the degree Lenita
and I felt true love for each other before the affair started, this
and the next love, for me, defined why we felt we loved each other.
We didn't take into account, as important as this love was, that it
was not the totality of what marital love should be. After 29 years
and three children, our
storge love was very strong. But our
phileo, eros, and in Lenita's case to a degree,
agape
love had waned.
Agape
Agape is also
one of the loves little understood. Most think of it in terms of
divine love, or non-sexual love as contrasted with
eros. But
these ideas only skirt the foundation of the word and its
corresponding love.
If there is one word I
would list to describe what this type of love involves, it would be
martyr. Unlike
eros, it is not based on filling one's
needs. Unlike
phileo, it doesn't require companionship.
Contrasted with
storge, it is not based on family bonds or a
comforting presence. Rather, this love indicates one who is willing
to sacrifice themselves for another, a cause, or a belief.
In classic Greek, the
term was rarely used, and was a more generic word for love without a
lot of meaning attached to it. The writers of the New Testament
infused the word with the meaning of love that God has for us. But
there are three times in the Bible when the word is not used of
divine love, but inappropriate love. It is the highest form of love
one can have. It willingly sacrifices what one wants in favor of the
needs and desires of the one loved. This is why Jesus said, "Greater
love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends." (Joh 15:13 ASV)
The term became
attached to divine love because God's love so often uses the term.
Because Israel so often committed adultery against Him, and He
forgave them and took them back. Because we so often seek other
"gods" in our lives than Him, and yet He waits with open
arms to receive us again like the father did the prodigal son. For
sure, the pure example of
agape love is God Himself, who
willingly became incarnate as a man, so He could give His life, to
defeat death, and restore life through His resurrection. In spite of
the fact that we, as a whole, had rejected Him.
None of us can hope to
have and exhibit a pure
agape love, but we can participate in
it through Him. Our love involves selfish desires, need-based
companionship. We can't get away from that, and indeed, should not.
For us,
agape love transforms those loves into an integrated
whole of what love should be.
St. Paul exhorts the
Ephesians in relation to marriage: "Husbands, love your wives,
even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it;"
(Eph 5:25 ASV) Marriage is at its ideal, a sacrifice of each other on
the altar of their new spouse. In the Orthodox Church's marriage
ceremony, this is illustrated with crowns the groom and bride wear on
their heads, known as crowns of martyrdom. This same spirit is shown
in the traditional Western marriage vows, "...for better or for
worse."
This type of love does
not waver with one's feelings of love. It does not rely upon being
treated fairly or justly by the other spouse. It does not even depend
upon whether one's spouse is abusive or not. Once one has
agape
love for another, it is there forever.
Note, I'm not saying
this love puts up with abuse or injustice anymore than God puts up
with sin. Simply that one loves the other, and has their best
interest at heart no matter what happens or what sacrifices need to
be made.
Allow me to illustrate
this with my own situation, at the risk of sounding puffed up and
wanting praise from my readers. For I don't count this as something I
did through great effort, but was simply there and natural, so I
attribute it to God working in me when I needed it most.
When I first discovered
Lenita's affairs, among the shock, denial, and disbelief that I would
ever find myself in this situation, one desire rose above the others.
I realized she had committed a mortal sin that could destroy our
marriage and her. While not denying my pain and struggle, my first
concern was for redeeming her if at all possible.
So much so that when I
called my priest the next morning, he asked me whether I wanted a
divorce or not. I said without hesitation, as if there could be any
doubt so why ask, that I did not want a divorce. The idea of
divorcing her hadn't even entered my mind, though I worried that it
could end there depending on where she was at. I readily forgave her,
and that has stuck. I've never dangled her sin over her head as a
punishment.
That said,
agape
love would have demanded that I leave if she continued to reject me.
If she had not repented within a reasonable amount of time, like the
sinner cannot be with God in heaven, I would have had to leave her.
That in itself would have been a sacrifice on my part because I
wouldn't want to do that. Yet, if she stood any chance of healing, it
would require at some point for me to release her like the father did
the prodigal son. But no matter what, I would still love her, no
matter what she did. For that, my pain would be all the more deep.
But it is far less than the pain God has for the many who have
rejected Him, and He still so loved the world that He sent His
only-begotten son to rescue us through the sacrifice of death.
It is
agape love
that ties the other loves together into a full, complete, and holy
love that goes beyond ourselves. You cannot "fall out of love"
with
agape love. The heart of a marital love is this
self-sacrificial love.
Allow me to put it in
the negative. Many look at love as merely a feeling, an emotional
attachment. It is that, but by itself, it falls far short. So when
during the marriage, the one spouse isn't getting the sexual love he
wants or expects, instead of being willing to sacrifice for a time,
he goes outside the marriage to find his fulfillment. When one spouse
neglects the other, and someone comes along who pays attention to
him, he mistakes that attention for true love because he doesn't have
a sacrificial love for his spouse that no matter the temptation
presented, he will abstain.
Agape love does not ebb and flow
with circumstances, but with one's commitment to be a martyr for the
benefit of the other person.
I know what some are
thinking. Doormat. No, not quite, as I illustrated above.
Agape
love doesn't shield the object of love from the consequences of his
actions, but loves him, even when that love says you must release him
in the hope that he will eventually repent and return with a true
change of heart. That is often harder than staying and shielding him
from the consequences of his actions, and ends up enabling his sin
instead of healing it.
What is True Marital Love?
All love contains
elements of each flavor of love. It is not like you can take love and
neatly divide it into these black and white categories.
Storge
love for a child involves a level of
eros passion for him. The
parents sacrifice often for the well-being and benefit of the child,
exhibiting true
agape love. All human
agape love is
connected to
eros, phileo, and
storge love.
In each action, one
type of love tends to dominate over the others in time, while for a
full love, all comes under the umbrella of
agape love in
general. For if love doesn't mean to give of one's self for the
betterment of the other, then in what manner is it true love? In what
manner is instinctive and needs-based love really love in the full
sense of the word if it does not have as its final goal the best for
the other person, even at your expense?
The ironic aspect of a
full love of this nature is that one gets more than what the other
loves can give by themselves. Our fulfillment doesn't come from
getting, but in giving. It is the nature of this type of love to
establish love as a lasting love.
While in my story I've
attributed several aspects of what Lenita did to rebuilding as key in
my quick recovery, if there is one reason why I healed as fast as I
did, much quicker than most people in my support group, is that this
sacrificial love caused me to be more concerned for her than for
myself. I was more focused on her healing than my own. I forgave her
readily, even though I didn't know if her commitment would stick. As
I write this, not even two years past discovery day, I don't think
about the affairs much. It is always there, but I don't hurt as much
from it. I don't get depressed over it anymore. Our relationship is
better than it has ever been. I'm exceedingly thankful that she was
able to repent and turn from the path she was headed down. It has
been a long and painful process, but a rewarding one for both of us.
To put it bluntly,
without a strong sense of love embracing all the loves, especially
agape love, I would still be hurting today. I would feel the
injustice of what she did to me, the grief of what I had lost would
still weigh heavily on my heart. Despite the fact she'd done all the
right things so that other hurt spouses on the support group vocally
wish their spouses were like her, I would still hurt deep inside, not
feeling free to relinquish my pain for fear it would let her off the
hook. I would not have easily forgiven her. If it were not for a love
that didn't depend upon her behavior to exist, I would not have
sacrificed my own selfish desires for what was best for both of us.
Instead of enjoying a fulfilling relationship with her now, we would
live in doubt and stress, fearing the next slip up and that love
would shatter with the next sin.
If passion love, family
affection love, and companionship love do not lead one to sacrificial
love, then that love is a shadow of the real thing, and not fully
love. If love can so readily changed based upon feelings and actions
of others, then it is not true love, but selfish ego-protecting
desires.
As St. Paul states:
"Love is patient, love is kind; love does not envy; love does
not boast, is not puffed up; does not behave disgracefully, does not
seek its own, is not provoked to anger, thinks no evil; does not
rejoice over unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all
things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things."(1Co 13:4-7 EMTV)
Are you in love? Let
that love be the mark by which you measure if you are there. If we
are honest, none of us exhibit it perfectly. But we strive to do so,
and if we don't, only then have we lost.
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Check out the full book, which includes the story of how Lenita ended up in a series of affairs, how Rick discovered it, and how both rebuilt their marriage into a vibrant one, as well as many other good articles like this one to aid in
Healing Infidelity.
