Although the idea of giving people choice of who they love in relationships sounds good in social justice circles, when it comes to marriage, the ground rules quickly change. Saying, “Let people love whoever they want” makes you sound altruistic until it’s your wife or husband who are chasing after another person in the name of love.
It becomes open season on your marriage when you live by “Let them love whoever they want”. You can’t stop the cheater or the home wreckers wanting your spouse.
They may even consider it ‘unfair’ that you limit who your spouse can love. It’s exclusionary. It leaves other people outside of your social circle.
When that loving whoever they want means you get dumped, you look at the issue differently. It’s easy talking about freedom to love until it touches your marriage.
Love gives freedom, yet it also constrains and limits your choices. When you love your spouse, you limit how far you go in your relationships with others. If you’re still depending on your spouse to set limits on you and your behavior, there are some other issues going on.
Society likes the idea of having freedom to love who you want, until it touches your marriage. That kind of freedom is the enemy of commitment. When you married, you committed yourselves to each other.
If you are your spouse are clamoring for ‘more freedom’, the root problem may not be about freedom, but instead about commitment. The one clamoring for freedom may have only made a ‘limited commitment’.
Limited commitments amount to ‘stop-loss’ orders on your relationship. When things get too challenging they decide they need to abandon their commitment. Their personal pain level means more to them than your marriage at that point.
Perhaps they never fully committed to the marriage in the first place. It seemed like the right thing to do, yet when it impinged on their comfort zone, they decided that marriage is not for them.
They may have found some way of crossing their fingers during your marriage vows.
In order to commit to wedding vows, you need maturity. This is one of the dangers of ‘marrying before mature’. You end up with people going through the motions of committing without anything to back it up.
Affairs test your level of commitment to marriage. They test the strength of your promises. They test the boundaries of your relationship.
The encouraging news is that most marriages can survive and bounce back from affairs. An affairs doesn’t have to mean the end of your marriage. With the right tools, you can repair the damage to each of you and your marriage.
In the “Affair Recovery Workshop“, you can learn ways of repairing your marriage, including the level of commitment and communication.
Best Regards,
Jeff
3 Responses
Proverbs 4:7 Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding
The problem many people have is that they don’t believe God is capable of preserving His Word in the book we know as the King James Bible
And so….
Romans 1:22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
When we fail to trust the God who made us and made marriage …..we fail….
You are on and summed up the life of a military spouse wonderfully. I left that life what seems like ages ago, but reading your article brought up old memories and painful outrage at the previous life I had when I was a USAF military wife. In addition to what you pointed out, when my ex husband was in the service, spouses felt like second rate citizens to both our own military and to whatever country we wound up residing. Spouse couldn”t do much officially without direct approval and without the active duty spouse being present. It is such a conflict when a military spouse is made to feel subservient unimportant by the red tape of military personnel, while simultaneously feel that there is a huge weight of responsibility and criticism if the duties” of the day-to-day domestic gears don”t run smoothly and precisely. I remember the words on an old sweatshirt that my ex had purchased for me back in the day “Military Wife: the Most Important Job in the Air Force. That sentiment still has an important element of truth.
Twaambo,
Thank you for writing. Military wives face many unique challenges. They have an important job, although the whole time they face the challenge of divided loyalties. There are times you wonder whether you are first priority or further down the pecking order. The military and many federal jobs, along with law enforcement, the medical profession and fire fighting ut you in a loyalty bind. It’s the nature of those professions and it puts a strain on marriages.
Jeff