Last month a reader wanted to know “Why is an affair is wrong?” This is a legitimate question given that when the topic of affairs comes up, there are mixed responses.
Let’s consider what it means when there is an affair. First, it violates your marriage vows. If you promised to love your spouse above all others and be loyal to them, the affair violates that.
This makes the cheater a vow-breaker and liar. These are labels that not everyone feels comfortable being attached to themselves. One of the consequences of this is that it decreases your believability.
If you made your oath before God, then you face the fallout from breaking that promise as well. There’s also the matter of breaking your vows before all the witnesses to your wedding as well. It amounts to a public proclamation that you’re not keeping your word.
You may have talked yourself into it, yet that doesn’t mean that the affair is okay.
Another effect is that an affair breaks the trust in your marriage. In being married, there’s an element of trust. At the time of your marriage, each of you trusted each other to stay loyal.
The affair damages the trust that each of you had in each other. It sends the message that you can’t be trusted with emotional treasures.
Thirdly, what the cheater doesn’t see is how the affair impacts their bonding. Relationships involve emotional and psychic bonds. Everyone you sleep with has bonds to you and you to them.
Having an affair also has a psychic energy element. You may have hid all the evidence of the affair, but you can’t hide how it alters your energy field. The affair amounts to you exposing yourself to ‘dirty energy’.
That energy is real and impacts your relationship with others.
Fourthly, having an affair exposes your spouse to any sexually transmitted diseases you were exposed to. This makes you a potential carrier of disease. Since STD’s (sexually transmitted disease) numbers are increasing as high as they are, the threat doesn’t deter some cheaters.
Even though some can leave you sterile or impede your sex drive, it doesn’t stop them.
In the US, STD’s are increasing between 31% and 76% depending on which disease you are considering. Even condom use is not slowing things down.
Fifthly, there’s also the behavioral aspect that once you give into an affair, it makes it harder to resist any more in the future. Once that bridge is crossed, the barriers keeping you back grow increasingly weaker.
If these aren’t enough, then there are the issues regarding role modeling and familial patterning. It would take me six pages to explain them. Let’s just say that there are long term relationship consequences that come with affairs.
Besides this, affairs are against some of the earliest moral codes such as the Noahic and Mosaic codes. It later became incorporated into Biblical teachings. Those codes are in place for a reason.
The prohibition against adultery kept people from stealing other’s wives and fighting over them when the codes were followed. Those kinds of concerns incite high levels of passion on all sides.
This is one of the reasons infidelity was also included in criminal codes as well. Initially it was viewed as a capitol level offense. Over time, the severity of it has decreased.
There are many reasons why an affair is wrong. These just touch on a few.
It’s serious when an affair happens if you’ve been wondering what makes it wrong, you may want to consider the video “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery”.
The video guides you through those initial steps in stopping the affair and turning your life around.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
