I am watching The Age of Innocence again, and it just struck me how our culture promotes the idea that the greatest romances are ones we never act upon.
Think about all of the movies you've seen or literature you've read or perhaps even romance novels. The "greatest" love stories seem to be about two people who fall deeply in love and are not allowed to be together.
We admire their tremendous nobility in not leaving their boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife, we feel their agony at being separated, and we rejoice when the female protagonist is able to free themselves from their brutish husband and get back together with their high school sweetheart, or when the male protagonist is finally able to disentangle himself from his scheming wife to be with his One True 
Love who has always only acted out of pureness of heart.
In reality there is nothing romantic about being unfaithful in your heart and playing your partner for a fool. It is a sign of immaturity to only want what you can't have. Real love is characterized by commitment, respect, honesty, and loving someone even when they are unlovable. If you find it exciting to act in a way that necessitates being disrespectful/dishonest with yourself and your partner, go back to Junior High. (Actually, that is pretty unfair to Junior High kids.)
I don't know about any of you but I am looking to be with a grown man who values the positive traits I do have, and does not feel like they need to cheat because someone else has a few positive traits I don't. Someone who doesn't have to have it all (by having more than one romantic partner instead of maybe some friends?) even if it is at the expense of their spouse and their children and their mother and their community.
I was taking all of this very personally for a long time, and then it occurred to me lately that when my husband decided to go outside our marriage and get his needs met, not in a healthy way where you share interests with people you don't necessarily share with your spouse, but in a way that required romantic entanglement, he disrespected and was willing to harm a lot more than just me to get it.
How would my kids feel if they knew what he did? How would that impact his relationship with them? What would all of his lifelong church friends think? How happy would his mother be able to be if she suffered seeing something like that about him?
He wasn't just willing to tear my life apart, he was willing to destroy his kids' faith in marriage, make them resentful, lead them into living with people before marriage, lose their for respect him, change forever the way they viewed God because God is also a father and that hangs people up a lot, wreck their belief system that moms should stay at home...it is only because of MY discretion that they have not suffered this way. And that our community has not suffered in being disillusioned with him. And that his mother has not suffered...I mean the list goes on and on and on.
I really did think of adultery as something he did TO ME... when in reality all of these other things are true, he did this to everyone we know, and me not letting anyone know about it is the reason why I have been alone in my pain, when I am in pain. I'm in a lot less pain thinking about it, that's for sure.
And I am grateful I did not spread around the suffering now that I am moving on past what happened. It is also a sign of maturity to accept the consequences of someone else's behavior--it is a necessary facet of forgiveness, and it shows you that which is more important, your ability to move on.
[This message edited by 2ndFiddle at 2:45 AM, Monday, August 7th]
