Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith Too
This title says it all…well, sort of. I’m not actually talking about adultery, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m talking about the danger of having close friends of the opposite sex when you are married. I have counselled many people who have gotten themselves in trouble with their spouse by having too deep of a relationship with an opposite-sex friend and/or complaining to this friend about their marital woes.
Whether or not your opposite-sex friendship is a new or a very old relationship (pre-marriage), this relationship needs to change, and boundaries need to be built around it. Why? Because it has the potential to create division in your relationship, and it can be the source of suspicion or scandal. When problems happen in our marriage, we need to work through these issues productively with our spouse and avoid bringing others into the situation (unless you are seeking counseling from a professional or a priest/pastor). When we struggle to work through an issue with our spouse, we are often tempted to process the issue with others. When we choose to do this with a friend who is of the opposite sex, it can lead to a situation where we feel more understood by them than we do by our spouse. This, in turn, can lead to us talking more with this friend and avoiding our spouse.
As this happens, we risk our hearts being drawn into a dangerous emotional connection with this friend, especially if they are truly listening to us and showing interest in our plight. Even if we don’t form this emotion connection, we could cause this friend to misunderstand our motives or give other people the impression that we are building an inappropriate bond with someone other than our spouse. Either way, we put ourselves at risk of an emotional affair, or at least the appearance of one. If it persists, it can greatly complicate our marital healing in many ways.
ACTION STEP: This week, examine all of your opposite sex relationships and consider whether you need to build clearer boundaries in the relationship.