As counterintuitive as it may seem, men rarely commit sexual betrayal because of a lack or loss of love for their wife. Hardly ever does a man who has fallen sexually sit in my office and say that he doesn’t love his wife anymore. It happens on occasion, but even then it often is not true. Usually when a husband expresses that he doesn’t love his wife, he is making a statement about his own shame. He is grasping at straws and trying to make sense of his own behavior. This particular logic says, “If I am willing to hurt her this badly, over and over again, then I must not love her.” For some guys it’s easier to stomach the explanation of “falling out of love” or “I must not have truly loved her anyway” than it is to acknowledge their own mean, evil, destructive sin. It is incredibly difficult for men to accept and own the reality that the people we love the most are the people we’ve hurt the worst.
The issue of acting out sexually has little to do with whether or not a husband loves his wife. It also has next to nothing to do with whether or not he loves Jesus. The faulty assumption is that something outside the person will motivate him to change. Our reality is that consequences are a poor long-term motivator. Likewise, positive outcomes or benefits are also poor long-term motivators. You can repeatedly tell an addict that he’ll blow up his life if he keeps acting out, and he still won’t change. You’ll get the same result if you tell him how great his life will be if he gets into recovery. Such tactics don’t work.
What brings about authentic change is a mysterious, dynamic interaction between our soul and the triune God. Until someone who is living a life of sin decides he can no longer bear living that way, nothing will change. The scale must tip in a way that the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of change. In recovery circles, they say we must get sick and tired of being sick and tired. Without this realization, things may change on the surface, but true, deep character change will remain elusive.
Tying this back to our topic, we can substitute any external force into the myth, and it will remain just that: a myth.
• He would stop if he loved Jesus and went to church more.
• He wouldn’t do this if he loved our kids more.
• He would be a man of integrity if we didn’t live in such a sex-saturated culture.
• He wouldn’t have done this if he had not been abused.
When the scale tips and the motivation becomes internal, then authentic change can occur. Until then, love is not the issue. “Igniting the old flame,” as some wives try to do, will only serve to kick the can of recovery farther down the street and delay dealing with reality.
The debunking of this myth requires a brief overview of compartmentalization. Please know this is simply an explanation, not an excuse for a man’s sexual acting out.
Men who commit sexual betrayal, especially those who are sexually addicted, are incredibly adept at compartmentalizing their behavior. Picture a closet wall with shelves from top to bottom, wall to wall. Each shelf holds as many shoeboxes as possible. Every box has a label that can easily be seen and read: Home, Family, Work, Hobbies, Addictions, Sexual Sin, God, and so on. These boxes represent the fragmented, compartmentalized mind of a man consumed with sexual sin. Each box holds areas of his life that ideally would be intermingled. But with an unhealthy person, these areas are isolated so that one doesn’t spill over into another.
Picture the very top shelf. On the far left side is the box marked Family. This box contains the memories of the wedding day, shared assets like a house and bank accounts, kids’ birthday parties, family vacations, dinners with relatives, and Christmas mornings. It holds dreams of life together and the “happily ever after.” It also holds love, commitment, empathy, security, provision, care, concern, and the other raw materials that make up the fabric of a marital relationship. At a time when a man is doing family life, for example, on Christmas morning, he slides this box off the shelf and pops off the lid. He is fully immersed in the contents (not to be confused with being fully present in the moment) and thus not digging around any of the other boxes. His mind is on his family and the festivities of unwrapping gifts, putting together toys, finding batteries, and cooking breakfast. When he is finished with the Family box, he puts all the contents back in, places the lid firmly on the top, and returns it to its place on the top shelf.
On the bottom shelf, in the far right-hand corner, is a box labeled Sexual Sin. This box contains the destructive, painful, shame-filled, and exciting elements of his addiction. When a man pulls this box off the shelf and dumps out the contents, he is totally engrossed by them. Whether the box contains pornography, masturbation, strip club visits, an affair—all of which could be indicative of a sexual addiction—his attention is solely focused on its contents.*
By the way, some men describe a feeling of tunnel vision when they head toward acting out, as if they can see nothing else but the next high. This is a function of compartmentalization and, metaphorically, digging around inside this box. What’s important to understand is that when a man is preoccupied with his Sexual Sin box, he is completely out of touch with and disconnected from his Family box. It’s as if when he is in one box, he is literally detached from all the others.
A wife will ask how her husband could commit the act of betrayal without thinking about her or the family. This is how: men compartmentalize their lives to the point where the singular focus of one area is all encompassing and becomes a barrier to his commingling the other compartments. The boxes are distinct and separate; there is very little overlap. When we’re in one box, we aren’t in another. There are rare occasions when, even though a man is mesmerized with the contents of his Sexual Sin box, a moment of clarity and conscience will prompt him to take a quick glance at the Family box. For a brief, fleeting moment, he’ll think, I shouldn’t be in this box. I should pick up all these pieces, close up the box, and throw it in the trash. I should completely get it out of the closet. For good …
But the contents grab his attention again and redirect him, so he ignores what he has seen. Addictive, compulsive, coping, self-preserving tendencies prevail, and he continues in shame-bound denial. Once he has acted out and no longer needs what the Sexual Sin box offers, he’ll quickly scoop up the contents, replace the lid, and return it to the shelf. He might not even think about that box until the addiction beckons again.
When a wife hears me share this closet metaphor, she’ll say something about how frustrated the whole thing makes her. She’ll say that compartmentalization sounds like an excuse. Even Shelley had this opinion when she was proofreading this section! She felt a little frustrated, like I was providing an escape clause or something for the men who commit betrayal. It seems to tap a nerve in wives.
That’s okay. I’m not writing this to fix it or make it feel better, nor even to make a husband’s betrayal more palatable. I simply want everyone to be informed and to understand. There is a small part of me that hopes a wife will process this information in a way that decreases her inclination to vilify her husband. It does not apply to every wife, but some see their husband as a terrible monster who has deliberately stripped away their dignity and whose evil intent is to inflict perpetual wounds. Chances are, this is just not the case.
Anyway, from this quick overview of compartmentalization, it’s safe to say that the boxes are self-soothing, coping strategies that men use to deal with life. The fragmented mind of a sexually addicted man often finds its origin in his childhood. For myriad reasons, the child needed and developed distinct boxes, each with its own set of rules, regulations, and relationships in order to make sense of or deal with the pain and confusion in his world.
We all compartmentalize to some extent. For example, we each have a unique set of parameters that guide our speech and behavior when we are at an important business dinner versus a meal at home. Different rules apply to our conduct when we are at a funeral as opposed to a wedding. While we all have some compartmentalization techniques that help us appropriately navigate life, a man who commits sexual betrayal has more distinct and defined containers and stronger dividers between them. This facilitates his ability to willingly commit such hurtful acts and inflict immeasurable damage to his marriage and other family relationships.
Compartmentalization is not nearly as big an issue for women. They typically don’t operate this way. Most women think holistically. They have fewer distinct boxes in their closets, so to speak, and many of them are interconnected. What goes on in one container affects others, because they are interwoven. As such, almost every wife I talk to says she could never imagine herself behaving in such hurtful ways and with total disregard for her husband and children.
Remember that the root word of integrity is integer, a whole number. It is not divisible nor disjointed. Thus striving for integrity means working toward integrating all the compartments. Extending the metaphor of the closet of boxes, integrity is a process by which all the boxes are removed from the shelves and dumped in the middle of the floor, where all the pieces commingle. The contents of one box mix with the contents of the other boxes. Work melds with Family. Home gets intermixed with Hobbies. Sexual Sin is dealt with because it’s in the same pile as the God and Church boxes. In fact, this is one of the primary drivers for encouraging men to commit to full disclosure. The deconstructing of the boxes that hold all our secrets is a prerequisite for integration within ourselves, with our wives, and with God.
* For further discussion of “fractional addiction,” see Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, Every Man’s Battle (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook, 2000), 30.