When I danced the night away with my “London friend,” with his hand on my waist and my heart pounding in my chest, the night my appreciation for “Blurred Lines” was preemptively forged, I was dating someone else.
My boyfriend, the one who had kissed me sloppily on the steps on the way to winning my heart, and I had been together for a scant four months. I loved him dearly. We had an agreement, though. I was pretty sure I would marry him one day (turns out I was wrong), but I was only twenty, and I wanted to be free to make out with a few strangers in British pubs if the occasion arose. I didn’t want the possibility of such a minor, but (to my mind) quintessential, study abroad experience to come between us. I didn’t want to have to choose between my love and my freedom. Not at twenty. Not if we were going to be together forever starting when I got back stateside.
That agreement proved to be all fine and well and good. I kissed a few strangers. I got to feel desirable and young, stupid and carefree. For a largely responsible oldest child, total nerd, this was an important rite of passage. It proved to be not a particularly big deal; it was within the agreed-upon bounds of our relationship.
The real problem arose when I met someone I was crazy about, another American in the program, who had these eyes and this smile, and who introduced me to Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s great writing book. We were friends, but we had chemistry. We walked home from class and shared shortcuts through the tony alleys of South Kensington; we talked about books. We saw plays for five pounds sterling, ate at awesome restaurants, and danced away Wednesday nights in the cheesy Covent Garden club that featured one-pound drink specials. We were almost always in groups. He was dating a statuesque Ivy Leaguer. I was in love with someone else.
This other boy, he of the writing classes and the nights dancing, was also technically allowed by his girlfriend to make out with strangers in bars. Still, nothing ever happened between us. Just lots of fraught silences and loaded looks. Now it’s possible, certainly, that this boy was never interested in me as anything more than a friend—I am well versed in unrequited crushes, and projecting content onto awkward silences—but I know I was scared that if I pursued anything with this boy, I would have to end things with my beloved back home.
A kiss in a bar is one thing; an emotional connection over books and vocation is quite another.
I didn’t, back then, quite understand how fidelity worked. I figured as long as we weren’t making out, I wasn’t breaking any promises. It was okay for me to dream about this other boy, to write letters and e-mails, to invite him to visit when we got back to the States, because “nothing ever happened.” I hadn’t ever kissed him—though I’d sure as hell thought about it—so I was, technically, being faithful. I thought the “technically” part mattered.
Nearly fifteen years later, I encountered a man who bears a physical resemblance to that boy. Not the Boyfriend, the Other One. The nose is different; this guy is taller. We are acquaintances, but one morning it struck me that he looked like my old crush. I’d never noticed it before because we are both parents and know each other only in the context of our children; I do not connect my children with old flames. The resemblance hit me one morning when this dad made a passing comment to me and I felt a flush rise in my cheeks, when I became aware, in a day care parking lot, of the blood rushing south, pounding through my abdomen.
It was weird. Also fleeting. I didn’t think about it again until I came home to work on this chapter. But having that feeling, the rush of attraction and arousal, made me contemplative.
Was this feeling a challenge to my faithfulness to my beloved husband?
Which made me wonder: What do we do with fidelity? Most people would probably say this is an important part of a relationship; however, both church and culture struggle to interpret fidelity in relationships in the sort of robust ways that will help people to actually be faithful. Rather than a romantic, and usually incorrect, notion that fidelity means never again feeling the rush of attraction, or shutting down the part of your brain that notices lovely strangers, a Christian sense of fidelity is one grounded in mutual promise and the hope of a shared life.
MUCH AS MARRIAGE used to be understood as a clear boundary outside of which sex was not supposed to (properly) occur, fidelity in a relationship used to be pretty generally understood to mean “not making out with other people.” And, if that’s the criterion we’re still using, I was probably solidly within the bounds of fidelity in both of the above instances.
I’m not sure, however, that “refraining from engaging in sexual activities with someone who is not your partner” is a sufficient definition of fidelity. Neither does the imperative “don’t cheat” capture the spirit of faithfulness. Maybe because you expect a positive definition of something that is supposed to be full of faith, not just a list of things to avoid.
One of these experiences, though, was out of my mind and off my conscience within three and a half minutes, while the other has become a source of some regret (and book fodder) years later. What was the difference?
There was a time when my fairly ridiculous reaction to a personable, benign comment from an acquaintance would have undone me completely. I had carried some certainty into my marriage with Josh because during the two years as a couple prior to our wedding, I’d never looked askance. Those two years marked the beginning of the longest period of fidelity I’d ever experienced; ours was the first relationship in which I could consider a long lifetime of monogamy as both romantic and possible, as opposed to frightening. We’d had a passionate beginning and our intimate bond was easily wrought.
Those years at the beginning of a relationship, of easy devotion and delicious infatuation, slowly melt into years in which devotion and infatuation, in which passion and desire, can and should yet exist; but the pastoral care literature—the stuff pastors are supposed to use to instruct young couples—carefully warns that those lovesick feelings of contentment no longer come so effortlessly. Desire has to be kindled, hearts have to be guarded against encroaching feelings, devotion requires intention. If feelings arise for others, it’s because something’s going on in your marriage.
I love to study theology, a discipline concerned with symbols, and relationships, and making meaning of our experiences in the world. My job—teaching, writing, preaching, providing pastoral care—requires that I pay attention to the meaning we make of our lives: thus, in my book, everything means something. But what I’ve learned over time is that not everything means what I think it means. Sometimes, people interpret things incorrectly.
Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that most of us are operating under a couple of different understandings of the nature of fidelity in any given moment. We may use contractual language: we have agreed to be monogamous, and thus cheating is breaking the contract. Anything short of cheating, though, is fine. Others of us hold a romantic vision of love as the fulfillment of all our desires in our partner, in which any desire for any other person is a betrayal. In our wedding, as in many, the pastor prayed, “What God has joined together, let no one break asunder,” and Josh and I vowed to “forsake all others and be faithful” to each other as long as we both shall live. Those promises, though, had been present, and largely explicit, for Josh and me long before the hot July day on which we wed.
Just about every couple I’ve ever worked with as they prepare to get married is totally on board with forsaking all others, in theory. I know far more romantics than contract negotiators. We grew up on Romeo and Juliet: stories of love blooming against all odds, of lovers preferring to die than be apart. The church plays into this, too, with discussion of mutual self-sacrifice and service and viral blog posts about how love and marriage are not for you. (Hint: they’re apparently for your partner.)1
It’s not that Christians are generating those narratives ex nihilo. A number of New Testament epistles are routinely read as advice guides for healthy, faithful relationships. But the one that seems to incontrovertibly convict anyone who’s ever so much as thrilled to the presence of an attractive stranger on the train comes from the mouth of Jesus himself.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
(MATTHEW 5:27–28)
Jesus is (perhaps unsurprisingly) right: you don’t need to actually commit adultery to have sinned against your partner (and probably yourself and God, too). But desire isn’t exactly the same as lust, even if it’s for someone to whom you’re not currently bound in a covenant relationship.
The recent morning on which I felt a flush of desire wasn’t so much my body longing for anything or anyone in particular, but might have been a signal of any number of things. The curious way sensory memory works, given this guy’s resemblance to that long-ago boy. Or maybe that I was ovulating, given that just about everything gets me going when I’m ovulating. Or, most likely, the flush of desire may have been related to the fact that I am writing a book about sex. These thoughts and feelings are rather close to the surface for me right now.
At any rate, when I got home, ready to write, I checked my calendar against the ovulation theory, and then let the feeling go, not just from my body, but from my mind. And thus I don’t think that moment constituted adultery, or even lust.
Some definitions might be in order.
WHETHER IT STARTS in late childhood or early adolescence, or doesn’t make an appearance until we’re older, at some point we realize that we are more attracted to some people than others. Physically attracted—we like their eyes or hair or build, or just the general look of them—or attracted to another attribute: the sound of their voice or the way they tell stories, their worldview or compassion. The nature of attraction can reveal as much about us as about the other person; it tells us about our preferences, whether momentary or persisting, about our mood and our perceived needs.
What I’d call chemistry (not in the sense of stoichiometry and pipettes and acids and bases that can burn a hole in your shirt if you’re not paying attention) can develop when there’s a mutual attraction; it’s the charge, the spark that seems to pull two people together. It exists in the give and take of conversation, in the pull that draws you to stand ever closer to the other person. I’m not great on etymology, but I think it’s called chemistry because two people, thrown together, make something new: they create something—energy, maybe, but sometimes something more. There is the possibility of burning a hole in something. There’s sexual chemistry, of course, but there are other types, too: the way good friends play off each other, or colleagues on a project, or a writer with her editor. Madeleine L’Engle, married for decades and writer for even longer, describes this beautifully:
A true friendship has become more and more a lost art in a society which feels that in order for a relationship to be fulfilled it must end in bed. A true friendship is always amoureuse; it is part of my human sexuality; each encounter with a friend is a time of creation . . . My relationship with my editor has got to be amourous. This doesn’t mean sexual indulgence . . . It does mean something is happening on that non-empirical level, in the mediating band between nightside and sunside. . . . Many editors are qualified . . . But with only a few is the spark set off in me, so that I know what must be done to make a manuscript come alive.2
There’s a decisively physical element to much of what we think of as chemistry, which is part of what makes it exciting, and part of what makes it risky. It’s why dancing can be foreplay; a pair can test out how easily and unconsciously they can get their bodies to move together in rhythm. Josh and I had been married for maybe five years when we stood on a North Carolina beach and shared one of the hottest moments of our relationship, in plain sight of my extended family. We threw a ball back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes it landed right in my hand; sometimes, our limbs lengthened to grab it from the air just above our heads. Watching him stretch, his grace and strength, feeling my own arms and legs moving to meet his throw, I wanted him. I delighted in the cadence of our dance, and gave thanks that no one in my family reads minds. A Nerf football has never been so sexy.
One of the reasons I married Josh is because we have chemistry six ways from Sunday: we dance well together physically and metaphorically. But while he’s the only person with whom I share chemistry on all those levels, I still manage to connect with other people on a host of other levels. Josh is my only husband, my only lover, my best friend: but he is not the only person I know and love.
Esther Perel, a couples and family therapist, muses:
We all share a fundamental need for security, which propels us toward committed relationships in the first place; but we have an equally strong need for adventure and excitement. Modern romance promises that it’s possible to meet these two distinct sets of needs in one place. Still, I’m not convinced. Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling.3
Just as Josh is not particularly interested in the ins and outs of denominational politics nor of theological arguments, I can’t keep track of the personalities and challenges of the eighty or so students he teaches each year. I’m good with names and faces, but he is forever being greeted in our town, at the library, in the grocery store, by students current and former, whom I have never heard of nor seen before. After years in this school district, there are literally hundreds of them.
I can’t be jealous, then, of the fact that he and his colleagues support one another tremendously and want to spend time with one another outside of work: the guys go camping annually; he lunches with the ladies on his team each Friday. For my part, I have worked hard to cultivate an ever-expanding network of awesome colleagues in my own field.
As L’Engle suggests, though, the question is not whether there’s something lacking in our spouse that makes us want to have more than one friendship or relationship in our lives—but whether those other relationships support us individually and as a couple in healthy ways. I’m invited to lunch with the ladies and Josh; he’s welcome to talk church nerd whenever he wants; his colleagues and mine value our marriage and are rooting for it.
So, too, do we rely on siblings and friends and parents to enliven and enrich our lives. Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Jealousy, possessiveness, a need to be the only relationship in a partner’s life—those are thieves that steal, kill, and destroy. A community that provides grounding, meaning, connection, and joy is a critical contribution to the abundant life Jesus describes. But so are fidelity and trust within our primary relationship.
Attraction is not always sexual, and tells us as much about ourselves as anyone else; chemistry is mutual and not always sexual, but usually awesome, as long as it supports your primary relationship. Arousal is the sexual side of attraction and, similarly, tells us as much about ourselves as anyone else. But it’s not always another person, or something they’re doing or saying, that gets us hot and bothered. I could smell Josh’s deodorant out in the world and be ready to go most of the time, hear a certain song and be filled with longing, either because it calls up a memory or simply because it’s full of poetry.
For a long time, I thought that being in love with one person meant only having eyes for them. (Shbop-shbop.) That’s how you know, right? When you can’t think of anyone else, when she’s on your mind all the time: his smile, her voice, the way he makes you laugh, the way she sees you. My college boyfriend was the one I loved, and then I met someone else who made me feel that way. With whom I wanted to spend as much time as I could; with whom I felt alive. Not more alive than when I was with my boyfriend, but also alive.
A therapist friend and I were talking about couples the other day. I usually see them before they’re married; she sees them after. When I see them, when they are planning their weddings, they are usually still delightfully infatuated. By the time she does, they are no longer in that space wherein they crave each other without thinking, wherein they are barreling toward each other in the hope of ecstatic reunion. Their intimate familiarity has grown, and their all-consuming desire has cooled.
Perel suggests that this cooling has more to do with the paradoxical nature of intimacy and desire than it does with the relative health of anyone’s particular relationship. In our lasting relationships, we want closeness, and stability. We experience change as stressful and threatening to the life we’ve built together. But desire, the erotic, the singular focus on our partner and the thrilling feeling of butterflies in our stomachs, sweaty palms, and breathless anticipation: those things require uncertainty, and distance. Not grave, unconquerable distance, but some. How can you breathlessly anticipate the arrival of your lover, when most of the time the greatest distance between you is between two apartments, or (worse!) the kitchen and the bathroom? In a deeply intimate relationship, you share a lot. The erotic asks for concealment, negotiating, back-and-forth.
Perel’s wondrous reminder, the one that my therapist friend and I realized in our discussion, is that people think it’s right, good, and necessary to trade one feeling for the other. It is worth it, people say, committing to monogamy; intimacy is worth the decline of the erotic. This is what growing up is all about. But they’re wrong.
We should never sacrifice one fundamental need for another, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think we can.
We need both; Jesus did not come to rob our lives of richness, but to help us live into life’s fullness. Jesus would not encourage us in an attempt to kill some vital force within us; we’re supposed to notice beauty in the world, the amazing individuality of every living person. As L’Engle says, “If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive.”4 We’re supposed to relish the ties that bind us to one another and the creative energy that flows among us. Jesus surely appreciates my freckles and sense of humor, and Josh’s way with words and the way he slips into “Dance-y Hammond” mode if we stay at a party for long enough. If God cares about the sparrows, and counts each and every hair on our heads, surely we are following in the spirit of Christ when we notice the generous way she is with kids, or the length of her calf; when we see his concern for his justice, and the way he fills out his shirt.
That said, as Paul reminds us, always: “Everything is permitted, but everything isn’t beneficial. Everything is permitted, but everything doesn’t build others up” (1 Corinthians 10:23, CEB). Depending on whether he or she or we are single, if there’s any disproportionate power relationship dynamic between us, if we have the sort of rapport that warrants the giving of compliments, it may not be beneficial, appropriate, to give voice to the fine qualities we’ve noticed in another. It may not even be beneficial or appropriate to entertain ongoing thoughts about the lovely attributes so-and-so has going for them.
WHEN JESUS WARNS the gathered people about adultery and lust, he does some more scriptural interpretive work: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Don’t commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every man who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28, CEB).
Good old Jesus, raising the stakes. The commandment from Sinai prohibits adultery. Thou shalt not . . . But Jesus suggests that it’s not just our actions that can cause harm. You don’t have to follow through; you just have to think about it.
Surely that’s a metaphor, right? It isn’t really just as bad to cheat than to sort of contemplate it, is it? What’s the difference between appreciating someone’s God-given hotness and lusting after them sinfully?
Some Christians5 define lust as thinking or doing anything sexual without your spouse, including but not limited to teenage masturbatory fantasy, a little bit of imagination about an ex or a celebrity, and desiring someone. I think that’s drawing the circle a little wide. How, after all, do you find the person you want to make your spouse without experiencing a bit of sexual desire?
Rather, the sticking point for me is the object of the desire. For those Christians just mentioned, any object other than a spouse is a problem. But if we don’t believe that all pleasure, all desire for unmarried folks is necessarily wrong, that’s an insufficient definition. Philosopher Simon Blackburn comes closer to the point: “Love is individual: there is only the unique Other, the doted upon, the single star around whom the lover revolves. Lust takes what comes.”6
The question of lust isn’t necessarily just one of monogamy, then—it’s about the failure to value someone for who they are, in the fullness of their humanity. Margaret Farley writes,
As we frequently understand it, lust is a craving for sexual pleasure without any real affective response to, union with, or affirmation of the other. If there is any love here, it is of oneself, for the sake of which something or someone else is “lusted after.” The objects of lust are in this sense fungible, they are whatever entices one in sexually passionate ways.7
Blackburn and Farley lead us toward a definition: lust is sinful because it devalues others as individuals. Lust isn’t really concerned with the particulars of another, about his body or her interest or her consent.
A lusting suitor might deny this charge, caring mightily, even obsessively, about the particular characteristics of the object of his desire. What moves desire into the realm of lust? Or burning, fiery, passionate longing into excess?
If love is about valuing another and honoring God’s image within her, lust is less concerned with the good of the other than with the meeting of a desire for union. It’s not that no affection for the object exists, just that his needs and wants are not the priority.
Lust is sinful because it fails the test of neighbor love . . . but it can also fail the test of self-love, too. Blackburn writes, “When we talk of lust it might seem clear enough what we are talking about: sexual desire . . . But that does not get to the heart of it.”8 There is something about lust that is inherently selfish, but selfishness is not the same as the self-love to which God calls us. The sin of gluttony works as a less-politicized analogy: the glutton eats and eats, depriving others of food they need, not caring for their lack; but eating like that will kill a body before too long.
Lust dismisses the needs of others, but also tends to evidence a willful ignorance of its possessor’s own needs. Lust is about sexual desire, but it’s usually about something else, too. Heck, even sexual desire itself is usually about more than one thing, too; human beings are complicated.
Poet Marc O’Brien contracted polio at the age of six, and spent the rest of his life in an iron lung, profoundly physically disabled. In 1990, he wrote a story for The Sun about his quest to understand his sexuality as a person with a disability, and his strong desire to experience sexual touch and intimacy with another person. His essay, “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” was made into a 2012 movie starring Helen Hunt, and both renderings of the story are helpful in parsing the complexity of human desire. “It took me years to discover that what separated me from [others] was fear—fear of others, fear of making decisions, fear of my own sexuality, and a surpassing dread of my parents.”9
Growing into adulthood requires—for all of us—finding the courage to reach out to others, and to embrace our sexuality as a source of vitality instead of shame. O’Brien writes:
As a man in my thirties, I still felt embarrassed by my sexuality. It seemed to be utterly without purpose in my life, except to mortify me when I became aroused during bed baths. I would not talk to my attendants about the orgasms I had then, or the profound shame I felt. I imagined they, too, hated me for becoming so excited.
O’Brien experienced his body as a betrayer: not entirely outside himself—for he felt as emotionally passive as physically—but working against his best interest.
I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be held, caressed, and valued. But my self-hatred and fear were too intense.10
In O’Brien’s testimony, his sexual desires and impulses are solitary; though he longed to be in love, to have a sexual relationship with a beloved, he had emotional work of his own to do before he could pursue such a thing. But the focus of his desires on sexual acts, and on his own needs, is not sinful. Neither, I’d argue, is the important work done by Cheryl, the sex surrogate, or the advice given by Father Mike, the local Catholic priest, who suggests: “Jesus was never big on rules, and he often broke the rules out of compassion.”11
O’Brien’s story compels because it raises complex questions and reminds us again that sexual desire is not in and of itself the same thing as lust; what moves me is his unflinching commitment to self-examination. More often than not, those in the throes of lust aren’t able to be honest with themselves about what they really desire. Sex, maybe. But also affirmation of a sort; or connection, or a thrill. Maybe an escape. Sometimes sex is an easy way to avoid harder conversations. A number of my survey respondents reported in retrospect using sexual activity with someone other than their partner in early relationships to provoke jealousy or a breakup they couldn’t otherwise imagine initiating.
On the flip side of lust—whether that sin lies in thought or action—lies faithfulness: to God, to our partners, and to ourselves. Faithfulness doesn’t require so much the policing of our thoughts, an anxious attention to propriety, but a living into the fullness of our promises and relationships.
When I met the fellow journalism student in London, I wasn’t blindly lusting. In fact, in the context of my relationship, passing lust worked out on Australians with work visas at our local pub was preferable (if less ethical according to the norms of chapter three) to actually caring for someone else. But my growing feelings for my friend challenged my faithfulness, because I started imagining what it would be like to be with him instead of my boyfriend. I hedged my bets on the future of my committed relationship, loitered near the metaphorical doorway with one foot outside it.
I’ve wondered on occasion what made it so hard for me to get my head around what was going on; why I couldn’t see my faithlessness for what it was. I believed in fidelity. I’d been surrounded by models of it. But I hadn’t realized that you could feel love for more than one person at once.
WE’RE CALLED TO a life of abundant love, to connection with lots of people. To our parents and siblings, friends and strangers. We’re called to see the best in people, to appreciate and value them in their fullness. I shouldn’t have been surprised that in the midst of trying to love my neighbor, I might, you know, start to feel love for my neighbor. It’s possible, it turns out, that you can be attracted to more than one person, even more than one person at one time. But it’s not possible to grow into the abundance of love, to grow more perfect in love, if you’re hedging your bets.
The myth of “the One” is powerful in our culture, and I object to it for how much harder it can make life for single folks, but it also presents a challenge to fidelity. The idea that we are each intended for just one person has led more than one person in a committed relationship to wonder if they have been in error making a commitment to their partner, if they are instead supposed to be with the person awakening new (or old, or faded) feelings in them.
Instead of measuring potential suitors against the imagined criteria of the One, we might be better served by considering Christian practices of discernment. The Quaker tradition uses the language of “way open” or “way closed.” God’s grace and the Holy Spirit move in us and in the world. Sometimes doors open and that opening allows us to see a way forward in a decision. Sam loved Chris, but they were from different parts of the country, and it was vitally important to each of them that they eventually settle in the vicinity of their families of origin. Neither could imagine compromising. Their love was good and strong, but this unbridgeable conflict seemed like a door closing on their relationship. Adam loved Amanda, but he wanted kids and she didn’t. If they’d decided to stay together, his becoming a father would be a way closed to him, but he’d have the open door of a life with someone he loved.
When you make a promise to be faithful to one person, that means that you’re intentionally closing the door to certain types of relationships with other people. Those relationships might have been wonderful. You might have made a life with someone different from your spouse. But you didn’t. You chose one way and not another.
Our culture has for a long time spoken of the way of marriage and commitment as not simply a door, but a cage. The title of Esther Perel’s book, Mating in Captivity, comes from a D. H. Lawrence poem, “Wild Things in Captivity”:
The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.12
Perel’s description of the paradox of needs in a long relationship is a useful rejoinder to that way of thinking. We long for commitment, for security and intimacy, but we will, mostly, if we’re not experiencing depression or low levels of vitamin D or testosterone, not cease to desire the thrills of an erotic life simply because we’ve made a commitment.
Lawrence’s last stanza offers a solution:
Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can’t take place.
Break the cage, then, start in and try.13
Perel rejects the solution, and the reasoning, that if you want to have sex, you have to break the cage of marriage. So do I. It’s true that sex is a state of grace, and that it can’t exist in all its wonder and glory in captivity. But our culture is wrong in equating commitment with a cage. We walk through the open door into committed relationships, subsequently closing other doors. That door opens up, however, not to a tiny room with too close walls, but into the wild blue yonder.
There is nothing more expansive than the erotic imagination of human beings, Perel suggests. Commitment to one partner can be, should be, an opening to a space wider than our imagining.
The problem of infidelity is a problem of lust—but not because it is an insatiable desire for sex. Rather, infidelity manifests a failure to attend to our needs for recognition and surprise, for self-awareness and desire, within our relationships, instead focusing on someone else. While her particulars may be lovely, she could really be anyone, because the desire for her is about meeting the seeker’s needs, not creating a new relationship in love. The problem of infidelity is a problem of lust, because ignoring one’s commitments sacrifices the needs of the partner on the altar of the pursuer’s greed. If you’ve promised to forsake all others, it’s a sin against your partner to cease forsaking them.
Perel suggests a number of ways to negotiate and be intentional in engaging erotic imagination within committed relationships. But she says that all the tricks and toys and new positions our culture describes in women’s and lads’ mags are not the important factors. She instructs, “If we are to maintain desire with one person over time we must be able to bring a sense of the unknown into a familiar space. In the words of Proust, ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.’”14
Jesus is forever talking about having eyes to see and ears to hear. Whether it’s the reign of God being born among us or the thing that attracted us to our partner in the first place, we need to be intentional in looking for it, in seeing it with new eyes. We assume that when we’re in love, the rest will simply fall into place, but, as Perel notes, spontaneity—in sex or in intimacy—is a myth. We have to be intentional.
It can seem like a drag—and indeed, every now and again, it is, even with someone we dearly love; but if the relationship is worth investing in, the investment is worthwhile.
JOSH AND I have been together for over a decade now, and because our relationship is on pretty solid ground, there is less surprise, less intrigue, and virtually no pining in my life. We check in with each other about too much; I never have time to pine. And, should I ever need a fix of those things, of pining and intrigue, I can read, or browse romantic movies on Netflix, or engineer a period of separation from my beloved. (Our third child was totally conceived after Josh had been away at a writing residency for two weeks. This is surely not a coincidence.)
In truth, those easy things are more than sufficient. I was horrible at dating. When I first started up with Josh, I could tell things would be serious (not least because he was best friends with my roommate, and if I screwed up our nascent relationship I’d have to hunt for another apartment). I hadn’t been single for terrifically long; as someone well practiced at serial monogamy, I’d been (sort of?) enjoying a period of just going on dates.
I wondered about this to my mother—Am I ready for this?—and she said, “Bromleigh, my child, you are no good at being single. You are built for relationships.”
I was more than a little surprised to hear this from her (and it must be said that she only said this to me when I was twenty-three, at the age she thought it was well-nigh time for me to be finding a serious partner), but she was totally right.
I find my depression harder to manage when I’m single. When I was dating, pining, obsessing over unreturned phone calls, I didn’t get my work done. I spent too much time moping to get my papers written.
I knew my relationship with Josh was different because there was no drama. He made sure that I graduated on time (he selflessly played Madden football on his PlayStation while I read theology and worked out economics problem sets sitting next to him on the couch). There’s not a ton of intrigue, because there’s too much trust. Our love is the solid ground I stand on. There’s not a ton of intrigue, but there’s adventure, and the mutual enabling of self-exploration: without his support, I would not have written a sex book; without my encouragement, he would not have pursued a master’s degree in a program he loves.
Being faithful in our relationships is sometimes harder than we might have imagined—it simply doesn’t come without some effort, not for anybody—but a faithful love is also better than we might ever have imagined. Firmly grounded in a trusting relationship, we know the assurance of grace that enables us to go out into the world and love widely, deeply, and ever more perfectly in love. We can, in Perel’s words, “not merely survive, but revive”:15 we can pursue pleasure and connection, creativity and passion. In a faithful relationship, we can stop hedging our bets, and take a leap of faith.