Christian Men's Defense Network

In Part 1 of this series, I dealt with getting into the right spiritual mindset. In Part 2 I dealt with understanding and combating the threat of shame. Now, we need to deal with pitfall avoidance. There are a lot of pitfalls, some emotional, some relational, and some practical.

The first pitfall to avoid is to not fall for any blame-shifting tricks your wife might throw at you. If your experience is true to a common pattern (one I also experienced), she’s been telling you for weeks or months that she is “unhaaaaapy” in the marriage, and that you need to change. She might even have threatened divorce if you didn’t change.

This is very common. In fact, you might even be in marriage therapy right now to deal with your alleged shortcomings. This is a major pitfall you need to identify and avoid: She isn’t telling you all this stuff because you are really a bad husband. She isn’t going to therapy with you because you need to change for the sake of the marriage. She isn’t threatening divorce because she’s unhaaaapy.

Rather, she’s doing all of these things because she needs you to take the blame for her sin. If you google “christian wife cheated” or something similar, you will find multiple stories where the guy is going to therapy with his wife and then finds out she was cheating. Or you’ll find stories about how she was complaining about the marriage, and then he found out she was unfaithful.  I

In fact, this is exactly what happened to me with my ex-wife.  For a month and a half before I found out the truth, I was repeatedly instructed that I had to change for the sake of the marriage.  This kind of thing isn’t a coincidence.  She needs you to buy into her own personal fantasy that her actions were somehow justified.

Don’t do it. She has to admit that the current crisis in the marriage was caused by her own lack of self-control, not by you being a bad husband. She must admit this, both for her own spiritual health, and because your marriage cannot survive unless she does. Repentance results in healing. Unrepentance results in self-destruction.

Furthermore, if you admit to being the chief problem, she will lose all respect for you. I know, this sounds really bizarre, but it’s how female psychology works. She needs a man who is strong and tough, who can stand up to threats and remain stable. She needs a man who can stand up even to her, because if her man cannot stand up to a woman who is clearly in the wrong, how could she trust him to stand up to bigger threats?

So don’t do it. Don’t be a pansy.

Second, if you are currently seeing a marriage therapist, stop. This is the opposite advice of what most Christians will give you. But if your wife brought you to the counselor under false pretenses, then continuing the counseling relationship is buying in to your wife’s scheme.

Instead, if you want to go to a counselor, find a male Christian counselor of conservative theological disposition. I say male because, as the victimized party, you need someone who can empathize with the kinds of emotions a man feels when his spouse cheats. I say “of conservative theological disposition” because you do not want to go to a counselor who is a feminist white knight mangina. While being conservative doesn’t make it impossible to be a white knight, it at least lowers the probability. It also increases the odds that the counselor believes in ideas like sin, guilt, and (again) repentance.

Third, you need to avoid a false concept of forgiveness. This is really, really important. I forgave my ex-wife very shortly after she told me she had been unfaithful. I did this, not for her sake, but because it is my duty to my Lord as one for whom He has shed His blood. If Jesus died so that I might be forgiven, who am I to not forgive my wife?

But forgiveness is not a feeling. You can forgive your wife and still be angry as hell at her. In time, as you ask God to give you a heart that backs up your decision to forgive, He will. But forgiveness is just that, a decision. It is an act of the will, nothing more or less. It is, as one friend put it, “Giving up your right to a better past.”

Forgiveness is also not reconciliation. This is a very common misunderstanding among Christians. Just because you forgive your wife, doesn’t mean your marriage isn’t over. It doesn’t mean divorce is out of the picture. Instead, it means you take your hands (metaphorically) off her throat.

So do not seek any form of revenge. Divorce isn’t revenge, and if you decide to pursue divorce for the purpose of revenge, you’re making a big mistake. Now, not all Christians agree on when–if ever–divorce is permissible. As a Protestant, I hold to the usual Protestant interpretation that it is only permissible in case of adultery (with the possible exception of physical abuse creating a “divorce for personal safety, but no remarriage” situation). Adultery is the very case you’re in right now.

But my point is, regardless of your personal beliefs about divorce, when you forgive your wife, it doesn’t mean you’ve reconciled the marriage. Forgiveness is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for reconciliation.

Fourth, don’t assume she isn’t already planning to divorce you. She might very well be. That’s why you have to be pro-active here. There are some vital practical steps you need to think about (h/t to Man for the Ages for some of these):

• First, if you have a joint checking account, I would immediately go to the bank and put half the cash (your half) into your own personal account. The internet is chock full of stories of a woman emptying a joint account after her husband confronted her about an affair.
• Next, never move out. If you move out now, chances are you will never get your house back. She’ll divorce you and, posession being 9/10ths of the law, you’re out of luck.
• If the two of you separate for a period of time, and you have kids, do not let her take the kids. Do you hear me!?! Do not let her take the kids. You will never get custody if she does. And she might very well take them half-way across the country, and your relationship with your kids will never be the same.
• Be clear to her, if you decide to separate, that since she was the one who stepped out, you are staying in the house (assuming you want the house in this market) and the kids (if you have any) are staying with you.
• Keep a journal of everything that happens, including time spent with kids. This is good both as a record should things get ugly from a legal standpoint, and as a means to organize your thoughts and enable you to remember facts and events. The latter will be important in the healing process. Don’t tear pages out of the journal. If you need it in court, doing so will make it suspect.
• Do not go blabbing to just anyone. For one, you may not know who she cheated with (and it might be more than one guy). So who knows if one of the people you tell is her lover. For two, some of the people you tell might be her friends and they might clue her in as to your thoughts. For three, it can get you in legal hot water if you’re not careful. So stick with immediate family members for now.

These are some basic guidelines on pitfalls to avoid. This isn’t an exhaustive list. In general, it is a good idea to 1) use common sense; 2) realize that, as an adulteress, your wife is not trustworthy, and she must work to earn back your trust; and 3) keep up the 3 P’s. Those three rules will help you avoid a lot of problems.

Update: Reader 7man has this sage advice to add:

So your Christian wife cheated on you.  The first post in this series dealt with getting you in the right spiritual mindset:  God has your back.  Now, you need to deal with preparing for the emotional journey.

First, be prepared for the fact that this is going to hurt.   A lot.  For a long time.  This isn’t going to clear itself up in a couple of days like an Athlete’s Foot infection.  You will sometimes feel like an emotional train wreck.  You will sometimes feel utterly alone, even when you’re with friends or family. You will sometimes feel like God has totally abandoned you (but He hasn’t, trust me).   Like the damned crew of the Black Pearl in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, you will sometimes feel absolutely nothing.  Numb.  Unable to either laugh or sink into despair.

And you will sometimes feel red-hot, blazing anger.

It’s okay to be angry.  Christians today will tell you anger is never justified.  And yet they claim to serve a Lord who actually chased people out of the Temple with a whip like a mad man.   Ignore all that.  Be angry, but do not sin.

Next, you need to be clear that this is not  your fault.  Shame will be a constant threat to you.  And you must not let the Devil shame you.  Cling to God and resist the Devil.

Your wife especially will try to shame you.  She will try to tell you she did this because she was “unhaaaaapy,” because you don’t listen to her, because you don’t communicate well, because you don’t keep the house clean (my ex-wife tried all of these).  That’s baloney.

Here  you need understand your first bit of female psychology.  Women often have a wee little furry rationalization hamster in their heads.  In the face of facts, truth, reason, or logic that point to the woman’s guilt, her little rationalization hamster will get in its hamster wheel and run as fast as it can away from reality.  But it will never get anywhere.  It’s stuck in a hamster wheel.  So she will only go in circles.

Often, such a woman’s rationalization hamster will create the idea in her head that she did such and such because she was unhappy.  She’ll do this after the fact as a way to rationalize in her mind what she did.  She won’t even realize she did it.  In actual fact, she might have been really happy right up until some suave, muscular, rich, charming, and exciting man said hello and started to flirt with her.  But after the fact, she will create the idea in her own mind that she wasn’t happy the whole time.

No, the Bible gives us only one reason that she cheated on you:  Lust.  Rank, disgusting, vile, perverted lust.  Women lust too, even though, again, a lot of Christian pastors don’t ever mention that.  They only like to talk about guys who look at porn, never about women who commit lust that leads to infidelity.  Some of it is innocent on the pastors’ part:  Because the female version of lust is much more emotionally driven than the male version, it is much easier to confuse for real love.  And pastors are at a disadvantage in understanding this because, like you, they’re dudes.

If a Christian man cheats, other Christians will tell you that it was lust in your heart and you need to own that and repent of it and exercise self-control.  They’re right, too.  Should be the same speech for a woman.

But if the woman is the one who cheats, a large number of them will say something like, “The fact that she felt a need to cheat indicates there was some deeper issue in the marriage that you both need to work together to solve.”  Baloney.   She felt a need to cheat?  Yeah, just like when a guy sees a hot blond with a low-cut top and feels a need to fantasize about having sex with her.  Seriously.  How stupid do they think you are?

This is the truth.  There is no shame.  She is the one at fault.  Think about these things before moving on.

So you are a Christian man, and you just found out your Christian wife cheated on you.  I’ve been there, man.  It is the worst feeling I’ve ever known.  I really feel awful for you.  When it happened to me, I literally felt like someone had reached in and torn the heart right out of my chest.  Before it happened, I used to read descriptions like that and think the person writing them was exaggerating, engaging in hyperbole.  No.  That is what it feels like.

First, take a deep breath.  Reflect on this for a second:  In brotherly love, your Lord, while you were still His enemy, gave His life as a sacrifice for you.  Because of Him, there is nothing that can now or ever separate you from the power, protection,  and fatherly love of Your Father in Heaven (Rom. 8:38-39).  God has your back.

Now, let me explain things to you like they are.  When it happened to me, there was almost nothing out there to give me Christian guidance on what to do about it.  Almost nothing.  And what was there, was, I discovered in retrospect, based on a false understanding of psychology and, even worse, a false understanding of Biblical marriage and sexuality.

Almost all the stuff I found was about a guy cheating, not the woman cheating.  This is despite the fact that female marital infidelity is a growing trend within the Christian community, one that the church refuses to deal with and likes to paper over.  In our society, women are almost as likely to cheat on their spouses as men, but there’s next to nothing out there to help a Christian man deal with that.

Which is why I wrote this.  It’s a little something to guide you through the process.  It may not be perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot more than you’ll get from Focus on the Family or other “Christian” institutions, many of whom have given themselves over to latent Christian feminism or faulty unbiblical views of marriage.  So calm down and pay attention.  Again, God has your back.  Trust me.  He had mine, even though it took me a long time to realize that.

A thousand may fall at your side
And ten thousand at your right hand,
But it shall not approach you.
–Psalm 91:7

The Devil is trying to get at you, to weaken your resolve to abide in quiet faith to your Lord and King.  But he isn’t trying to get at your marriage.  He already got at your marriage when he got at your wife.  There’s nothing you can do about that now.  You are his next target.  It might be possible for your marriage to continue, but realize the Devil already got it, and you’re now starting over.  But in this, remember the words of the famous hymn written by Martin Luther:

And though this world, with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed
His truth to triumph through us.
The Prince of Darkness grim,
We tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure,
For lo, his doom is sure;
One little word shall fell him.

God’s got your back.

But now you have some homework:  Bible reading.  I suggest a regular daily dose of the three P’s:  Psalms, Proverbs, and Paul.

Psalms because David often writes of being under attack, and of God’s salvation and protection against that attack.  You are under attack, so you need the encouragement and strength of the Psalms as you struggle against the “principalties and powers” of the Devil.

Proverbs because there Solomon talks of the importance of wisdom.  You will need wisdom in your life more now than you ever have before.  Solomon also talks a great deal about how to avoid the wiles of a sexually immoral woman.  Your wife, as hard as it is to admit, is such a woman, and her wiles can be powerful, tearing you and your family down to please her sinful passions.  “For a prostitute’s fee is only a loaf of bread, but an adulteress goes after a precious life” (Prov. 6:26).  You need wisdom.

Paul because he was, as theologian F.F. Bruce called him, the “apostle of the heart set free.”  Paul is the apostle of joy, redemption, and hope.  And you need these three.  Ephesians and Colossians are good choices, since they focus on God’s eternal love for us and Christ’s pre-eminence, power, love, and glory.  Finally, I especially suggest regular reading and re-reading of Romans 8.

The three P’s are vital to success.  This was one area I personally lacked, and I wished I had been mindful of my P’s in order to help the healing process.

Now that you are hopefully in the right spiritual mindset, the next post in this series will focus on helping you get in the right emotional mindset.