When a business partnership ends…

When a business partnership ends, we do not necessarily assume one party is punishing the other.

Now, I believe marriage is much more than a business partnership or general contract. It is a covenant. 

However, I do think it is helpful to think about the two together. It is helpful to correct thinking that choosing divorce is necessarily punitive in nature.

It is not!

Divorce is a form of detachment. The faithful spouse who chooses (or accepts divorce) is saying that they cannot stay attached to someone stuck in spiritually, emotionally, socially, physically, and/or financially destructive behavior.

I think cheaters are like addicts:

They are addicted to stolen intimacy, possibly the sex, and the power holding such secrets gives them over faithful spouses (and others not “in the know.”)

This is why true repentance from cheaters is so rare. The sin owns them like the substance of choice owns an addict.

When the “addict” refuses help and will not own the process of recovery fully, then little hope exists for him or her to recover.

Many of us, faithful spouses, would have loved to stay married as long as our cheater really dealt with his or her “addiction.” However, we were not given that option.

The addict refused to give up lying, cheating, and “stealing.”

So, instead of two lives (or more) being destroyed by one person’s hell-bent penchant for sinful destruction, we detached from the cheater. We divorced.

The cheater is free to defy God and live a life of sin, but we do not have to accept being dragged down with them (e.g. Mt 19:9).

I do not have to wish my former “partner” ill will when dissolving our partnership. The dissolution may merely be an acknowledgement that we have chosen different, incompatible paths.

That is not a punishment, but rather the faithful spouse facing the sad reality that their (ex) spouse prefers sin to honoring God.