“She cheated on you? Well, did you take her for granted?”
-Cruel, Cheater-Apologist Pastor
What I find interesting about accusations about ingratitude is how they seem one-sided when a cheater is involved.
The faithful spouse is fair game to be criticized for not showing enough gratitude for their spouse. This is doubly the case if the other spouse cheated on him or her emotionally.
Advice about not taking the other spouse for granted is dispensed among Christians with the veiled threat that cheating might happen if you failed to live up to this.
The real interesting thing is how the cheater is really the person with the greatest gratitude deficit in my opinion.
If the cheater was grateful for their spouse, their heart would have no room for another. Instead, they failed to cultivate this important spiritual discipline.
They allowed ingratitude and entitlement lies to grow like weeds in their heart until infidelity revealed the spiritual disease on their insides.
This is also what makes the common pastoral diagnosis so evil. They double down on the cheater’s entitlement and ingratitude by suggesting the issue was with the faithful spouse taking the cheater for granted.
Perceived ingratitude from the faithful spouse is not the issue. Sin comes from the heart of the cheater alone as Scripture teaches (see Mark 7:21-23).
Yes, an ingratitude issue is present when cheating happens. However, like the sin of adultery, this ingratitude can be located in the heart of the sinner who cheated.
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*A version of this post ran previously.
