She [an adulteress] does not ponder the path of life; Her ways are unstable, she does not know it.
-Proverbs 5:6, NASB
A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.
-Luke 6:45, NLT
Cheaters cannot help but expose how they really see marriage.
When caught–or even before being caught–cheaters are well-known to talk about how they are on the raw end of the marriage deal.
They aren’t getting enough sex.
They aren’t being appreciated enough.
They aren’t getting enough money from their spouse.
You name it. A cheater has probably said it about how they are the martyr in the marriage.
I think such “excuses” and accusations expose the wicked hearts of cheaters. And it is sad.
They are treating these accusations as central to what they believe marriage is.
It is all about the marriage “deal.” And they think they got the raw end by this point in the marriage.
Clearly, they did not understand godly marriage from the start.
It wasn’t about what benefits they got from being married. The prize was the spouse that the cheater is now abusing with their lies, accusations, and infidelity.
With pastors so fixated on avoiding divorces and so-called Christian counselors fixated on “what was missing” in the marriage, cheaters are left unchallenged with this pagan view of marriage.
The cheater view of marriage is dehumanizing to say the least:
The cheater is reducing his or her spouse to what benefits they bring or–more precisely, at this moment–are not bringing to them.
To me, this says the cheater was in love with the deal, not the faithful spouse. The faithful spouse was merely the means to the ends of them getting what they wanted. And that is sad.
It is sad because such a view means the cheater will be ever chasing “the deal” and missing out on the real riches that come with deep, committed relationships.
This is what my cheating ex-husband said to me WITH A BIG SMILE ON HIS FACE, sometime between the night I caught him out on a date with a newly divorced ho-worker and the day he told me he wanted a divorce because of my “trust issues”. He said to me, “We will always have our memories of our great sex.” Yep! This was during the two months we were “working on our marriage” with our lying, emotionally abusive-to-me pastor. All of our 24 years together — the birth of our two kids, all the joy they brought to us, all our happy times together with each other and as a family of four, our vacations, all the memories — and all that mattered to him was sex. Out of his mouth came what was most important to him, just like the Bible said it would. And when I felt confusion over his words — that’s when he was lying because it didn’t line up with the truth as I knew it and experienced it — cognitive dissonance. I truly don’t believe he’s a Christian.