And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also.
-Jeremiah 3:8, KJV
What I find especially troubling is how some people will call some affairs “exit affairs” and thereby minimize how devastating these affairs are to faithful partners.
An “exit affair” is generally understood as a the final act of a cowardly cheater who is leaving a “troubled” marriage. In other words, the cheater leaves the marriage via committing adultery.
As you may have guessed, people tend to focus upon the “troubled” part of the marriage over the actual treacherous cheating as what doomed such marriages.
It is a version of the old lie that says adultery is just a symptom and not a sin.
This “exit affair” thinking is madness. Even if the affair was the last act of a cowardly cheater in the marriage, that does NOT mean it was insignificant as to the marriage’s end.
Let me explain via analogy:
Say a shooter enters an oncology unit at a hospital and starts killing cancer patients.
Is the shooter less of a murderer because his victims had cancer?
Do we need to go into the full medical history of one of his victims to figure out what killed one of his victims–i.e. the bullet through the heart?
The same idea works here with “exit affairs.”
Going into the marital history is like taking the medical history of the deceased gunshot victim and suggesting such is necessary to determine cause of death.
Such behavior is an engagement in willful blindness towards what obviously killed the marriage–i.e. the infidelity.
Let’s stop minimizing the damage of any adultery!
There is no such thing as a noble “affair!”
The cheater who ends her marriage via an “exit affair” is acting in a destructive and wicked way. It only takes one adulterous affair to destroy a marriage just as it only takes one bullet to kill a human being.
Please, pastor and fellow Christian, stop ignoring the obvious and support the real victims of this unilaterally chosen marriage murder!
