Dear Divorce Minister,
I discovered that my wife was unfaithful 5 years ago. I wanted to work thing out and told her “Maybe now, we can have the marriage that we always should have had.” She said she was sorry and wanted to make this work and our marriage did get better at least in the beginning.
But, she quickly stopped trying and thinks that she has done all she needs to do. I, however, don’t believe our marriage is anywhere near healthy. She refuses to talk to me about the affair or tell me the whole story. She did stop a lot of her bad behavior but won’t help me with positive actions. As long as she is not required to do anything, she is happy. If I need her to do anything at all to improve our marriage, she get extremely angry and shuts down.
I know that Jesus gives me the option to divorce because of adultery, but if I divorce now, it would be more because she wouldn’t fix her problems as I am sure she is no longer cheating. So, my question is after all this time has passed…
Is there a time limit on divorcing for adultery?
Thank you,
Rob
Dear Rob,
Let me answer your last question first with a question:
Did Jesus put a time limit on this divorce exception in Matthew 19:9?
My Bible does not say anything about permission to divorce being revoked after five years of trying. Permission is permission.
I am suspicious someone is pushing an agenda whenever any pastor adds to Jesus’ words. A time limit would be adding to His words.
The time passed was a gift you gave to your wife to truly repent from her sins and fix what her sins destroyed–namely, your trust and thereby your marriage. It sounds like she did not steward that time well.
You wrote,
She refuses to talk to me about the affair or tell me the whole story. She did stop a lot of her bad behavior but won’t help me with positive actions.
I am a firm believer keeping such affair secrets is a form of emotional cheating.
Even if she is no longer in contact with this particular person, she is still clinging to illicit intimacy with him by not divulging the details of what she did in the affair as asked.
As long as she refuses to divulge what she did in the affair, a barrier will remain between you two. It is a wall where she and her adultery partner know something that you do not. Like a super nasty inside joke, this keeps you on the outside looking in and is a recipe for relationship disaster.
In other words, her keeping affair secrets signal to me that she has not fully repented of her sins by cheating on you.
Keeping her secrets is more important to her than your healing and God’s demands for her to fully forsake the affair partner.
You wrote,
I know that Jesus gives me the option to divorce because of adultery, but if I divorce now, it would be more because she wouldn’t fix her problems as I am sure she is no longer cheating.
As I explained above, I would still consider her as cheating because of her refusal to be completely transparent with you about her affair. Such secret keeping is bound to cause marriage problems. So, I would not draw such a stark distinction between the cheating five years ago and the persisting problems today.
She did not fully fix the problems she created by her infidelity five years ago. Repentance was not realized. Hence, I would say you would still be divorcing her over the adultery even five years later.
Any way, all that does not matter as I do not see Jesus putting an expiration date on his permission to divorce over sexual infidelity in Matthew 19:9. Again, permission is permission.
You did not owe her these five years–that was grace–and you do not owe her more years of your life. She has chosen NOT to fully forsake her sin; and you are permitted–as I read Scripture–to divorce her today without any shame.
If she really wanted to stay married, she should never have cheated in the first place. And afterwards, if she really wanted to stay married, she should have pushed the affair partner out of her heart by telling you what she did with him and reinvested in improving your marriage in erneast.
Hope that helps!
-DM
