“Sure, I had an emotional affair. But it was just a cry for help,” says Cheater.
Sadly, this admission around some carnal Christians will lead to questions about the faithful spouse’s performance as a husband or wife:
Why did she “have to” have an emotional affair?!
I bet you can see where such questioning is heading. And it isn’t healthy for any of the parties involved.
Admission of an emotional affair is a very effective manipulation to a naive Christian subculture. In fact, we have movies that almost celebrate such affairs among Christians (e.g. “Fireproof“). These affairs are too often minimized and not treated as true sin in Christian communities.
The one place faithful spouses ought to be able to go for a professional who sees through this blame-shift is the church. Sadly, it might be the last place for finding someone who can see through it.
Pastors need to get better at not blaming the victim of emotional-affair sins.
A good place to start is to acknowledge a cheater is the violator and the faithful spouse is the victim of an emotional affair. A cheater is breaking her vows to “forsake all others” by having an emotional affair. This is sin.
God will hold her to account for such sin (see 2 Corinthians 5:10); and so, she is best served now by an encouragement to forsake this sin. Joining her bandwagon of blaming her husband for the affair is spiritual malpractice.
All of this assumes she is not using this admission to deflect from the truth that the affair went physical.
Adults engage in romantic behavior for sex. So, I think it is worth having a healthy level of skepticism when a cheater claims it was “only” an emotional affair. They lied in having such an affair; so, you ought not to take their word for it here.
This is the other part of the emotional affair admission manipulation:
They may be admitting it to better manipulate the pastor or Christian community.
They know the community and pastor is much more likely to condemn their behavior if it is a physical affair. Adultery is much harder to sell as the faithful spouse’s fault. So, they don’t admit that part.
The cheater doesn’t want to be the bad “guy” in this situation. The lie is employed to keep the focus on the faithful spouse as the problem.
Plus, cheaters know some churches and pastors will support a divorce from an adulterous spouse. So, they are unwilling to give the faithful spouse the moral high ground and that “out.” So, they lie.
