The hacking of AshleyMadison and the subsequent release of the personal information of many of its 37 million subscribers is causing violent ripples in homes throughout the world, even as we speak. The website, which caters to married people looking for extramarital encounters and has been compromised by cyber-activists, is now relegated to the role of helpless witness as the names and sordid secrets of its clientele are being broadcast for everyone (including their devastated spouses and families) to see.
It’s a human tragedy on a scale that we probably can’t really calculate with words; not merely the leak itself, but the fact that such a business exists at all and has found such numerous and willing participants. It’s a testament to the complete disregard by so many married people, for those they once vowed devotion to for the remainder of their lives; a frightening sign that Marriage isn’t quite as sacred as many involved have claimed.
As a pastor who has walked families through infidelity and its awful fallout far too many times over the past two decades, I’ve seen the horrible collateral damage of it all; the violation of trust, the emotional toll, the fractured relationships, the incredibly invasive wounds it inflicts on people and the barriers it erects between them, sometimes irrevocably.
And regardless of the differing circumstances and the scenarios of the indiscretions, one thing is almost always true: it didn’t happen in an instant.
Married people don’t usually just suddenly stumble into affairs as if tripping on a curb. It’s not often simply a momentary lack of perspective or self-control, or an anomaly born in a weak, passionate misstep. It’s usually the inevitable result of thousands of questionable decisions, all of which slowly, sometimes imperceptibly lead people astray:
It’s a hundred flirtatious remarks from a co-worker, a couple of months of gradually more personal texts to an old friend, a subtle but ever-deepening sharing of secrets on a message board, a pattern of jokingly bad-mouthing your spouse in the presence of a known suitor.
These are all part of the countless, extremely tiny steps on that very slippery slope leading to a website like AshleyMadison, and eventually to a physical manifestation of cultivated thoughts. Most married people who commit adultery don’t set out with that intention. They aren’t actively seeking to violate a trust, but they gradually weaken the bonds of emotional commitment over time until they finally sever. Cheating is indeed a brutal relational cancer, but one that often begins quite benignly and normally.
Facing a loss of intimacy or connection with their spouse, the accumulated stresses of raising children, financial pressures, the eroding of sexual chemistry, and the countless personal insecurities they each possess, many people begin turning to substitutes.
And most of the time, Technology is the portal to finding attractive imitations; the easy, ever-present, all-too available delivery system of those empty tonics for serious heartsickness.
Which leads me to the fundamental question I’ve been asking myself, my friends, and my readers in the wake of the AshleyMadison leak:
Does your spouse deserve open access to your social media; your phone, text, emails, inboxes, passwords, etc., or is that somehow an indictment of the marital trust and an invasion of the privacy of each individual?
I contend it’s the former.
For a long time, I’ve made it clear to my wife that she can get into my personal emails or texts should she ever need to; not because she would ever do so on a whim (or at all for that mater), but simply to let her know that I have nothing to ever hide from her. I don’t always remember to log off when I leave our shared computer and I often ask her to answer my cell phone if it rings when I’m in the other room. I give her my email passwords so that she can forward me files if I need them. There’s never a moment in those situations when I’m ever concerned or panicked or uneasy, because there is nothing in those places or on those devices that I’d ever be embarrassed for my wife to see. For me this is simply a natural expression of my vows to her. It’s just part of the deal; that kind of complete openness and the prioritizing of her over anyone else.
Obviously this transparency refers to all my personal communication streams. As a pastor, I am often given the tremendous honor of having people share their deep wounds and worries and struggles with me. My wife and I both treasure this greatly, and the confidentiality of those who feel safe to open their hearts with me is something we strictly honor. She would never view such communications and I would never share them. This is the very heart of my calling and why I do what I do; to give people a place to go when they don’t feel they can go anywhere else. I’m not at all speaking here of my duties as a caregiver and helper and confidant to people.
But when it comes to those things I speak and share and communicate outside my role as a pastor (and in my role as husband and father) I have no such restrictions. I am the most open of books to my wife because I desire to be so to. I want her to feel secure and loved and safe, and my transparency is simply part of my expression of that.
Some argue that all of this equals a loss of something on my behalf; a sacrifice of personal freedom or individuality. In some ways I agree, but for me these things are at the very heart of what marriage is made of, and why I chose to enter into that collaborative covenant partnership in the first place.
I had a friend argue that she doesn’t want to lose her personal autonomy, and that the kind of complete, open sharing I was proposing somehow signaled to her a tremendous compromise of as an individual—and she’s right.
That’s what marriage is. It is a willing sacrifice. It is an intentional compromise. It is the welcomed alteration of a person as they are alone, as they commit to be part of something else, together with another.
In some ways I approach this all simply and pragmatically:
If you want the complete autonomy you had when you were single—stay single.
If you want to be an unaffected individual without any constraints, then you shouldn’t vow to be married to someone knowing some constraints come with those promises.
If you feel compelled to speak to someone else, in a way that would likely damage your spouse should he or she discover it, then maybe you shouldn’t be their spouse, or maybe you shouldn’t speak that way to those people.
A few important distinctions:
This isn’t about sacrificing that which belongs only to you. Of course you will have parts of your life that you don’t share with your spouse; that stuff that we all guard closely and save solely for ourselves. But the hope would be that you don’t share those parts on social media at all then either. If anyone currently has more emotional access to you than your spouse, that might be a red flag.
This isn’t about giving up your identity. You can be a fully formed human being, with goals and a career and friends and activities of all kinds—and still be open about your social media and unafraid of being exposed. My wife and I each have a great deal of independence and personal freedom and time alone, but we never use it to compromise our relationship. We are independent, but in ways and areas that don’t have to do with our affections and attractions and desires and our deepest selves.
This isn’t about not having friends you confide in. These days, Christians (especially Christian men) are big on “accountability partners”. These are people you have in your life who supposedly ask you hard questions and help you keep good moral boundaries for your marriage. Of course having friends you can be open with is crucial, but these shouldn’t be substitutes for sharing such openness with your spouse. I have great guys in my life who I trust and can be real with, but I also have something else: I have the perfect accountability partner for my marriage—my wife.
This isn’t about superimposing my marriage onto yours. Your marital partnership, like every one that has ever existed in history is fully unique, and you and your spouse will work out that very specific relationship in a billion different ways that don’t look at all like another couple’s or like mine. I don’t share my perspective with any sense of superiority or judgment. This is simply the way I express my commitment to my wife, and how I am comfortable relaying this with regard to the technology I use. It’s not some moralistic boast but a sober statement of fact: I don’t have anything to hide, so I don’t hide anything. There is a rest and peace that comes with that.
Truthfully, many of the people recently outed by the AshleyMadison leak (as well an untold number of married people who are engaging in hidden intimacy in other settings), would still have found a path to be unfaithful regardless of the safeguards in place.
Yet I can’t help thinking that if more of those couples had practiced radical honesty and full disclosure with their spouses in these seemingly small, practical ways, many of them might have been protected from ever heading down that alluring, deceptively gradual road to infidelity in the first place, or at the very least they would have course corrected before disaster.
What’s your opinion?
