Well, let's pull up your chair and grab yourself a beer or coffee as we discuss one of the biggest fears facing evangelicals on the issue of intimate cross-gender friendships: when platonic friends who are not married to each other become romantically enmeshed and choose to end their current marriages over romantic absorption.
This sober potential is the greatest vulnerability for those of us who are nuturing deep beauty and relational richness in transmarital friendships. Friends who move from sweet and solid trust within their personal community to the heavy hellishness of spousal betrayal, broken homes, and devastated innocent children caught in the dramatic chaos.
There is this thick communal overcast of clouds hanging over spouses, children, surrounding family members, neighbors, and friends when two people believe their romantic couple chemistry should trump all other relationships--and they are married to other people. The dark side of inappropriate romantic infatuation is that two people steel themselves against this heaviness by turning inward instead of a chosen vulnerability outward.
Continue reading "Embracing Vulnerability: When Friends Betray Their Spouses Part One" »