Since my sabbatical two years ago, we have been engaging in a sermon series exploring the meanings of what I've called "Sinai's Ten Principles." Three weeks ago, with some trepidation, we began looking at what is commonly called "the seventh commandment": "thou shalt not commit adultery."
[from Part I]
At the outset, I suggested "this may be the most seriously violated commandment of them all by members of this congregation, and the one over which people have the most guilt, thus making it a very touchy subject to address. People tend to get mad when their sore spots are poked at, even when that's your job."
"My intent," as I said that morning, "is not to judge any individual's behavior, nor to induce guilt nor, heaven forbid, elicit public confession. Any experiences I refer to will be scrupulously from other congregations I have served and any resemblance to anyone in this congregation is purely coincidental, and if you think otherwise, it is your guilt speaking."
"It is my intention to suggest that my experience had led me to conclude that there is validity to the principle pointed to by this commandment - a validity that we ignore at our own peril. You are perfectly free to disagree with me, and to challenge me during the discussion that will follow."
That morning we looked at the historical reality that this commandment was not originally about sexual faithfulness in marriage, since men were at the time free to have concubines or multiple wives and were not sexually bound to loyalty to their wives. The commandment originally had more to do with women as property and with blood lines and inheritance rights than it had to do with marriage. That morning we explored the expansion of the commandment by some Christians over the years to include any sexual behavior which was not marital and procreation-centered. We left for today the exploration of what meaning this commandment might have for us in our time.
[the principle]
As I interpret it in the context of our times, the principle pointed to by the seventh commandment deals with the commitment most people make to another person in entering into what they mutually hope will be a life-long relationship. You will please note that there are no hetero-sexist assumptions included here: I am talking about the commitment of any two people to intimately share their lives. While most of the research deals with heterosexual couples, I know no evidence that the principle, in the terms in which I understand it, applies more in that context than in same sex couples.
Does the honoring of the commitment of two people to each other deserve to be dealt with as one of the ten primary ethical principles in human life? Thirty-one years of ministerial experience leads me to believe it does. The failures to honor that commitment reverberate throughout a community.
[changing morality]
We have traveled quite a circle during the years of my ministry. With the development ofthe pill, the legalization of abortion, the blossoming of Freudian psychology, the burgeoning financial independence of women, and the increasingly nomadic nature of our society, we have moved through a period of increased sexual permissiveness, through the "open marriage" fantasy, and are, I believe, moving back in the direction of sexual exclusivity as the ideal in human couples. In suggesting that these changes have occurred, I am not for a moment implying that there has ever been a time when everyone believed in sexual exclusivity, nor when everyone ever believed in sexual permissiveness, nor that everyone is moving back. There has never been a time when all people felt bound to a single moral standard, nor do I believe there ever will be. I also do not believe that everyone has ever acted or will ever always act in accordance to the standard by which they feel bound. The question is, "Is there some kind of societal standard, some ideal that should be held up as a benchmark?" Yes, and it has changed from time to time and place to place. Are there reasons to try to agree upon a bench-mark? Again, I believe the answer is in the affirmative.
[why commit?]
It seems to me that the point of departure in exploring this principle is the primary question of why it is that two people would get together and make a commitment to one another.
In his classic, The Art of Loving, the analyst-philosopher, Erich Fromm, suggested that:
We are gifted with reason; we are life being aware of itself; we have awareness of ourselves, our fellow humans, of our past, and of the possibilities of our future. This awareness of ourselves as separate entities, the awareness of our own short life span, of the fact that without our will we are born and against our will we die, that we will die before those whom we love, or they before us, the awareness of our aloneness and separateness, of our helplessness before the forces of nature and society, all this makes our separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. We would become insane could we not liberate ourselves from this prison and reach out, unite ourselves in some form or other with people,with the world outside.
There is more than one way to achieve liberation from the prison of our aloneness, but the primary way that people have chosen throughout human cultures is through the making of a commitment to share one's life with another person.
The cross-cultural studies of Helen Fisher, an anthropologist, have led her to believe that:
Pair-bonding is the trademark of the human animal.... Human beings almost never have to be cajoled into pairing. Instead, we do this naturally. We flirt. We feel infatuation. We fall in love. We marry. And the vast majority of us marry only one person at a time."
Fisher is not naive. She points out that the vast majority of societies permit polygamy -almost always the right of a man to have more than one wife - but actually having more than one wife at one time is almost always the exception rather than the rule. It is generally practiced by the powerful and wealthy who have the wherewithal to attract a woman to give up having a mate of her own.
Fisher goes on to say,
"you can't kill romantic love. Even where men and women live with several spouses simultaneously, individuals generally have one partner they prefer. In free sex communes, men and women tend to pair up. Even where marriages are strictly arranged and romantic attachments are prohibited, love blossoms..."
That is not to say that people are commonly bound for life. The evidence says that significant numbers are not. Indeed, adultery and divorce are present in every human society every known. Remember, Fisher said that pair bonding had to do with selecting one partner "at a time." Our society permits "serial monogamy" - one legal partner at any given time.
[complications]
The reality is that the course of relationships between two people has never been a simple one. People enter relationships with expectations, and the partner in the relationship is not always prepared to fulfill all those expectations. In fact, it is a virtual certainty that they never can because many of those expectations are not reasonable.
Fromm points, as an example, to:
men who have never been weaned, as it were, from mother. These men still feel like children; they want mother's protection, love, warmth, care, and admiration; they want mother's unconditional love, a love which is given for no other reason than they need it, that they are mother's child, that they are helpless....If they have found the right woman, they feel secure, on top of the world, and can display a great deal of affection and charm... But when, after a while, the woman does not continue to live up to their phantastic expectations, conflicts and resentments start to develop. If the woman is not always admiring them, if she makes claims for a life of her own, if she wants to be loved and protected herself... the man feels deeply hurt and disappointed, and usually rationalizes this feeling with the idea that the woman 'does not love him, is selfish or is domineering.'
Women can, of course, have just as unrealistic expectations of men.
[reasons for adultery]
Albert Ellis, a relatively permissive therapist, wrote an article on "Healthy and Disturbed Reasons for Extramarital Relations." Among the problematic reasons he listed were:
Ellis also lists what he calls "healthy" reasons for affairs which include: sexual varietism, love enhancement, experiential drives, and adventure seeking, but he creates such conditions around how healthy one must be to seek these, that they are hard to envision. Included, for instance, is his expectation that before having an affair one must deal so well with problems within the family that the relationship with the other person is not a way of avoiding them; and one must be so sexually adequate with one's partner that the affair is not a search for therapy. Someone who meets his criteria for having a healthy affair is hardly likely, in my experience, to have any interest in having one.
[myth collision]
I believe that Annette Lawson is on target in her analysis that much of the adultery in ourculture is the product of the collision between two myths: the "myth of romantic marriage" and the "myth of me." There was a time when marriage was seen as a social arrangement that had little to do with romance. I doubt if there are any of us who would want to buy into that today. For us, entering into a committed relationship is finding a life partner who excites us, who helps us experience life more fully, a person who knows us and appreciates us, a person who stirs our soul, and a person for whom we can do all of the above. The dream is that we can have a relationship which is so perfect that we will never experience frustration in it and will never be tempted to go outside it to seek the things that should be part of it. You see, we expect the faithfulness of our partner - we expect them to be there for us and to find in us everything they need. Those are pretty heavy expectations of a relationship.
And then we mix in the myth of self. We place a strong emphasis in our culture on self-fulfillment - on "becoming all that we can be." We want to explore and to relate and to grow. Lawson says that the goal of this myth "requiring that each person risk the loss of secure and known positions for the danger of new and exciting challenges, is to achieve the peak of self-actualization - the height of maturity." She goes on to say:
Self development need not lead to estrangement from the chosen Other, for the strongest relationships may well be those that permit autonomy to each partner while encouraging a way of loving that Francesca Cancian has termed interdependent rather than independent, but, alas, for many, and particularly for women, the pursuit of selfhood does involve conflict since their self-interest is so frequently at odds with the interests of their family members - both husband and children.
Lawson is not one-sided, however. She cites Barbara Ehrenrich's book, Hearts of Men, in which the author traces the effect of the Human Potential Movement on men, suggesting that it gave men justification for their "flight from commitment." "The new psychologies have exhorted them to pursue their own needs for self-actualization, even if that means abandoning ...commitments to others." The fact is, of course, that men have not been traditionally expected to subordinate their interests to those of the family, except perhaps their interest in sexual variety. What most people really want is a relationship in which they can always count on the other person to always be there to meet their needs whenever they have them, but in which no demands are placed on them to be there for the other except as they can fit it conveniently into their schedule. Oh, and did I forget, this is to happen in a relationship of equality. Right.
["open marriage"]
What I found during the "Open Marriage" era was that one partner in a relationship was sometimes able to convince the other that jealousy and possessiveness were primitive and outdated and that it would enhance the relationship for both of them if they were no longer sexually exclusive. While they convinced themselves that this was a supplement, not a threat to the primary relationship, what happened frequently was that one or the other of them sometimes would discover, in the experimentation process, that there was someone else out there who was able to do things for them that the primary partner no longer could, if they ever had. While they thought they were only shopping for sexual excitement and a supplement, they were, in fact looking for love, or they were at least were susceptible to it. What sometimes happened was that it was the partner who had the least interest initially, who decided ultimately that there was something better out there than what he or she had previously settled for.
I guess there is a question here - why shouldn't we all be free at any time to make a better deal if we can find one. I mean, we may settle for the best that is available to us at the moment, but if we can find more fulfillment somewhere else at a later date, why not? Why should we be stuck for life because of a bad decision sometime in the past? I guess the answer to that in part depends on whether you are "the leaver" or "the left."
[divorce]
I hasten to add at this point, I do know that people can make mistakes and I do not believe that vows should be irrevocable. I see no virtue in people going through life in a destructive relationship just because they thought they knew what they were doing when they entered them. I believe in divorce. I know many people who are much happier because they broke out of an oppressive relationship: some of them have found better relationships, and some have not, but many are happier alone than they were before. I also know people who chose to leave relationships for what they thought was "something better" and have done much worse.
[fidelity]
This is not, however, a sermon on divorce, but one on the principle of fidelity. Fidelity is "faithfulness to obligations, duties, or observances; loyalty." "Fidelity," says my American Heritage Dictionary, "involves the unfailing fulfilment of one's duties and obligations and the keeping of one's word or vows."
It is one thing to decide that a relationship is destructive, to do everything one can to improve it, but fail and end it. It is something very different to be living in a relationship, pretending to the partner that one is engaged in and focused on that relationship, and at the same time to be shopping around for "something better." I have often observed that if people invested half the energy and care in an established relationship that they pour into an affair, the first relationship would be transformed in ways far beyond what they could imagine. Making the most of what you have is not always a matter of settling for second-best. Fidelity is keeping the commitments you have freely made until you openly change them.
As with any principle, the question is not whether or not everyone will live up to it. They will not. People have never fully lived up to those kinds of principles, but is the response then to lower the expectation? The reason for a commitment is that I have expectations of this other person and the other has a right to have expectations of me. We mutually bind ourselves to each other. I am then morally obligated to give to my partner at least as much as I expect from her or him.
What is the alternative? A world in which we expect much and give little? A world in which trust is impossible; in which intimacy is impossible, because intimacy is absolutely dependent upon trust? I can trust others only in so far as I am, myself, trustworthy.
The principle of fidelity in marriage, having fallen out of fashion, is, I believe, making a comeback. Why? Because it's absence has proven to be so painful.
Erich Fromm said:
...to speak of love is not "preaching," for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being,. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only as exceptional-individual phenomenon is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of [humankind.]
Well, I disagree with Fromm. To speak of love [and fidelity] is preaching, but it is preaching because the responsibility of preaching is to "speak to the ultimate and real needs in every human being."
The goal of preaching about fidelity is not to judge or to condemn those many who have failed in the past to live up to the principle, for whatever reason. The goal is to affirm the human difficulty of living to that standard, and also the value in continuing to try; to take the principle seriously, to explore what its appropriate meaning is in our particular situation. Our failures to love do not invalidate love as a goal.
copyright 1996 by David R. Weissbard