Some while back, I found myself in a public discussion with a husband who does not approve of his wife “exchanging attention” with men, which for him includes working with male coworkers, having a male chiropractor, and so on. “I just cannot share her with other men in any way,” he said. Some of their friends had objected to his approach; he felt he was just being a faithful Christian husband, but he wanted a wider range of counsel, so he’d aired the question in public to see what people would say.
Now, the culture in which we live immediately responds with a wave of condemnation. He’s controlling, abusive, jealous. He needs therapy. She should divorce him. And so on. But not so fast. Our culture approves of adultery, fornication, infanticide, and a host of other evils; nobody should be trusting the culture’s judgment. All these evils are founded on a specific spiritual poison: a worship of personal autonomy that bridles at any infringement by anybody for any reason — and at this particular cultural moment, that goes double for a man infringing on a woman’s choices.
In the conservative evangelical world, we’re tempted to notice that poison, and respond to this husband with approval. Whatever annoys our autonomous, self-worshipping, adulterous, feminist culture must be a good thing, right? It’s a tempting line of thought.
Not so fast. Our culture is certainly not an authority on healthy marriage, but it is not a universal anti-authority either. Just because it disapproves of something doesn’t make that thing good. Which is to say that we’re not relieved of the duty of discernment; we have to make our own determination. This is nothing new: “Test all things; hold fast to what is good.”
So let’s do the work. First, this man is jealous of his wife’s attentions. The world wants that to be a bad thing, but it isn’t, necessarily. Jealousy is not automatically out of bounds; God is jealous too. Righteous jealousy is a zeal for what is rightfully yours. So the question we need to ask is, is this man claiming what’s his, or is he overreaching? As always, we norm our expectations by Scripture.
As a practical matter, Scripture paints a picture that’s hard to square with this man’s sentiment. It’s difficult to see how the excellent wife of Proverbs 31 could do what she did without interacting with men: servants in her own house, other members of the community, whoever owned that field, the workers in her vineyard. It’s difficult to see how a wife could follow the instructions given her in the New Testament without interacting with men. The command that women should be “keepers-at-home” did not mean they never interacted with the world; much the contrary. Managing a first-century household was not a reclusive affair: there were merchants to interact with, servants (or masters) to work with, work to get done that, especially in a preindustrial world, would require the assistance of (physically stronger) men. What about today? Really, this hasn’t changed. Being good at the business of life means being able to interact with the people who provide the goods and services you need. A goodly chunk of them will be men.
Thus far the prudential discussion. At a purely practical level, imposing this requirement of “exchanging no attention with men” will make a modern wife’s life difficult to impossible, just as it would have done in OT or NT times. That said, if it really is a righteous requirement, then we should stick with it, trust God and forge ahead. Righteous living is frequently inconvenient, after all. Since when was that a reason not to be righteous?
But it’s not a righteous requirement. There’s no biblical basis for the claim that all of a wife’s attention and interactions belong exclusively to her husband. No passage says that, and as we’ve already seen, the instructions to wives generally require her interaction with the wider world. In all but the most unusual circumstances, she will need to interact with other men in order to be a good helper and “battle-mate” to her husband. (See Leithart’s excellent The Glory of Man for a longer discussion of what it means for the woman to be a helper.)
The biblical instructions on how to treat members of the opposite sex do not align with this husband’s sentiment either. Paul tells Titus to treat the older women as mothers and the younger as sisters. He doesn’t say “don’t exchange attention with them; all their interactions belong to their husbands.” What this husband is describing as his boundary to nip any hint of adultery in the bud is simply not biblical. He needs to go and read Genesis 3: adding our own made-up laws to God’s doesn’t make life better and safer. “Neither shall you touch it” didn’t work for Eve, and “Don’t exchange attention with any other man” isn’t going to be proof against sin either; faith in extrabiblical prohibitions is simply misplaced.
Now, to a man who has settled on “don’t exchange attention with the opposite sex” as his bulwark against adultery, the above paragraphs are going to sound like we simply don’t care about righteousness. If that’s not the answer, then how are we going to prevent adultery? Don’t we understand how destructive it is, and how capable we all are of sin? In other words, where are the brakes on this thing?
This is a sensible set of concerns, and one that every recovering legalist has to face. If the legalism isn’t the bulwark against sin that it’s supposed to be, then what is? The answer to that question starts with a realistic appraisal of the threat. The man who’s demanding more than God thinks he’s taking the threat more seriously than the rest of us, but in fact that’s not the case. He’s missing something crucial.
We are all capable of adultery. All of us are at risk — most of all the ones that think they’re not. If 1 Corinthians 10:13 is true (“No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man”), then the temptations other people fall to are common to the rest of us as well. Just because we haven’t fallen yet doesn’t mean we can’t. Difficult as it may be to imagine, there is some combination of circumstances under which you — you, personally — would want to cheat on your spouse. And the same is true for any other sin. If it tempts anybody, then there is some version of that same sin that would tempt you under the right circumstances. Same for me. The circumstances that tempt me might be easy for you, and vice versa, but none of us is immune to anything. Like the Man said, only God is good. I don’t know what it would take for any given person, but make us angry enough, triumphant enough, sad enough, happy enough, lonely enough, desperate enough for something, anything, to numb the pain…everybody has weaknesses. We’re all in danger, and it’s silly to think we’re not.
It’s equally silly to pretend that sticking to some rule we made up will change that. Even God’s laws cannot keep us from sin. What are the chances that man’s laws will do what God’s cannot? “If there had been a law that could have given life, then truly righteousness would have been through the Law” (Gal. 3:21), but law can’t do that.
So where’s the hedge against sin? If we don’t make up a bunch of extra rules to protect ourselves from adultery (or whatever else), then how do we do it? Paul gives us the answer: “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4). As he will go on to say a bit later in the chapter, there is no solution to this problem other than the Spirit being at work in you, bringing life where there should be only death.
I’ve been married almost 23 years. Neither of us has ever cheated. Opportunities have come up; we’ve shut them down, hard. I lost a friend over one such situation; I don’t care. If you won’t be a friend of my marriage, you ain’t no friend of mine! We protect our marriage energetically. So should you. But do it in a way that fits with Scripture, not in a way that’s at odds with what God has taught us. That doesn’t mean you have no habits you can’t attach a verse to. I’m not saying that a boundary like (say) the Billy Graham rule is always nonsense; it was probably wise for Billy Graham and Mike Pence, and may be wise for other people too. Each couple gets to work things out between them, to a point. But it seems worth noticing that the rule ain’t in the Bible anywhere, and Jesus violated it good and hard.
Once upon a time, Jesus sent all His accountability partners to the grocery store, and when they came back, they found him engrossed in a conversation with a woman, alone — and exactly the sort of woman a virtuous man “shouldn’t” be alone with, too! (For the rest of the story, see John 4.) For a particular person, being like Jesus in that way might be off the table for a time, in the same way that a recovering drunkard shouldn’t hang around with people who are drinking (although again, Jesus did). That’s a weakness we should be honest about, but also looking to correct, but likely not a “boundary” we should be committed to for all time. It doesn’t seem wise to decide in advance that we’re going to just commit to being unlike Jesus. There’s nothing wrong with fleeing temptation; it’s a great idea! But when your protections get so tight they’re in the way of fulfilling Scripture, something is wrong. Real protection comes from norming ourselves to God’s way of thinking, feeling, and living, not from performative and/or immature reactions to our ungoverned passions.
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