May you never experience a wife that becomes emotionally attached to a”good friend”. And Yah help you if you become “good friends” with another man’s wife, becoming her confidant, helping her because he just doesn’t understand her. Listening to her for hours while your own family goes begging.
@steve, your post is evidence that learning is always lurking right around the corner. Thank you for injecting that perspective into this particular debate, because it reminded me of many things about which I need to be discerning.
In particular, it focuses me on something that may be considered a
tangent to what you're pointing to, and I'm going to use a real-life personal situation to illustrate what I'm addressing.
@rejoicinghandmaid, known here and far and wide as a proper woman of God, and I have developed a good friendship over the past year. We talk on the phone often, sometimes for hours during our night-owl overlap time (and please let
me inject here, at
@rejoicinghandmaid's encouragement, that
@steve's point about one's own family going begging isn't lost on me; that's why we predominantly limit our discussions to hours when everyone in my family -- each member of which doesn't share my minimal need for sleep -- is fast asleep in bed). However, no matter how capable I am of burning the candle at both ends, and no matter how thoroughly I intend to maintain properly-drawn lines, it is inescapable that I am a man, a married man in fact, and
@rejoicinghandmaid is an unmarried woman who desires to find a man who will be her covering. I have on more than one occasion asserted to her that, whether we like it or not, when she finds (or is found by) the man who will be her head, it will
necessarily be the case that our friendship will have to be diminished. We can potentially remain good friends, but that will depend on a great many factors (e.g., whether her man, she, Kristin and I identify reasons for the
four of us to socialize, fellowship, etc.), and it is just a given, if we're going to respect not only scriptural but common sense guidelines that our friendship will go through a transition that will result in our not being in anywhere near as much contact as we currently enjoy. You have pointed to the reason,
@steve: because, once
@rejoicinghandmaid has her covering, it could only be confusing in many ways if she and I were to continue engaging in as much interchange as we currently engage in. It's not a matter of being some kind of rigid prohibition that reflects an inability to trust one's spouse. Instead, it's a matter of enlisting every effort, structure and intention to ensure that the full one-flesh, unbreakable bonding be established and sustained between a woman and her husband.
The distinction between a man and a single woman engaging in intimate verbal communication and a man and a
married woman doing so is that whatever fire one is playing with when it comes to a single woman only risks creating an intimacy that may inspire the two to decide to become one flesh
themselves; playing with that kind of fire when the woman is
married defies the aspects of human nature that naturally lead men and women to flirt with physically consummating such intimacy.
Over the years, I've observed many, many instances that fit the template
@steve has so effectively and succinctly laid before us. I can't think of a one in which the outcome was edifying. If either partner in the marriage cavalierly accepts the woman having a "special friend" who "understands [her] better than [her] husband (or the man having a similar "special friend" who is a married woman), they may as well acknowledge that what they're doing is laying the foundation for heartbreak and divorce.
