I'm not so sure that the kind of depth and extent of intimacy and closeness that is possible in marriage is still possible for us, or that I want it even if it's possible, or that I'm even obligated to try for that.
That doesn't mean I don't love my wife or that I don't want to take care of her and our marriage. It doesn't mean it can't be fun, enjoyable, and satisfying.
But God doesn't command me to feel anything for my wife. He commands me to love my wife. There's a difference.
Maybe all that will change someday. Maybe not.
The truth is that I made a poor choice in a wife. I knew she had done some extreme things in the past but I believed she had learned her lessons from those experiences, had matured, and had become more responsible than that.
I clearly took a risk with her, gambled and lost.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Forgiving her means continuing to fulfill my commitment to her as my wife, accepting responsibility for our relationship. Something I've always done, albeit imperfectly, and at some times better than others.
But to me there was just too much harm done here to ever forget. And even if we wanted to or were capable of it, we have herpes sores and such that will always be a concrete reminder of how low she sunk. It's not just about having sex with someone else. It's about bailing on commitments, exposing other people, not to mention your family, to physical harm, it's about deception and scheming and manipulating the perceptions and lives of other people.
I can treat her well; I can treat her lovingly; I can refrain from mentioning or deliberately punishing her for those things; I can keep from dwelling or obsessing on those things when they do pop into my head out of nowhere; but I cannot forget. At least not yet. Maybe someday.
That's why choices are what they are. Real choices are more substantial than picking among various kinds of dish soap or automobiles.
Moral choices are accompanied by the sometimes irreversable consequences of our actions. To choose one path can, at times, mean another is forever unavailable to us, and nowhere does God promise to remove the consequences of our actions.
Life isn't fair and never was.
That stuff about "Givers" and "Takers" that Harley writes about is good stuff, and I tend to agree with him, but my marriage is no longer really about that.
When you look at the child that you have loved and protected from the day he was born and see a herpes lesion on his lip that, despite everything you did to successfully protect him this far in life from the evil that is in the world, and know that sore is there because of something horrible his own mother did out of pure selfishness and disregard for everyone including her own children...well, let's just say it throws a bucket of ice water on any warm and fuzzy feelings you might be trying to spark for your wife.
So in light of that, I don't see what good feelings for my wife will do. She's still sunk lower than anyone I've ever been close to..to my knowledge, anyway.
I take plenty of comfort that she appears to have turned over a new leaf. That is a good thing for which I am thankful.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. -- Inigo Montoya, 'The Princess Bride'
