As much as I hate to admit it, I am more naive than I think. A number of simple assumptions that I have held for years, or even ideas that have emerged after long reflections, have been overthrown and shown to be at least partially false. All of these have to do with how I view people. I've never believed that people are essentially "good," if by good we mean that people live moral and decent lives consistently. For most people, regardless of where they place their faith, going out of the way to help others is not very natural. Of course, there are always exceptions. I do think that in general we are all walking contradictions, people who always expect more from others than we expect from ourselves. We think that small gestures of kindness are worth more than they are, and the gossip, slander or whatever small amount of wickedness that surfaces in our lives are merely trivial and insignificant. As the usual line of logic goes when faced with our own shortcomings, "we are human after all!" And yet, I don't usually wake up every morning thinking how wretched and depraved the world is. I typically refrain from aggressively endorsing Augustine's view of the world as a heap of damnation (this is certainly stereotyping Augustine, which is unfair to such an incredibly complex thinker, so don't disparage him!). But the human soul is a terrifying thing.
I recently read Leo Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina," and one thing I noticed while reading it was that it kept dragging me into the emotions of others. Most of the emotions are painful but real. Anna's infidelity and the aftershocks of such selfishness has become for me a weighty reminder of humankind's potential for destruction. The drama of this story is even more gripping in light of a dear friend's infidelity towards this person's spouse. My first naive assumption about people is that husbands and wives, despite occasional lustful thoughts and perhaps brief moments of infatuation with others, love one another with a deep and sincere love that makes one ashamed of those sordid thoughts, etc. There's nothing I'm more afraid of than being "bad," than coming to the point where I call evil good and good evil. I'm terrified of hurting people and putting anything, whether an idea or an action, into motion so that reckless effects and repercussions are inevitable. I have no respect for people like Anna or my friend.
Another figure in Anna Karenina is a woman named Dolly whose husband cheats on her with their governess. It was painful reading how stupid and foolish Dolly felt after she became aware of her husband's affair. As one who is happily married, I cannot fathom how she felt (although Tolstoy helps me understand). Involved in this first assumption is the idea that unreserved trust, whereby one abandons oneself to their spouse in full confidence and awareness of the vulnerability that this produces, is, at least, true among many people. My hunch is, however, that most marriages never experience true, sincere, and reciprocal love. In such a relationship where a certain degree or level of doubt and skepticism is always present, the moments where one begins to experience real love are usually dissipated by the desire not to be disappointed, or not to appear childish. We think, "true love is found in Disney movies not in real life," and so we settle for various travesties of love: a moment, a fling, a relationship based primarily on external things. The glimpses of a rapturous love are often viewed as mythological shadows that are neither real nor trustworthy; these are dangerously experiential emotions that one must militantly avoid. Despite my naivete, I am convinced that I have loved and been loved more consistently and mightily than most of the world. And the love between my wife and I is, in many ways, in its elementary form. And that's the beauty of it. The picture of the 85 year old couple holding hands and eating ice cream cones together is what we all want. The problem is that most of us are not willing or patient to spend 60 years learning how to die to ourselves and love the other more than ourselves. Unfortunately, all the promises that are made by consumer products, institutions, and organizations that herald great rewards with little or no effort (what immediately comes to mind are weight loss products that claim to work without changing your eating or exercising habits) have transferred to the common perception about relationships and marriage. Damn the thought that people, who live and breath and have deep, complex emotions, can be treated like some type of consumer product with various personal rewards that require minimal effort.
I am entirely ignorant of the lifestyle that much of our culture champions where one has a right to have both sex and multiple sexual partners. Regardless of my "ignorance" (some might call it virtue) of such a lifestyle, I feel quite confident that those who have had multiple sexual partners will never understand or experience the connection between passionate fidelity and passionate sexuality. In my opinion it's truly their loss. The purity and protection of their soul is sacrificed on the altar of a new experience, a new person. There are people, I'm sure, who have led sensuous lifestyles and eventually maintained healthy marriages where they were faithful to one another, but I tend to think these cases are few and far between. One of the lessons I learned from C. S. Lewis's book "Perelandra," which is his attempt to describe the world if Adam and Eve would not have rebelled, is that curiosity is deadly. When the serpent figure, Weston, tries to get the Green Woman (the Eve figure) to imagine that Maleldil (the God of the world) gave her commandments and guidelines to keep her in ignorance. I won't give the end of the story away, but the lesson to be learned is that our curious imaginations about what life could be like if our lover or spouse was different, if they made more money, if they didn't do this or that etc., is like cancer to true love.
In light of these thoughts of mine (I guess I've only mentioned one naive assumption, but it will have to do for now), I rejoice in my marriage and in my wife, the only one with whom I have had sex. We were abstinent before marriage, despite numerous struggles. She is the purest thing I know. To have her love is sometimes frightening because I have the potential to destroy it: the spirit of Anna Karenina lives in us all. My wife also has my love and we both have destructive potentiality. But the dangers of infidelity do not detract from our mutual love; rather it increases it. If by abandoning myself to my wife I run the risk of being betrayed, I'd rather do all that I can to love her as best as I can so that no matter what she and I both know that I did all I could. I know my wife believes the same. By God's grace and our sheer determination, our love will prevail. May God have mercy on my friend who betrayed his/her spouse and kids. "Do you not know that God's kindness leads you to repentance?"
