Part Two, Adultery: Professional Protection

The Internet

You don’t need statistics to know I’m accurate in telling you that internet relationships are a serious threat to our marriages in the twenty-first century. I can tell you from just observing people I thought I knew quite well and from watching these people wreck and ruin innocent lives, that when we begin spending seemingly innocent private time on the computer, the anonymous relationships we form in chat rooms and on web sites can turn into spiritually deadly trysts in the bedroom. I learned that my friend Janice, after twenty years of marriage to a faithful gospel preacher, had left behind her husband and two teenage children to travel across the country and move in with a man she met in a chat room. I learned that  my friend Sam, was losing his job as a gospel preacher because his computer pornography addiction had let to physical acts involving women in the church. I learned that my friend Mary Ann had walked in on her husband…again…as he closed the door to his home office and nurtured his perverse pornography habit to the neglect of his three young children and his beautiful and dutiful Christian wife. I learned that my friend Dara recently discovered the “other” life her husband had been living for the past 15 years. Tim, Dara’s husband, was a computer programmer. His own personal computer, when finally examined after one slip-up, let his wife know there was an infidelity problem. It  revealed a long and deceptively sordid tale of pornography addiction and repeated liaisons with women even as he served their congregation as one of its ministers. Many counseling situations have found me sitting across the table from a wife whose world has just collapsed because of behavior triggered by internet misuse. It used to take a lot of rather bold immoral behavior to engage in conversation and liaisons that might escalate to an affair, but now that behavior is easily concealed and solicited by lonely people in chat rooms and on instant messaging services in your most private world. Pornography formerly required going into a store and purchasing magazines or going to an adult movie store for a rental. At least there was a deterrent there for one who was at all concerned about reputation. But the devil now peddles pornography in private perverted sanctuaries. He has successfully removed the stigma and he loves it when we step on the path to ruin thinking “No one will ever know”.

So what can women do?

Works cited:
U.S. Department of Labor (2007) Quick Stats 2006 [On-line] URL:  http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/main.html