Just one step at a time

According to Available Light, you can’t.

If you read his post, apparently he told a group of unmarried women who were living with partners that they should have no expectations of faithfulness over their partners because they were unmarried. In his own words:

“Years ago, in a graduate class discussion about adultery, I offended several young women by pointing out that it was impossible for their live-in boyfriends to cheat on them. Only married people can commit adultery, I said. It seemed to me that if they wanted to live together without being married, they should not expect their men to keep to a standard of marital fidelity.”

Oh come on! That’s so overly-simplistic. And completely arrogant Christian. As well as outrageous!

So is he saying, and I asked this in a comment, that the unmarried, but not living together, person, who hopes (as most of us do) that the relationships might move towards marriage, should not be hurt if their partner sleeps with/kisses/gets intimate in someway, with someone else? What happened to trust?

By implication (and maybe in my outrage I’ve mis-extrapolated this) he is saying that until we are married (and perhaps only until we’re married in church) we should have no expectations of fidelity from the other party, no demands of exclusivity of intimacy.

Bollock! Total and utter crap! Not quite the context (but Jesus never had this conversation), but I think it applies well here:

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ Matthew 25:21 NIV

If we can’t be faithful in the smaller things - and even though I’ve never been married, I can see that a relationship prior to marriage is in someways smaller than a married one - then how can we expect to be faithful in the larger things (touché, I know, but one of the points I tried to make last year, if you’ve been following me that long), i.e. marriage, which has more pressures.

And if we’re strictly ‘Bible is the actual word of God’ Christians, then those women who were living with and having a sexual relationship with their partners, in God’s eyes are married. Though it’s always funny how some Christians can beat you with one stick and ignore the other: i.e., if the Bible is ‘law’, then everyone must be married, whilst ignoring that the Bible equates a committed sexual relationship with marriage.

But then that might make things far to tricky and radical!

I do, though, tell the unmarried and widows that singleness might well be the best thing for them, as it has been for me. But if they can’t manage their desires and emotions, they should by all means go ahead and get married. The difficulties of marriage are preferable by far to a sexually tortured life as a single.

1 Cor 7:8-9 (The Message)

I have issues with these 2 verses. They make me want to go back in time, grab Paul and drop him in the 21st century and yell at him: “You find me a husband, then!” Because it’s not that simple. As one who regularly ‘burns in lust’ (and if you’ve followed my previous blogs you’ll know bits and pieces of my history that attest to this), I’m fully aware of the tortured life of a single (sometimes I love the way The Message gets to the nub of things so succinctly!). And I’m VERY aware of how it is not that simple to rectify.

However, I’ve been thinking a little more on this recently. Because I’d forgotten verse 8, pointing this very firmly at singles, I’d got along a line of thinking of better to get married quickly than burn with lust waiting out an engagement. You can always tell the Christian couples who’ve not had sex before married. They’re usually married within 6 months (sometimes less) of announcing their engagement. And the ones who are sleeping together. I know of someone who got engaged October/November last year. And they’re not getting married until 2009. They are, however, moving in together this year. Much to the consternation of a few of the more pious of our congregation. Oh, I love a scandal. Particularly one that I’m not the cause of!