Last week, while waiting for my turn on my usual pre-natal check-up, I chanced upon something interesting in the book I was reading. I was reading "Committed" by Elizabeth Gilbert (also of Eat.Pray.Love). I wanted to share it with Alvin right away but I had to wait until yesterday for me to read it to him. We were having a lazy Sunday afternoon and I really enjoyed our conversation, and our exchange of insights on the topic that I have just read to him.
So I'm posting that part of the book and hopefully, married people like us, can be more cautious when we form new friendships or continue to enrich "harmless friendships."
"But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people's infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs, begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or a wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don't sense the danger as it's happening, because what is wrong with friendship? Why can't we have friends of the opposite sex -- or of the same sex, for that matter -- even if we are married?
The answer,as Dr. Glass explained, is that, nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside matrimony -- so as long as the "walls and windows" of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass's theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world -- that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.
What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden in your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself -- your deepest yearnings and frustrations-- and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling out your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse, where there ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonal intimacy has therefore been re-arranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing."
"And it's true. You didn't see it coming. But you did build it and you could have stopped it if you'd acted faster. The moment you found yourself sharing secrets with a new friend that really ought to have belonged to your spouse, there was, according to Dr. Glass, a much smarter and more honest oath to be taken."
--from Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert (Bloomsbury Publishing, Copyright 2010)
Now, what am I driving at? Well many thoughts came into my mind, the piece does not only refer to the hubbys (although, personally, I think that men, are more prone to having affairs within a marriage), wives can very much commit the mistake or fall into the trap as well (especially in cases where the wife discovers shortly after marriage that she really doesn't know the person she got married to...or in cases where the "truth" finally is discovered and the wife becomes disillusioned). Maybe, unlike with the males, the females are more "discreet" about what they feel towards a new male friend, afraid of what society might "label" them. Aside from this, divorce or separations are not as popular in our culture so even if the wife or hubby does feel something for the new friend, most of the time, they probabaly just keep it to themselves or they stick it out with the person they married until the end.
So does this mean we should all be paranoid with the old and new formed friendships with the opposite sex? I don't think so. Does this mean, we have to be on guard of our spouses (and ourselves at that) on the old and new friendships they (and we) have with the opposite sex? Probably. It was just actually a good read for me. It was one of the things Liz Gilbert and Felipe discussed first before they plunged into marriage, and I think, it's a good one. Well, if you are married or planning to get married, I also think, it's not yet too late to have a good discussion on each other's insights regarding this matter. I am no love guru but I think the point of all these is not only about love but more so of trust and how you can continue to protect the "walls and windows" of your marriage despite the so many temptations around us. Marriage, after all, is HARDWORK.
