Like charging on a credit card: the pleasures of sin for a season---And then the awful price!!

And then the awful price.

Reading good literature – read that well written literature – makes me better as a writer.  So after I had my stack of Latin American works last week, I passed by the new nonfiction section, and picked up two, by title alone.  One was the book about a child raised by monkeys; the other was subtitled A Memoir of Marriage.  Since I am up to my elbows in a memoir, that seemed a good choice

However, it was not what I expected.  Instead it was the story of a tragedy, the author’s early betrayal of her wedding vows, and her husband’s betrayal later in their marriage.  The marriage counselor she saw told her to confess her transgressions to her husband, and from the outside looking in, it appears that gave him license for his infidelity.

In the early chapters of the book, she recounts her affairs, painting them with the brilliant colors of desire and passion and adventure, but she subsequently paints them also with the greys and blacks of lies, deceit, subterfuge, fear, and regret.  Lies had to be made up, remembered, pulled out again as history until eventually the affair swirled down the drain like dirty water after a storm.

Except that, as in the aftermath of a hurricane, the storm does not leave the landscape untarnished.

She somehow never expected her husband’s final affair to last ten years and birth a child by the time she discovered it.  She never expected him to leave her and their two sons, to lose their home, to lose the dreams she had maintained since she stood in a white dress and pledged her heart and body to her husband.

As I read the book, I grew steadily more grieved, for all of the lives touched by this nightmare because there seemed no reason not to live that way, nor did she seem to have any idea of how to right the mess.

She, they, did not know God.  She writes, as she reflects on 18 years of marriage and then five years of recovery after her husband finally walked out, that she still believes in marriage,” that there is no better way to get through adult life than as a married person.”  She goes on to say, “I used to think that marriage was based on passion and love.  Now I see that it’s based mostly on loyalty.  Loyalty with warmth.”

She also seems to believe that few people are hard-wired for fidelity, for monogamy. As I read that near the end of the book, I wondered if she realized she was saying that most people were doomed to the “hell” as she described it consequent to infidelity.

And finally, I wanted so much to tell her that it did not have to be that way.  That people could learn how to love, that love means finding joy in blessing your mate.  I labored over that last line, but I think that is what it comes down to, caring enough about someone to day- by- day seek ways to bless them, and you can only know and do that if you are aware of how loved and blessed you are by God first.