Be Careful When Comparing Your Spouse to Others

Adam and Eve are walking in the garden.

Eve to Adam: "Do you love me and only me?"

Adam to Eve: "Who else?"

Bad joke. Good point.

Eve had no competition. But it's not that simple anymore. Each day we are thrown together with a variety of people in the neighborhood, at work, at our children's schools (or our own), standing around the playground or practice field, running into the store. And these will frequently be people of the opposite sex, sometimes attractive people of the opposite sex.

Over the life of a marriage we will inevitably find ourselves spending time with other men or women to whom we are attracted. And as our society continues to break down gender-based barriers to men and women's freedom to choose how they live and work, we will increasingly find ourselves in such situations.

Now finding another person attractive shouldn't be a problem. There ought to be any number of men or women we are attracted to. It becomes a problem, however, when it leads us to question our current relationship, or when we decide to act on our new attraction.

When we begin to question a marriage, it changes the way we look at everything. We focus on all the little or not so little things about our spouse that we find mildly irritating or downright maddening. And we make comparisons.

We compare how our spouse looks at 6 a.m. with how our co-worker looks at 9 a.m.

We compare the conversation we had with an attractive classmate about the interesting subject were studying with the conversation with our spouse after four hours of wrestling the kids to bed, doing the dishes, folding the laundry, repairing the faucet and picking up the family room.