While waiting for my hair to process today (YES, I went to the salon and XWH can't do a d@mn thing about it now)I picked up a magazine with AG/VG on the cover. The article made me sick.
This was an affairage (although they both deny it), and the article talked about how happy they were blah blah blah after 10 years.

Anybody else read it?

I am sorry to admit this but I do not know who these people are. I am finding it a little funny about the Brad and Angelina thing, although who knows(or cares) how much of that is real and I feel really bad for their children.

They are singers. Vince is a country star and Amy (remember Baby, Baby?) made it bit with pop Christian stuff.

Complete hypocrites, IMO.

Another night for the record books. Mark and Zelmo are in complete agreement.

I remember it. There was a dilemma at my church as to whether or not we could sing one of her songs...might have been El Shaddai - any more.

I also remember an interview Grant did where she talked about it being God's will

Great minds...

I was watching a movie about the life of a movie producer who was married to Ali McGraw, Robert vans, today. She cheated on him when on the set of "The Getaway". Had an affair with Steve McQueen, himself married.
This poor producer takes complete blame for her cheting saying he did not provide her with enough attention because he was working so hard. Thye had one kid.
I wish Bob Evans would do some reading so he would realize that the decison to cheat was Ali's alone.

Hi Chai!

I hadn't read it, until you posted this...I looked up the article~~~> This is it, right?

How incredibly sickening! Apparently it's just a PA that they are denying, because their own descriptions paint a very clear picture of a nasty EA [not that I necessarily believe them that it wasn't a PA too]...They appear to think nothing of the EA though - in their minds that must not be cheating! That's some pretty thick fog...GOOD GRIEF!

Mrs. W

Yeah, they kept themselves "pure" for their wedding night...

I remember when all of this came down. IIRC they were singing together at church and when the announcement came that both marriages were ending and they were marrying each other I remember the polarization into two camps. One said "Good for them." The other said "How dare they?!!!"

What I keep wondering is why folks in the church don't speak out against this stuff. The divorce rate within the church is the same as outside the church and the rate of affairs actually shows up as slightly higher. (Two possible explanations for this have been proposed)

This is exactly the type of thing that caused me to try to begin a marriage ministry based on Dr Harley's stuff at our church. Overall, most people are pretty much clueless as to what it takes to make a marriage work. Even those who are supposed to counsel church members know almost nothing when it comes to infidelity and how to combat or even avoid it.

I've determined that most people simply feel their way through life and never even consider the ramifications of the decisions they make by feel rather than by thinking.

Enough ranting...

Mark

>I also remember an interview Grant did where she talked about it being God's will


Excuse me.

That noise you heard was me throwing up.

Hey Mark,
(and my apologies for the T/J here), but I'm just curious, what are those explanations that have been proposed?

GO,

Two things have been suggested based on research by Barna Research Group. First is the possibility that Evangelicals MIGHT more easily consider the consequences of what they do and actually recognize the fact that and EA is in fact infidelity. Many Evangelicals consider and admit to porn use being adultery in the the strict sense of the word. So it might just be a case of those within the church actually being more honest since they are perhaps more likely to have already considered their own actions to have been wrong and not continued to justify long after the fact.

The second theory, which I think can actually only explain a portion of this and so is probably a partial answer with the first theory also coming into play here, is that the church puts together people, sometimes not married to each other, into close working conditions on projects and causes about which they are both highly motivated and extremely enthusiastic. In some cases the spouses do not share the same passions and/or vision and in some case do not even share the same faith.

Picture a worship band. The guitar player, recently converted, spent 30 years or more of his life playing rock n roll to fanatical fans and groupies, any number of which were willing to have sex with him on a moment's notice. His need for Admiration is quite high and now that he has "converted" his need is only being met by those who recognize his talent and his turning around in his life.

In this same group is woman, who though trained in music and with a life long passion to sing and develop her talents, maybe even a dream of going on the road to sing for the Lord has put her dreams and vision on hold while raising her kids for the last 25 years.

Now these two sing and play together. They practice together. They plan together. They dream together. They share one passion. They share one goal. They share one dream. They feed each others ENs. She admires the heck out of him for his talent and how he has turned his life around. He is willing to talk to her for days about music because his wife doesn't know a thing about it. NOBODY in th4e church sees the potential for a problem so they encourage the two to develop their music together.

Then everyone seems surprised when the marriages start to crumple. Even worse, some see the two working together so closely as being God's plan to help both of them recover from the abusive/unhappy marriages each seem to be in....

Those who have been damaged or destroyed by infidelity, on either side of the coin, get this. The rest of the world is totally blind and ignorant of what it's all about. The church is no exception.

BTW, the admission of infidelity in the church is about 3% higher than the national average. Still within margin of error for the sample population but many feel it needs to have some explanation. I think it is a combination but the majority I think leans toward the second explanation.

Mark

The admission but 'prolly not the comission.

Exactly.

I confess, I read my W's Good Housekeeping while on "a mission" in the bathroom.

I was disgusted as well.

A website called the cheatingdetective states that 70% of women never find out about WH affair, and 54% of married men never know about their wives A's.

How they get this info/stat I do not know, but I think by a landslide most A's are never discovered/admitted/found out.

I'm hoping the church folk have higher numbers because they feel the need to be honest more

Thanks, Mark. (OK, it wasn't fun to see my affair-biography there, but I do thank you for the illustration.)

Thanks for the article. It is clear from the article that Amy and Vince are adulterers. They had a very apparent EA.

Amy's xH Gary Chapman did not have a good life after the event. Married twice and failed business development. He was caught with marijuana and had a dui recently.

My objection to Amy/Vince's union beyond their adultery is how they drag Gods name into their misdeeds. A/V please shut up.

GO,

See, I wasn't even thinking of your A bio when I said that. I have just seen it happen, understand why it happens and know how it can happen unless we do something to prevent it from happening.

Barbie and SW,

I think most within the church HOPE that is the case, that church people, those who have admitted to already being forgiven for things they admit now were wrong on their part, understand and are now more honest when they admit their guilt. But some churches are breeding grounds for affairs because the leadership does not address the issues I brought up.

Many attenders of churches do not attend church with their spouse. They either go to separate churches or one goes, usually the wife, and the other stays home or goes golfing, to the big game or hangs out with his buddies on Sunday morning.Most of these people feel they are immune to temptation. After all, what could be a better way to be doing what is right than to be involved heavily in a powerful ministry within the church.

What we all forget at times is that the church is made up of a bunch of sinners who have been forgiven rather than a lot of folks who hold themselves to some moral code that is superior to those outside the church.

In MB parlance, these people then begin spending their most enjoyable recreational time with others of like backgrounds, similar passions and dedication to the same things while their spouses are not even in the same book let alone on the same page.

The high point of the week becomes being with this group of people who all share the same goals, passions and vision for the world. They begin to feel closer to these people than to their own spouses since their spouses don't have these things in common with them.

Since most don't know what leads to an affair and cannot protect themselves from heading down that road because they don't know it when they see it looming ahead, they only recognize the fact that what they see in this other person is attractive to them and they begin to compare the spouse who does not share this same view of things to the person who does. As soon as that comparison begins, disaster is on the horizon for their marriages unless they know enough to stop it from happening.

What most fail to get is that in order to prevent it, they must change what they are doing. They don;t want to give up the project (worship band, Sunday school training sessions, church board meetings, missions trips with a mixed group etc) because they feel it is their calling in life. They spend less time with the spouse than with the person they have come to admire so much.

Unless one of them knows what to do to stop the potential dead in its tracks, they start discussing the "project", interjecting complaints about their own marriages or spouses or even just the way the kids are acting lately and suddenly they are allowing each other to meet two or three of their intimate Emotional Needs. Love Bank deposits are sky-rocketing and neither one seems to realize what is taking place.

Then one day, one of them says something like, "I wish my wife understood this stuff the way you do..." With no further prompting, one or both begin to imagine "what if..." and the fantasy takes on a life of its own. The real relationship of the marriage with all of its problems, hard work, trouble and conflict gets compared to this perfect life of happily ever after that is all in the minds of the soon to be affair partners and neither one has even acknowledged an attraction to each other yet. And THIS is why they don't know they are about to have an affair...They are not acting from sexual attraction yet but merely seeing someone better than they believe their spouse to be who could make them happier than their spouse can make them.

They fall into an affair because they don't realize they can have one and have no idea what one looks like. They fall in love with a fantasy because they think it is real. The rewriting of history in order to justify what is about to happen begins because it is a comparison of reality with fantasy and since fantasy is always only what you make it, the fantasy can be as perfect as you can imagine and wish for.

Gotta go...

Work beckons...

Or more to the point...

Work sucks.

Workplaces do the same thing, especially big corporate workplaces, and the spouses are completely cut off from the whole thing. Same dynamic, different venue. Red Flags Everywhere. Just substitute "workplace" for "church" in the long post above and see how completely similar it is.

And why is it like this, in both churches and corporations? Because this arrangement serves them both very, very well.

Nobody can make money for their church/company if they're home with the spouse and kids. Long hours are needed to make the church/company solvent and growing. But how do you get people to ignore their families in favor of spending long hours and taking lengthy business trips serving the church/company?

Money? Well, you could try this, but the amount of money it would take to *pay* people to ignore their families would really cut into profits.

So, what else could possibly persuade someone to spend 12 and 14 hour days serving their church/company, and spend 5, 7, 10 and 14 *days* at a time traveling for that church/company, leaving their families at home and largely ignored?

Oh, yeah. Sex.

If you set up your church/company activities so that the presence of spouses actually seems awkward and intrusive -

If you then freely allow and encourage everybody to bond and "be a family" within the church/company and publically reward them for behaving this way -

If there are no rules of any kind about married (but not to each other) people behaving like they're on dates while "serving" their church or "working" for their company -

Well, your church/company will grow and thrive and profit handsomely in every way. But you will notice that a huge number of your poor poor church members/employees have the bad luck to be married to crazy, angry spouses who just make their lives miserable. You may also notice that there is a huge divorce rate among your church members/employees.

But that's just bad luck, right? After all, these people are *wonderful*! Ask their fellow members/co-workers! They just had the bad luck to be married to horrible insane spouses and will be better off without them anyway.

The marriages crumble and the families are destroyed, but the church/company thrives - thanks to all its wonderful members/employees.

And that's all that matters.