How did the affair start?
It was 1995. I got involved with a girl at work because I tried to help her with her problems. Her husband was my friend and she was Louwtjie’s (my wife’s) friend. She and her husband were both Bible School Students, our children were at the same school, we were in the same Homecell – so we had a lot in common but I picked up that she was unhappy with a few things in her life and I tried to help by “Counseling” her. Now I’ve been blessed with the gift to understand “Female Emotions” and thus grew to a position as this girl’s “Best Friend” very soon. During moments of vulnerability, I comforted her, dried her tears etc, etc. Anyway, one thing led to another and I discovered the real woman who also understood me better than my wife and she became my “Best Friend” too.
Suddenly we questioned our marriages and reasoned that married people should have what we have – being “Best Friends”. We suddenly found a lot of unhappiness in our individual marriages and started wondering how it would have been if we were together instead. That is how our affair started – it was not born out of lust but rather out of the fact that we really understood one another and had the ability to bring out the best in one another. It was also about how we made each other feel.
How did I feel during the affair?
Because I’ve always desired to be a “Man of God”, this whole thing just ate me up! I lost my “confidence in God” and my “boldness to speak God’s Word into people’s lives”. I felt guilty ALL THE TIME and lost the freedom to ask God to help me in my business. It is terrible to KNOW you’re doing the wrong thing but you are now driven from within with this desire for another person you’ve fallen in love with! Believe me, I know how good it feels to sense “God’s smile of approval” on me and that was gone. I lived from being driven by desire to be with my “Best Friend” to feeling totally disgusted with myself when I had given in to my feelings. What made it even tougher was the fact that it was not just a cheap affair – we really loved and respected each other – we even prayed together to ask God’s forgiveness and help to sort this whole mess out.
Because of our relationship, we got more and more dissatisfied with our individual partners and became progressively more critical of them as well. After a while you compare your partner to your “Best Friend” on all levels and build up this huge case in your mind that this marriage is actually not good for you.
Then we tried to justify our affair with examples from the Bible but no verse totally fitted our situation…and verses like
Deu 17:17 Neither shall he multiply wives for himself
just made it worse…