Loving Your Neighbor's Wife

The woman opens the door to the dentist’s waiting room where you sit. She says your name and smiles. You follow her down the hallway.

Or you come upon her running, on your way to work.

She leans forward at the drive-thru or from the bank teller’s window, or you meet her at her house to look at a job. She is fit and tanned, classically beautiful, or perhaps attractive in a powerfully personal way only you understand.

What is your response to the visceral and physical pull of other women? Of your neighbor’s wife? How do you maintain integrity in these highly charged situations, with so much conflicting stimuli?

Perhaps you conjure up the face of your wife or girlfriend, who loves and trusts you. Do you fumble for an emotional trigger in the image of a crucified, bloodied Jesus? Or do you mentally pass your finger through a candle’s flame, hoping to sear temptation with a taste of hellfire?

Our ways of processing morally volatile situations are as varied as we are. Some are effective, many are not. Some moves we make are ultimately self-defeating, disastrous feedback loops that can roll a routine encounter into another notch in Lucifer’s pitchfork handle.

Remember the days when we were seven- and eight-years-old, roaming the church grounds in little man packs and facing off with the girls, trading insults and taunts in any one of those unwinnable and perpetual arguments? And when the pretty girl showed up, the stakes were suddenly so much higher, the insults so much lower, and the taunts louder?

We are now 25, 35, or 50 years old. Have we grown into a more mature response to the effects of women? Do we still have an eight-year-old mind, or have we developed the mind of Christ?

Many of us still, in an ill-fated fight or flight reaction, attempt to neutralize the threat posed by an attractive, illicit temptation by instinctually de-valuing or reducing the subject of temptation, which is, in our case, the presence of a woman.

I have been with mature Christian men who, when put in contact with an attractive woman, have covertly denigrated and reduced them. I notice this because I understand as well as any man the appeal of this wide and broad way. I have felt myself rise to dominate, humiliate, and control when I fear the power of female attraction.

Lust is a crime of hate and theft. Emotional domination, spiritual abuse, and humiliation, however subtle, however framed in Christian rhetoric, are shadows of the real black stuff. Shadows of violations of God’s beauty and loveliness in the feminine representation of Himself.

Brothers, we have a better Way. We have the way of the cross, where Love opened itself to a world of male dominance, aggression, and exploitation yet triumphed gloriously. This triumph did not feminize us, or make us less male; it welcomes us to a masculinity of more power, deeper vitality, and truer purpose. It receives our plastic squirt guns and hands us two-edged swords. This triumph takes our desperate battles and rearranges them around tables of sharing and growth. And it can transform our relationship with other women from self-defeating contempt to purifying love.

How do we love other women? How do you love your neighbor’s wife?

See her as her Creator and Savior does. This you received from your Father, when you became His child and all things became new. Every human you see—every woman you see—is transfigured by what you know about God. He made her. She is infinitely loved. Her value is beyond computation. This is what you see when you love.

Honor what is hers. Be aware of the space she needs to feel comfortable, both physically and emotionally. Women have come to equate male engagement with male advancement, and they will scan and read your intentions with practiced speed and unsettling accuracy. Her personal space, her emotional bedrooms, and her sexuality are hers. When you step in too close, when you dominate or rough her up with verbal discomfort, you have hated and robbed her. When you feed on her visually, even from across the street, you are hating and thieving. Love gives and adds; it never takes.

Grant her humanity and dignity. It is indicative of the condition of Anabaptist masculinity that we need to be saying this. Do other women make you uncomfortable?

Is it difficult for you to make eye contact and engage a woman? When you meet a woman, especially a sister in Christ, in the aisle at the grocery store, do you love her by demonstrating pleasure at meeting her? Or do you ignore, diminish, and reduce her by brushing past in an assaulting aversion and silence? Give her a seat at the table, a voice in the conversation, and a place in your world. Like another human.

Demonstrate to her that she’s more than a face and a body to you. In one of the cruelest ironies of the flesh, the more attractive a woman is, the more she is dehumanized and objectified. Show her you recognize her as possessing a heart, a soul, a spirit, and a mind. A past and a future, wants and desires, fears and insecurities, hopes and dreams. Like you. Recognize, respect, and demonstrate this.

Loving our wives is transforming. Loving our friends is fulfilling. Loving our enemies is freeing. Loving our neighbors’ wives? It is for the brothers of Christ and the sons of God.