Fidelity

About three weeks ago, the former-pop-star wife of Utah Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko made the startling declaration in an ESPN the Magazine interview that since he spends so much time travelling for his job, the temptation of infidelity is so great that she gives him an "allowance" of one night per year with another woman. She put it this way:

"What's forbidden is always desirable. And athletes, particularly men, are susceptible to all the things they are offered. It's the same way raising children - if I tell my child, 'No pizza, no pizza, no pizza,' what does he want more than anything? Pizza... If I know about it, it's not cheating."

Not surprisingly, this sent shockwaves through the sporting world. Multiple columns, papers, message board posts were all hailing Mrs. Kirilenko as the "best wife ever" and Andrei as the luckiest man alive. A column on Fox Sports had this to say:

"This, we feel, is perhaps the perfect marriage. If all marriages operated like this, divorce attorneys would be as uncommon as mad cow disease, and Dr. Phil would be installing satellite dishes and sweating his mortgage. In other words, life would be better in so many ways..."

I found this to be yet another interesting counterpoint to the Biblical value of marital faithfulness, which is something that Jesus, Paul, and other writers all taught about. Why should a husband love and be with only one wife, and vice versa? In general, it seems that the values of the world (or at least, Western culture) in this arena seem to gravitate to the very capitalist "more is better" mode of thinking. For example, we jokingly refer to marriage with prison references like "the ol' ball-and-chain", and many people now take the attitude that Biblical teaching on marital infidelity, as well as many other "sins", is in fact just an arbitrary rule guilting people into staying away from something "good". In other words, commitment = imprisonment.

Nick Collison, a power forward on the Seattle SuperSonics, made an insightful response to the first quote above from Kirilenko's wife: "If you give a kid pizza, he might want a different kind of pizza. It might get worse."

I think this sums it up nicely. The Bible's teachings on holiness are not intended to be arbitrary rules to keep us imprisoned from the good things in life. Rather, they're intended to teach the discipline that one might teach a child. If you gave a kid pizza every time he wanted one, this will have undesirable outcomes for him - physical malnutrition and perhaps obesity, and perhaps a psychological sense of entitlement.

It's when we've learned how to be disciplined in mind, body, and spirit, that we can identify those things in life that are truly good and have lasting meaning and value. One of those can be a healthy, faithful, loving, and servant-like relationship with a spouse where each can find completion in the other. The perfect marriage isn't one where each side gives the other the supposed "freedom" to break a special commitment at will - rather, I think that a perfect marriage will find that each partner has developed such love for one another that they'd have no desire to turn elsewhere.