I Never Thought I Would Be the One

By Eddie Eccker

It is dusk, and a father is standing at the window of his house, looking down through the lattice at the street. A young man is walking below. The father knows the corner he is coming to, and he knows the house just past it. The woman who lives there is another man's wife, and her husband has left on a long trip. The young man does not slow down. The light is almost gone, and before he reaches the corner, she is in the street, coming to meet him.

That is how the story in Proverbs 7 begins. It is three thousand years old, and it reads like the classic setup of an affair: a married woman, a man who already knows where she lives, a husband out of town, and an evening dark enough to hide them. I sit with people after affairs, and the chapter matches what I hear from them.

If you are not a bible reader, that's fine; just know that this reads like a case study written by a father who had seen this happen time and again and wants nothing more than to warn his son and teach him how to recognize it early.

The text calls the young man simple. The Hebrew word describes someone open and unformed, a man who has not settled what he is committed to. Nothing in him turns him around when he finds himself on that street. Nobody has touched him yet. He picked the street and the hour all by himself.

I read the woman as someone he already knows. The chapter does not say it outright. He is taking the road to her house, so he knows where she lives, and when she meets him, she says she came out looking for him in particular. She is a married woman from his own community who has just come from worship.

That is typical of what I see today. Affairs happen between people who already have a reason to be near each other: a coworker, a friend of the family, a neighbor, someone from church.

The research says the same thing. Shirley Glass was a psychologist who studied infidelity for more than 25 years. In her book Not "Just Friends," she reported on the 210 unfaithful partners she had treated. Eighty-two percent of them had the affair with someone who was, at first, only a friend. Among the unfaithful men in her practice, 62 percent met the other woman at work.

What happens next happens fast. She meets him in the street, takes hold of him, and kisses him before she says a word. Then she talks.

Her speech gives him four things. First, she says she came out to find him and nobody else. She mentions that she made her offerings and paid her vows that day, which gives the evening religious cover. She describes the bed, with its linen from Egypt and its myrrh and cinnamon. Last, she tells him her husband has left on a long trip with a bag of money and will not be home until the full moon.

He is chosen, his conscience is covered, pleasure is waiting, and nobody will know. An affair today is built from the same four pieces.

The order matters, because the kiss comes before the speech. By the time she gives him reasons, his body is already involved, and the reasons only have to be good enough.

The mind is a crazy place, and seduction changes how a man's brain works.

In 2006, Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein published a study of 35 male undergraduates at Berkeley. The men answered the same questions about sex on different days, once in a calm state and once while sexually aroused. When aroused, the men were more willing to tell a woman they loved her when they did not, to push a date to drink, and to keep trying after she said no. They were also less likely to say they would use a condom. The same man gave one set of answers calm and another set aroused, and his calm self did not anticipate what his aroused self would agree to.

Loewenstein calls this the hot-cold empathy gap. A calm man cannot feel what he will want when he is aroused. When he says he would never do it, he is answering for the calm version of himself. The authors concluded that willpower does little against arousal and that the effective protection is to stay out of the situation.

Keeping a relationship secret makes the attraction stronger. In 1994, Daniel Wegner and two colleagues published two surveys and a lab experiment on secret relationships. In the surveys, people kept thinking about past relationships that had been secret, and thought about them obsessively. In the lab, pairs of strangers touched feet under a table while another pair sat at the same table. The pairs who did it in secret reported more attraction to each other than the pairs who did it openly. When she says her husband is gone and nobody will know, she is lowering the risk and raising the attraction in the same sentence.

Infatuation has been measured as well. In 2005, Arthur Aron, Helen Fisher, Lucy Brown, and their colleagues scanned the brains of 17 people who were in the early, intense stage of romantic love. When each person looked at a photo of the one they loved, the areas that became active were parts of the brain's reward and motivation system that are rich in dopamine. This is the system that produces wanting. It works the same way in a man who is infatuated with a woman who is not his wife.

Proverbs describes this state with animals. He follows her all at once, like an ox walking to slaughter and a bird flying into a net. Neither animal can see what is in front of it.

The chapter says he does not know it will cost him his life.

In the ancient world, that could be literal. Today the cost is his life as he knows it. The Hebrew word in that verse is nephesh, which covers a man's whole self as well as his physical life. The two chapters before this one list what he loses: his honor, his money, his years, and his standing in the community.

I would put his family at the top of that list. His marriage and his children's trust in him go first, and opportunities sometimes close once people know. He can see none of this when he is standing in the street with her.

I have noticed with my clients, the sobering up comes after the act, followed by the confusion. That is when a man (or woman, depending on the situation) says, "What have I done?"

The confusion is about two things. One is her, because regret does not switch off the pull toward her. The other is himself. He questions who he is now. The sentence I hear is, I never thought I would be the one. I even hear it from the most committed Christians, the ones who were sure they were not the kind of person who could do this.

Proverbs records that voice in chapter 5. A man at the end of it groans and asks how he could have hated correction and ignored his teachers.

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, published in 1957, describes what the mind does next. A person cannot comfortably hold two beliefs that contradict each other, and he will change one of them to end the discomfort. "I am a faithful husband" and "I did this" cannot both stand. He can own what he did. He can also change the story and decide that he was never happy and the marriage was already over. The days after the act are when he picks between those two.

What I tell people is that everybody is at risk. We are all the same in this. The man who denies that could easily be at higher risk, because he is not on guard.

Loran Nordgren and two colleagues tested this in 2009 and named the result restraint bias. They ran four experiments on hunger, addiction, and mental fatigue. In each one, people overestimated how well they could control their impulses. The people most confident in their self-control exposed themselves to more temptation and gave in more often. In the smoking experiment, the smokers who overestimated their self-control were much more likely to smoke after watching a film about smoking. Nordgren's advice was to avoid the situations where a weakness thrives and to keep a humble view of your own willpower.

Shirley Glass, the psychologist who spent her career studying infidelity, saw the same thing in her office. She said the people who ended up in affairs were often naive. They believed that loving their spouse made them immune, and that belief kept them from noticing the warning signs.

The father in Proverbs knew this. He says she has brought down many, and that strong men are among them. He is telling the story to his own son, which means he assumes his son could be the young man in the street.

Paul makes the same argument to the church in Corinth. He is writing to committed believers, the same kind of people I hear that sentence from, who were confident in their spiritual standing. He reminds them that Israel had every spiritual advantage in the wilderness and most of them fell anyway, and sexual immorality is one of the failures he names. Then he draws his conclusion: "Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall" (1 Corinthians 10:12, ESV).

I think this is why Proverbs spends so much of its opening on adultery. Chapters 2, 5, 6, 7, and 9 all come back to it. The book keeps reminding the reader that he could be the one.

Wisdom is assuming that you are capable of this and deciding what you will do while you are still calm and in your right mind. The chapter gives its instructions before it tells the story. Keep these words, write them on your heart, and treat wisdom like a sister. Chapter 5 is more concrete: stay far from her, and don't go near the door of her house.

The young man had to walk to her street. A man today carries that street in his phone, so staying far from her door now includes the messages he answers and the conversations he keeps going.

The father wrote this to his sons and put a woman on the corner. Switch them and the story holds. A wife can be the one walking at dusk, and the man who steps out to meet her will know what to say. The warning belongs to husbands and wives alike.

His last instruction is plain: do not let your heart turn toward that road, and do not wander onto it. You could be the one, and there is no room left for naivety. Decide now who you will be.

Resources:

Shirley Glass, NOT "Just Friends": Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743225503

Shirley Glass, Fresh Air interview (2003) https://freshairarchive.org/segments/psychotherapist-dr-shirley-glass

Shirley Glass quoted in "Workplace Romance: The New Infidelity" (Crosswalk) https://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/divorce-and-remarriage/workplace-romance-the-new-infidelity-1223108.html

Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein, "The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making" (2006) https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/HeatMoment.pdf

D. M. Wegner, J. D. Lane, and S. Dimitri, "The Allure of Secret Relationships" (1994) https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.66.2.287

Arthur Aron, Helen Fisher, and colleagues, "Reward, Motivation, and Emotion Systems Associated With Early-Stage Intense Romantic Love" (2005) https://einsteinmed.edu/uploadedFiles/departments/neurology/Clinical_and_Research_Programs/Reward_Emotion_and_Motivation/Aron%20et%20al%20JN%2005.pdf

Loran Nordgren, Frenk van Harreveld, and Joop van der Pligt, "The Restraint Bias: How the Illusion of Self-Restraint Promotes Impulsive Behavior" (2009) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02468.x

Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957)