A few months after I voluntarily resigned from the ministry at age 48, my children had grown and were out of the house, and my wife was loving every minute of a demanding real estate career. Every Friday morning, for six months, I would leave my empty house, drive to a nearby town, and meet a close friend for half a day.

We had sex. Good sex. The kind that feels like the movie 9½ Weeks. But that’s not what I think about when, twenty years later, I remember those Fridays. What I think about is between our times of sex—lying there sweating and laughing, or munching a Panera sandwich for more energy—was talking about Dostoevsky, about Sartre, about whether a God who had abandoned half the people on earth was worth worshipping. She had read everything I cared about. She laughed at the things I found funny. She pushed back when I was being an idiot, which was more often than I admitted. She listened to me, and she saw me.

I would drive home thinking: This is one of the best friendships of my life.

And that sentence always arrived with a knife in it.

ºººº

At some point, I started asking her a question. I asked it probably a dozen times over those six months, in different ways, as if rephrasing it might produce a different answer.

Do you think there’s any possibility we could tell our spouses? And they wouldn’t mind us meeting like this on Friday mornings?

She would laugh. Full, genuine, slightly incredulous laughter. “There is no way in hell that would ever happen.”

I knew she was right. I had known it before I asked. I kept asking anyway, because I genuinely could not reconcile the beauty of what we had with the necessity of hiding it. That gap felt like a philosophical problem I couldn’t solve — not just a personal one.

The sex was amazing. The friendship was richer. The dishonesty was eating me alive.

ºººº

For me, here is what makes affairs a burning hell. I am an excruciatingly honest person. I detest lying the way some people detest broccoli — viscerally, physically, at a cellular level. I don’t do it well, and I don’t do it comfortably. It weighs me down.

The secrecy violated something so fundamental in me that after six months, I ended this beautiful relationship. I did not want to end it. I want to be clear about that. I ended it because the alternative — continuing to lie to people I loved — was making me someone I didn’t recognize. But ending it cost enormously, to this day. I still miss her friendship. I miss the Friday mornings. I miss being known that well by someone who had no obligation to know me at all.

I spent a long time afterward trying to calculate which choice cost more. Staying in the lie or ending the beauty. I’m still not sure I got the math right. I no longer believe honesty is always the best policy.

ºººº

You have a person in mind right now.

I know you do, because I’ve been living long enough to know how these questions land. There’s someone — a friend, a colleague, someone from your small group ten years ago, someone you had dinner with last week, your spouse’s best friend — and as you read the question in this title, one face appeared.

And you immediately felt guilty about it. That’s exactly the point.

You’re over forty. Probably married. Raised in a tradition that handed you very clear rules of how sexuality works: one person, forever, exclusively, or you are broken. The rules don’t have an exception for a profound intellectual and physical connection with someone who isn’t your spouse. The black-and-white rules have a red zone labeled sin,and they dare you to step outside the lines.

So you’ve been carrying that face, that friend, around in the red zone, which is an exhausting place to keep a person you genuinely care about.

ºººº

Here’s what the research actually shows, and it should make all of us furious.

Somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of married men and 15 to 20 percent of married women report having had at least one affair. Those are just the people who admitted it to a researcher, anonymously. Real-life researchers who study what gets left out of self-reporting put the real number closer to 40 percent of all marriages. One in three. Or more.

Think about that for a moment. We have built an entire civilization on sexual rules that roughly one in three people quietly break, then lie about, then carry in silence and guilt for years — sometimes decades — sometimes forever.

The prohibition isn’t preventing the behavior. It’s just guaranteeing that it happens in the dark, where it does the most damage. Where people like me would go back home on Friday afternoons and wish they could tell their lifelong spouse or partner about a life-giving friendship.

If a third of all marriages involve an affair, we are not protecting people from extramarital sex. We are keeping people from knowing about it. Those are very different projects, and only one of them is honest.

ºººº

I’ve been thinking about why sex with a friend feels so dangerous to the people around us. What are we actually afraid of?

The evangelical answer is the soul-tie doctrine — the teaching that sex permanently bonds two people at a spiritual level, so having more than one bond fractures the soul. You cannot give yourself wholly to two people simultaneously. What you give elsewhere, you steal from your spouse. And for people who grew up in the church, this wasn’t negotiable. It was a real transaction. You signed over the deed on your wedding day. The self has a title, and the title was irrevocable.

But here’s what that model gets exactly backwards.

I drove home from those Friday mornings more alive than I’d been all week. More curious. More physically awake. More genuinely glad to walk through my own front door. The conversation about Sartre hadn’t taken anything from my marriage — it had refilled something in me that my marriage, through no fault of its own, couldn’t reach. I went back fuller, not emptier. If it had not been for the secrecy, my spouse would have gotten that version of me. The lit-up version. The one who had just been seen and known and delighted in by another human being.

This is what the ownership model refuses to account for: desire feeds desire. Aliveness expands — it doesn’t deplete. The person who is genuinely flourishing in one connection tends to bring that aliveness home, into the kitchen, into the bed, into the long evenings with their children. Everyone benefits. The spouse. The children. The whole household breathes differently when one person is truly alive rather than quietly suffocating inside a framework too small for them.

The theft model doesn’t produce more love for the spouse. It produces a slow, invisible deadness — managed, performed, year after year — and nobody can name what’s missing because naming it would be the confession.

The fear underneath the ownership model is even more primal: sex plus friendship equals love, and love equals replacement. The logical chain runs so fast that most people don’t even see it happening. But it’s there. She knows him too well. She makes him laugh too easily. She reads the books he reads. This cannot be allowed. It must be something more dangerous.

But sometimes this has nothing to do with religion or culture at all.

Some people wield sexual exclusivity as pure control — with no theological framework required, no purity culture to blame, no institutional permission sought. The agreement sounds mutual on paper. In practice, it functions as a leash. One partner dictates the terms, and the other accepts them for reasons that make painful sense if you understand how early experiences of control can get coded as love.

This happens across every orientation, every background, every demographic. The impulse to own another person’s sexuality is older than any church and survives the abandonment of every doctrine. Strip away the theology, strip away the cultural framework, and some people still arrive here — needing to possess, needing to restrict, needing the other person’s desire to have no address but themselves.

What that tells me is this: the church didn’t invent the ownership model. It just consecrated it, dressed it in covenant language, and called it faithfulness. The root is older and more personal than any institution. And it shows up wherever one person needs to manage what another person feels.

Why? Because we have decided that sex is the most combustible force in human life — more dangerous than money, more destabilizing than power — and that it can only be safely contained in one sealed vessel per lifetime. Anything that touches another vessel is demolition.

What I experienced on those Friday mornings was not destruction. It was warmth. It was life. It was two people reading, talking, touching, and being genuinely glad the other one existed. The devastation came later, and secrecy ignited it, not the affair.

I chose secrecy for a brief time. Then the secrecy became untenable — not because I got caught, but because I am the kind of person who cannot sustain a lie without it hollowing me out from the inside.

So I ended something beautiful to stay “honest.” And I have never fully decided whether that was integrity or indoctrination.

What I know is this: one in three of us is making some version of this calculation right now. In secret. Alone. Unable to ask a single person in our lives what they think, because the asking itself would be the confession. And then, condemnation and devastation.

We are not bad people doing bad things. We are human beings trying to love well inside a framework that was never large enough to hold us. A person can’t meet another person’s every need for a lifetime. The expectation is unreasonable. And so, given our constructs of religion, culture, and control, we are forced to drive to the next town in secret shame.

And somewhere, right now, someone is going home from an illicit tryst, on a psychedelic-like high, trying to figure out who the hell they actually are…and what the fuck are they going to do…