I was a guest recently on one of Moody Radio's national programs, Equipped with Chris Brooks, answering questions from listeners. I've been the guest on thousands of similar radio shows, to say nothing about the thousands of radio shows that my wife, Joyce, and I have aired on Marriage Builders® Radio. But I had trouble answering one question of a listener that day: "As a single woman, I don't like the guardrails that married men in my church often raise when I try to be their friend. Why can't we be brothers and sisters in Christ, as the Bible has encouraged us to be, and learn from each other."
It's a very tough question to answer because of competing values. On the one hand, as Christians, we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. We are to love and care for each other as Christ has commanded us to do. Friendship is encouraged among believers. And yet, I've found that there are great risks when a married man or woman develops an opposite-sex friendship outside of marriage, even among believers. The risks are so great that I have encouraged married men and women to avoid opposite-sex friendships altogether, a position that I have taken consistently throughout my career as marriage counselor.
The justification for my position is based on years of experience helping Christians who have fallen victim to infidelity. Pastors, missionaries, evangelists, and church members alike have come to me for help to recover from their mistake of a lifetime. How could it happen to someone so dedicated to Christ's service, knowing that He has clearly condemned infidelity?
The answer is found in the extraordinary power of romantic love. It's what usually motivates us to marry, but it can also motivate us to be unfaithful. I use the Love Bank to illustrate how romantic love is created.
Very simply put, each of us has a Love Bank within us that accumulates love units in the name of everyone we meet. When a person makes us feel good, deposits are made into their account, and when they make us feel bad, withdrawals are made. We like people with positive accounts, and dislike people with negative accounts. But when someone's account has so many deposits that it breaches the romantic love threshold, a feeling familiar to most of us is triggered: Romantic love. We have no control over this phenomenon. It's entirely driven by deposits and withdrawals.
I have helped thousands of couples that are considering divorce learn how to restore romantic love to their marriage. I show them how to make massive love bank deposits by meeting each other's most important emotional needs. By restoring romantic love, any threat of divorce is ended because couples in love never divorce.
But I've also warned couples, even those in love, to guard their Love Banks from outside threats. If they let someone of the opposite sex outside of marriage make massive Love Bank deposits, they are at risk of falling in love with that person. When that happens, instincts take over reason, and infidelity is usually the tragic result.
What is a friend? It's someone who meets some of our emotional needs. Affection, conversation, recreational companionship, honesty and openness, and admiration to name a few. When these emotional needs are met, Love Bank deposits are made. And when they are met by someone of the opposite sex, the effect is so magnified that the romantic love threshold can be breached.
Most affairs are not planned. They begin as a friendship of mutual support. But that mutual support can make enough Love Bank deposits to trigger the feeling of romantic love. Once that happens, our instincts can take over, making us want to maintain that relationship at all costs.
What choices, then, does a single Christian woman have in building friendships with fellow believers? Based on my experience with those who have fallen into the trap of infidelity, my advice to the single woman who asked me the question on the Equipped radio program is to form great friendships with Christian women and Christian single men.