Cross-Gender Friendships

It's curious how some subjects just seem to keep popping up in clusters. Following hard on my thoughts on cross-gender friendships as stimulated by the movie Take the Lead, Scot McKnight has initiated a significant discussion on the same topic. The post itself is quite short, but the comments are extensive.

Two women in particular spoke rather eloquently, I thought, about the positive values of close cross-gender friendships: see comments by Jen O. and Jennifer (particularly the second paragraph of the linked comment).

I thought again about the premise set out early in the post, and seemingly accepted by most, if not all, commenters: "opposite sex friendships can lead to intimacies that destroy marriages". I began to wonder if perhaps we have not accepted a faulty premise that is in some way analogous to the faulty premise of the youth pastor that had sexually abused Jennifer some 20 years ago — to him, she was the problem, and he was simply the victim of her "dangerous" attractiveness.

Perhaps we ought to question the premise that it is the intimacies developed in opposite sex relationships that are the cause of the marital "train wrecks", rather than simply the place where some train wrecks happen. And is it only in cross gender relationships that emotional infidelity occurs? What of all the women (and men) who feel that the time their spouse spends with his buddies (or her girlfriends) is more important than time spent with them? What of all the pastors' wives who have felt that the church was the "other woman" in her husband's life — the one who got all the emotional energy and intimacy that belonged to her? And what about the hugely negative effects of the competitive husband (or wife) bashing games that go on in single gender gatherings?

Is not the real issue a failure to develop and maintain a relationship of love and intimacy with one's spouse, regardless of the presence or absence of other same or cross gender friendships? Is it not what is or is not happening within the marriage the principal determinant of success or failure? To see the external as the primary cause of the failure is as much a cop-out as the youth pastor blaming Jennifer for his abuse of her.

It seems to me that the expressed perception of close cross gender relationships as "dangerous" to marriage may be connected to a perception of love and intimacy as a "scarce" or "limited" resource, in which the more some one else gets of my wife's confidence, the less there must necessarily be for me. We recognize this idea as immature when expressed by children who fear that they will be loved less now that the new baby has arrived, but perhaps many of us never really lose that fear.

We have been made in the image of an intensely intimate God, whose triune loving relationships overflow with ever more love for all of creation. And we are the objects of Jesus' prayer that would we be one, even as He and the Father are one. Unless we believe Jesus' prayer to be in vain, it would seem we should expect to be made into people whose capacity for love and intimacy is no longer scarce but abundant!

Nevertheless, we live both in the "already" and in the "not yet". For some of us there is more of the "not yet" than for others. And so the ability to experience one's own and one's spouse's capacity for love and intimacy as abundant rather than scarce may well be vastly different from person to person and from couple to couple — and even from season to season for the same couple.

My suggestion for wise counsel is this: do whatever it takes to keep building intimacy of all kinds within your own marriage. If, because of your own history and formation and situation, that means severely limiting the degree of intimacy in other relationships, then do it. And conversely if close external relationships enhance the capacity of you and your spouse to engage more closely and intimately with each other, then nuture those relationships, be they same or cross gender, individual based or couple based. Just keep the primary focus on growing closer to your mate, by whatever means.