This morning, actress Glenn Close was on the CBS “This Morning” show and she was talking about one of her well known roles in the movie “Fatal Attraction.” By now, I assume everyone has seen this classic movie but the concept is that a married man has an affair with a woman and everything is wonderful in the beginning and at some point she becomes a total basket case and wants more of a relationship than the married man is willing to give to her.

Now, I can approach this whole cheating while married/committed from a Biblical or spiritual point of view… but I’m not. I could also tackle the topic from a sexual health risk factor… but I’m not. Right now I only want to address the emotional issues that come along with bringing another person into your relationship.

Many want to argue that monogamy is not natural, that if we look at mother nature rarely do we find monogamous creatures. Ok, I’ll give you a pass on that. Lots of species in the animal kingdom are doing it whenever the urge hits them with whatever mate they find accessible at that moment.  The one thing that humans have that other animals do not have is the “power of choice” over our urges. SURE, sex is a natural urge. Who and when we have sex with is our conscious choice though.

Sex does not “just happen” just like it does not “just happen” that you ate the whole cake, sat at the Blackjack table too long, or parachuted out of that plane. Speaking from a woman’s point of view, ladies know as we are getting ready for the date that night whether or not we will be “giving a man some.” We’ve already shaved our legs, sprayed on his favorite perfume and put on our matching pair of lace bra and panties and unless the guy totally screws up the date, we as women have already pre-determined the ending destination for the night.  Men and women know the consequences going into sex… we make the choice, be it the right choice or the wrong choice.

The problem that arises for most humans is that we cannot repeatedly have sex with an individual without developing some sort of emotional attachment during the course of connecting physically and pillow talk. If you are married or committed and having an outside affair, you are stretching yourself thin emotionally while at the same time putting your wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend in an “emotional threesome” that they most likely did not sign up for.  She’s got feelings for him, he’s got feelings for her and her, she knows about her but cares less about her feelings, she does not know about her or all the extra feelings being passed around in her love life universe.

In time, the lady/man on the side will want to spend Valentine’s Day or Christmas day with you, but you can’t… and maybe, just maybe they won’t be too accepting of that or too happy with that.  Maybe in time, you as the married/committed person might find yourself preferring to spend your birthday or free weekend with your “thing on the side” and then more and more you will find yourself absent physically and emotionally in your marriage/relationship.  Or worse yet, in time you will find out you’ve brought someone into your life… into your marriage/relationship that, like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” refuses to be ignored and then what a mess you’ve gotten yourself into.  You are not possibly just bringing destruction to your life but to your partner’s life as well.

Any man that emotionally attaches himself to a woman will tell you that at some point, it’s going to eat away at his mind (his manhood) to think about the lady he’s intimate with kissing on someone else, doing the things she does to him to someone else, it becomes harder and harder to send her back home to her husband/man even if he’s married himself. Emotional attachment to most men equates to territorial possession.  For women, emotionally attaching ourselves to a man just opens a whole gamut of potential problems if he’s in a relationship.  We go into what we are designed to be… nurturers. We want to take care of you when you are sick, share life with you (maybe even create life with you),  pick your dress shirts up from the cleaners but that is not allowed in the “extra” or “side” relationship so emotional frustrations start to set in.

Look, cheating was around 2000 years ago and I expect it will be here 2000 years from now, so I don’t expect this article or the next 2000 that you read to stop it. My only goal is to hopefully get you to pause for a moment, to think for just that split second about not just what might feel good right now but the emotional consequences and resulting problems you might develop down the road.

I love it when y’all are loving each other. Peace and Blessings ~Lana Reid