Growing Your Hedges

My next brilliant idea was to gather a few friends who had recently gotten married and start a little men’s group. Initially, this group consisted of Jeff, a pal from church, and two fellow seminarians named Matt and Ethan.

The 4 of us began meeting weekly for breakfast, and we soon fell into a comfortable routine. Generally, one of us would begin by describing some incident during the previous week that had upset his wife, such as saying, “Could we talk about this tomorrow?” when the wife was trying to share some heartfelt concern right at bedtime. The other 3 would then remark, “Your wife doesn’t like that either, huh?” And we would all go away with a deepened understanding of our spouses’ mysterious needs.

While helpful, this strategy only took us so far, as the stories quickly began repeating themselves. To shake things up a bit, we decided to read and discuss a Christian book on marriage. The book we ultimately settled on bore the strange title of Hedges, and it promised to help husbands “affair-proof” their marriages. I now wonder why this theme struck us as a necessary or appealing one, but we eagerly began reading tips on building a union strong enough to withstand any outside temptations.

The book began with several detailed anecdotes about men who had been unfaithful despite having a strong personal faith. As I recall, all these stories followed a similar pattern, with friendly conversations and flirtations turning into emotional attachment and then, despite all efforts to resist, full-blown infidelity. I had a hard time envisioning this sequence of events playing out in my own life, as I had a tough time with just the friendly conversations part and had only dated about three women in my whole life.

Still, I tried to keep an open mind—until the book suddenly got a little weird. The author began laying out some ground-rules he had developed for himself to short-circuit the progression of infidelity, which included his commitment to never—under any circumstances—ride alone in a car with a woman who was not his wife. Upon reading this, I wished the author had included a picture of himself on the back cover. Was he some Adonis who women couldn’t keep their hands off of during a routine drive to the airport? If not, his rule seemed like overkill, and I said as much during our next breakfast gathering.

The opinions of the group on the subject were somewhat divided. Jeff and Matt agreed with the author that it was better to be safe than sorry, but Ethan showed some sympathy with my reaction. “What if it’s some 70 year-old crone?” he wondered aloud. “Don’t you have to take this on a case-by-case basis?”

This remark stirred disquieting memories of my experience at the nursing home, but I was grateful that some common sense had begun to enter the picture. And before long, we all agreed that our marriages were “hedged” enough to allow us to move on to a new book.