Host:  A question I’d like to throw out to you now is what are some danger signs that one finds themselves in, or danger signs that you are in a compromising relationship?

Guest:  Well, some of the danger signs are when you start finding your mind and thoughts coming back to that person constantly. When you’re starting to say “ooh”, a comparison between her maybe and your spouse.  Those are very significant danger signs.  The other is just wanting not to go home very much.  A couple of others is, you start picking fights with your spouse, it’s kind of subconsciously that we start doing that and trying to affirm inside of us, “Oh, you know, that person is such a nice person”.

Host:  “I’m justified.”

Guest:  Yes, because “How could anybody live with this women, or this man or anything.”

Dave Currie:  Tonight’s been an amazing show talking about a very serious topic of how to affair-proof your marriage.  So here are my best thoughts on how you can actually put a hedge around your marriage and actually affair-proof it. First of all you’ve got to:

1. Re-commit to marital faithfulness
   There needs to be a decision in your heart that “I want to be loyal to my husband.  I want to be loyal to my wife”.  It was all part of your vows, “As long as we both shall live”.  There was a time when you said, with the ring on the finger, “It is you, and you only”.  And it was a special time, it was a great time.  It was a conscious decision.  But in the same way you made a commitment in front of those people that wedding day, you need to make a commitment that says, “I will remain faithful to you”.  Have the integrity to be able to see something endure long in your marriage.  I love calling it a Legacy of Integrity, where your kids, as they watch, they see something real, something lasting happen.
2. Break the silence
   If you’ve messed up, the best thing to do is talk to somebody, a counselor, a friend, a priest, rabbi, pastor.  Talk to somebody to get some help in working it through.  Make sure that your advice is not coming from somebody who has had an affair who’s going to go light on you.  Get someone who’s wise who can help you fix things, correct things.  I might even suggest that not only breaking the silence with a friend, but you need to tell your spouse about either the temptations you’ve had or the situation that you’ve been through.  You want to build your marriage on a foundation of honesty and it’s a wonderful thing to do.
3. Walk from compromising relationships
   Put distance between yourself and the person that’s tempting you.  For sure, put distance between yourself and the person that you’ve had an affair with.  You’ve got to do that.  You’ve got to break all that relationship.  But you know what?  If you’re going to keep from having an affair, you don’t want to put yourself into compromising situations in the first place.
4. Realize the cost of an affair
   That was one of the things I did, likely 5 or 6 years after I was married.  I took some time to think through what would happen if I actually had a sexual affair on Donalyn.  And, you know, I thought about all the different situations that would succumb.  I mean, I’d have to face her, I’d have to face, well one of the hardest ones is looking at my dad in the face and tell him that I really blew it, because my dad is such a man of integrity.  Looking at my kids and telling my kids that I’ve blown it, that would just kill me. And you know what?  I want to have a legacy.  All that I stand for.  Here I am teaching on marriage and to have blown it in my life, what a travesty of what I stand for. And you know what?  You need to realize the cost of an affair and especially that 80% of second marriages blow it anyway.  So the answer isn’t getting rid of this spouse for another one it’s working out the things with the one you have.
5. Build in relational safeguards
   I call them hedges, where you have friends in your life who hold you accountable.  Where you don’t go out one-on-one with another person of the opposite sex, other than your spouse.  And you only have couple friends.  You don’t have individual friends of the opposite sex.  Those are some of the things that are going to help you put those hedges in and stay with them.