What Does Submission Look Like After Betrayal?

“Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, His body, and is Himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands” (Ephesians 5:22-24)

“Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may we won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct.” (1 Peter 3:1-2)

“As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens another.” (Proverbs 27:17)

“Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.” (Galatians 6:1)

I recently got this question in a betrayed spouses’ support group I currently co-lead. I have also asked this myself. And it’s a fair question, really. After all, our husbands are living in sexual sin, whether that’s infidelity, prostitution, porn use, and any other kind of sexual sin under the sun. Why should a wife ever submit to that?

Betrayal has taught me a completely new way to submit, and it’s so unlike the kind of submission I was previously taught in church. I was taught that submitting to your husband is obeying your husband without question, “winning him over without words”, never challenging him, never calling him out on anything, and letting him do whatever he wants without considering my input. And when you’ve been taught to submit to your husband this way, it’s only natural for this question to pop up when he’s living in sexual sin that’s endangering you and your marriage.

So if you were sold this type of submission too, ditch it. Such a dysfunctional view of submission does not apply here. Because when you’ve been betrayed, you do in fact need words!

If your husband has sexually betrayed you, you need to do submission differently from what the church might have taught you. Betrayal in marriage requires a more radical, stronger, “tough love” kind of submission that holds your husband accountable for his sin. Submission after betrayal looks a lot more like this:

• Respecting his right to make his own choices.
• Allowing him to experience the consequences of those choices, up to and including divorce.
• Stating your needs and setting boundaries.
• Applying this verse and others to your life: “As iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17)

And what does all of that look like in real life? This kind of submission, in its essence, is submitting to God first and foremost. If God tells me to “sharpen my husband” according to Proverbs 27:17, that’s what I’m going to do. I challenge my husband’s sin. I expose it to the light, convict him, and correct him, rather than sit back and allow his sexual sin to endanger my marriage. If God tells me to “restore my husband gently” according to Galatians 6:1, I will do that as well. If my husband is caught in a sin (and he most certainly was!), this passage gives me permission to call him out on it in a loving way. And ultimately, that will (hopefully) make him a more godly, “sharpened” Christian. This kind of submission encourages him to place himself in submission to God as well, and allows the consequences to happen if he chooses not to do that.

It also looks like the boundaries I’ve laid out here, and a lot of them sound like, “If you do X, then I’m going to do Y.” If my husband relapses, he has to tell me and his accountability partners, and I ask him to give me time and space away from him so that process the relapse. Because I need that time and space away from him physically to process, grieve the betrayal, and feel safe again in the marriage. Further, they’re consequences my husband needs to deal with, to slowly make him realize that porn use is not worth hurting me or our relationship for.

This kind of submission, at first glance, almost seems wrong, doesn’t it? It sounds kind of unsubmissive. But there’s nothing unsubmissive about holding your husband accountable! Our husbands are sinful, imperfect people who sometimes need correction and need to be “sharpened”. There needs to be a way for wives to “tough-lovingly” correct them if they go awry. Redefining submission and taking a new approach to it are some of the ways that I found.

And I have found that this way is also supported by scripture. When the Lord’s people kept going back to their sin (in other words, worshiping false gods, effectively “cheating” on God) in the Old Testament, the Lord did not sit back and allow His bride to just do whatever she wanted. He set boundaries with her, which are in His Holy Law and in the Ten Commandments. His bride, Israel repeatedly crossed those boundaries, and repeatedly did it without repentance. And the Lord allowed all kinds of consequences to happen to Israel as a result of her sin. This included spending 40 years in the wilderness, exile, slavery, destruction of their temple and city, loss of their promised land, oppression from other nations, death, and more. Sometimes they repented and turned back to God, but sometimes they didn’t. So eventually, God allowed the ultimate consequence of their adulteries to happen: divorce (Jeremiah 3:8).

So you do not have to tolerate sexual sin in your marriage for the sake of “biblical” submission. Adopt a new, more gutsy submission: the kind that submits to a loving, merciful, just, and perfect God above all. The kind of submission where you expect to be treated like a human being and an equal partner in your marriage. The kind that holds your husband accountable. The kind that is not afraid to correct the sinful, imperfect people in any position of leadership, and sharpen them so that they become better leaders under God’s authority. And this kind of gutsy submission can change the world around you. That’s what submission after betrayal looks like.

(CORRECTION: The sentence above that says “Our husbands are sinful, imperfect people who sometimes need correction and need to be “sharpened”.” originally said “Our husbands are sinful, imperfect people who have been called by God to lead us in our marriages.” But I corrected it to better reflect how my views on this are currently changing. Read this post to learn more about that.)