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The instant gratification that comes from an affair yields an awesome power, allowing a person to forget the realities of home. Those few moments of passion may cause an adulterer to disregard anything that has to do with truth, including the feelings of other people. Marriages are temporarily annulled, relationships are severed, and aftershock is an afterthought of the sex. Hopefully he or she used protection. Good if so. But even if condoms were one-hundred percent effective, they could not possibly stop all sexually transmitted diseases. After all, pain cannot be held to the confines of latex.

Yet an affair rarely endures, but its fallout lasts for months, sometimes years. The panic, the nerve-searing paranoia, the tears, and the pain leach to more victims than just the jilted spouse or significant other. When a marriage, or significant relationship, loses its innocence, it affects the children from that union as well. When the affair is revealed, it is hard to mask the pain. Mornings gathered around the breakfast table are quiet. Grace isn't the same. The children peek and notice their mommy, or daddy, shifting during prayer, looking at the other parent in a way that speaks of audacity. Almost as if God should not bless the table, let alone forgive. Civility is forced, game night fades, and outings to church are usually less one parent, at least for the few Sundays that first follow the act. Homework is difficult to complete because of the nightly fights over who, what, why, when, and where.

Patience is lost, and the children are scared to make mistakes because of the reprisal from parents who are now holding short fuses. The kids develop shells, and revert to a life of survival, wondering where the happiness has gone. Over time, their feelings mutate. Wonder becomes truth. They are the cause of the friction, the anger, the pain, they think. Fear becomes self-loathing, and soon, nothing can stop the hate. Then the parents have to live with the distorted irony of working things out for the benefit of the children.

Sometimes one parent leaves the home, which causes mixed emotions. The children are not exposed to fights or pitiful acting when it comes to the appearance of harmony, but they still lose. Now they wonder what they did wrong, to cause mommy or daddy to leave. The house is quieter, and no piercing eyes dominate the dining room table at dinner. But there is one less place setting, one less parent, which can affect the kids greater than any unspoken tension.

An affair is not commitment's test. It is not therapy without the co-pay. And the fallout is a forced learning experience better off not taught. Adultery hurts. Outside liaisons make a bad marriage unbearable and turn a once good marriage sour.

And kids remember everything.

Learn more about this author, Krymzen Hall.
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