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There are times in the lives of most Christians when a vital force inserts itself into our consciousness and demands to take over. We see someone, and we crave.

Sometimes we want and can have—with God's and everyone's blessing. Desire does take place between husbands and wives, sweetly, as in the wistful songs by the husband-and-wife duo Over the Rhine. After recovering from a near-divorce, Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler put to music this aching confession: "You're my water / You're my wine / You're my whisky / From time to time. / You're the hunger / On my bones / All the nights / I sleep alone."

But even married people who feel this marvelous hunger in their bones are occasionally broadsided by unwieldy yearning. Misguided cravings do not discriminate between the single and the married, the celibate and the promiscuous. They plop onto your lap unannounced. You see someone, and suddenly you want to do something—often, something that is not yours to do. Like it or not, think healthily about it or not, pray against it or not—desire happens.

What do you do when it pays its impromptu visits? Indulge in thought only? Deny it's there? Seek an exorcism? Curse yourself? Eat chocolate?

Nancy Trejos wrote in The Washington Post about another unreliable solution. She described how some Shiites, the majority who have regained power in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, have resurrected an odd custom from before Saddam. Mutaa, or "enjoyment marriage," is a contract that provides already married men with a religiously sanctioned opportunity to have sex with someone other than their wives. All a guy has to do is support the willing woman financially. The mutaa can last a few minutes or several years. If it sounds like prostitution, that's because it is, say women's rights activists. But Shiite Muslims argue that mutaa provides humanitarian aid to war widows and young divorcees. How noble is that?

Such moral evasions aren't just a Shiite thing. King Solomon pretended that his polygamy wasn't harming anyone. Then there are the happily married people who go to church, yet find themselves illicitly entangled.

Before her death of cancer in 2003, psychologist Shirley Glass, named by The New York Times "the godmother of infidelity research," described trends of what she called "the new infidelity." One, Glass noticed a rise in emotional affairs between colleagues since women started getting traditionally male-dominated jobs. Two, Internet interactions were contributing to the rise of thrilling imbroglios. Three, even though they involved no sex, emotional affairs could be more threatening to marriages than one-night stands. (The myth of a soulmate not only creates marriages; it destroys them as well.) Four, Glass reported that most people who had affairs didn't go looking for them and reported having satisfying marriages.

My conversations with Christian women echo these findings. They are attracted to their husbands. But on certain occasions, they find themselves wanting other people, often men they meet through work. Intimacy developed in Christian settings—Bible study groups, churches, ministries, and seminaries—can catch us off guard. As men and women work together for a cause greater than themselves, their common vigor makes them attractive to each other. Church fathers and mothers discovered long ago that spiritual intimacy and sexual intimacy are kissing cousins. So it was only half-jokingly that my friend and I swore in our senior year of Bible college that we wouldn't pray with a man during the first three dates. Why get so cozy?

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April 2007, Vol. 51, No. 4