The Wave You Are Standing In (2 of 3)

Watch one man across the stages of one life and the patience of the adversary becomes plain. At thirteen the boy is in his bedroom with a magazine he found, and the body responds, and he learns that the response feels like power. At twenty-two he is in a college dorm with cable television and a roommate who keeps strange hours, and the habit has moved indoors and become routine. At thirty-one he is married and has children and the laptop is in the home office and the door closes, and the wife is tired and the marriage is settling and the habit is now a quiet rival no one has named. At forty-five he is at the peak of his career and his phone goes everywhere with him, and the categories have shifted in directions he would not have predicted at twenty-two, and his wife has not been intimately close to him in years and he is no longer sure when that became normal. At fifty-eight the children are gone and the house is quiet and the marriage has been running on momentum for a decade, and the alone time he has been protecting for forty years has now become most of his life, and the wife across the table feels like a stranger because in some real sense she is one. He has been having a relationship the whole time. It just has not been with her.

This is why gray divorce — divorce after fifty, after decades of marriage — is the fastest growing divorce category in the Western world. The rate has doubled since 1990. The standard explanations cite increased longevity, women's financial independence, the cultural permission boomers gave themselves to leave marriages that no longer fulfilled them. All of that is true. What the standard explanations rarely name is the role of the screen. Pornography use roughly doubles the probability of divorce in longitudinal studies, and that doubling is most pronounced when the use began mid-marriage and continued without interruption. The wife wakes up at fifty-six and realizes the man she married is not the man across the table, and she is not always wrong. The habit that started behind a counter in 1965 has been accumulating for forty years. The bill the man kept deferring has come due, and the cost is the marriage itself.

The older reader who has watched this unfold across the generations may feel the horror of it — what has happened to his children, his grandchildren, the culture he handed them. That horror is not wrong. But if he is honest, he will feel something else underneath it. He will recognize the pull. He managed it with a magazine behind a counter and a habit he never named out loud, in a decade when no one had language for it and shame was the only accountability system available. He did not conquer it. He managed it with more friction and less access, which is not the same thing. The desire is the same desire. The departure from the vine is the same departure. The mercy he needed at thirty is the mercy the twenty-three-year-old needs now — not the mercy of lowered expectations, but the mercy of being known and met in the exact place where the vine is available and the counterfeit is right there and the choice is still being made. The older man's wisdom is real. He has more road behind him. He knows where the path leads when you stay in the vine and where it leads when you do not. That knowledge qualifies him to walk alongside the younger man, not above him. The shared sin is the ground of the shared mercy, and the shared mercy is the only thing that actually helps.

There is also something the cultural explanation does not fully account for, and it needs to be named plainly. For many men — not all, because the experience varies widely — the sexual drive is not a polite suggestion. It can be a physical insistence that the body makes regardless of circumstance, regardless of intent, regardless of how many times the promise was made that morning. A hardness that will not resolve by itself, a tension that builds without asking permission, a pressure that the body treats as a problem requiring a solution. That is not a disorder. It is design. The drive itself is not the problem and it is not the enemy — covenant marriage was always meant to be its container, and the man who remains in the vine has something to bring to that container that the counterfeit can never produce. It is the same force that built civilizations and fathered children and drove men toward covenant marriage when the culture gave that as the only available container. The culture no longer gives that container reliably. The design did not change. What changed is that the cheapest available resolution is now three taps away at any hour, costs nothing, and leaves no evidence. The man at 10:47 pm is not just bored and spiritually adrift. He is also physically driven toward something, and the counterfeit is the first thing the body finds. Poverty of spirit in that moment is not just a theological posture. It is standing in the middle of a physical demand and saying Father I have nothing here and meaning it. That is the actual battle. The book that does not name it is not fully honest about what remaining costs.

The female version of the same departure is quieter and more socially invisible, which makes it harder to name and easier to miss. A woman fills the present with her children, her grandchildren, her friendships, her conversations, her books, the group chat that is always active, the social media feed that is always warm. None of those things are wrong. Most of them are genuinely good. The list will look different for every woman — it may be career, it may be ministry, it may be the relentless helpfulness that never stops long enough to be needy before God — but the structure is the same. That is exactly what makes the departure invisible — she is not doing something shameful, she is doing something admirable, and the vine is still absent. The need underneath is the same need the man has: to be known, to feel connected, to have the present moment occupied by something that asks nothing too costly of her. Her counterfeit is more respectable than his. The emptiness that drives her toward the fourth novel or the third phone call is the same emptiness that drives him toward the image. The present fills up. God remains absent from it. The dullness that follows — the worship that feels thin, the prayer that feels like talking to a ceiling, the quiet that feels heavier than it should — is the same dullness in both cases. Different packages. Same departure. Same vine waiting.