It’s fine for a man to look at an attractive woman. I’d even go so far as to say that if his first response is “whoa, I’d like to…” that’s probably fine too. It’s when that thought crosses your head, do you indulge it or do you say “ok now brother, yeah she’s attractive but your wife is beautiful, the love of your life and let’s not get carried away here.” The former is sinful, the latter is successfully dodging the near occasion of sin. As a general rule, men have a more powerful sex drive than women in that it’s flipped to the “ON” position all the time and our first subconscious response to an attractive woman is to consider her sexually. We can’t control that. What we can do is control that first response and temper our baser desires instead of letting them control us.
Text in bold = bridge way too far in my humble opinion as a man. I was internally agreeing with your posts up to a point, and that was the one that did it for me. That first response is not okay at all. Imagine telling his wife that? "Hey, honey, that very attractive woman over there well I would like to XYZ her and then ABC her too, whadd’ya think bout that huh, and remember you can’t get angry cos I am swtiched to the ON switch all the time!’
I don’t buy it. And I don’t buy trying to re-route occasions of sin. If you see an attractive women, objectively say [and this I agree is unavoidable as a warm blooded man] yes she is attractive, but subjectively there should be nothing more to it. Your ON switch should be turned on to your wife.
Its kinda like… as a crude example. if you have committed to dieting your whole life. Sure, you look at the chocolate and say “Yeah, tasty” but there is nothing more to it. There is nothing over and above it. At least there shouldn’t be, because thats when you either a)torture yourself in the whole dieting process or b) cheat on your diet. And if a diet is done correctly the original choice to not eat chocolate or look at it as a pleasurable treat becomes automatic.
Except marriage is way better than the above, more in depth. For marriage, unlike a diet, you are excited when you enter into it. It’s almost like “wow I’m getting exactly what I want” instead of restricting yourself. So you automatically should have no need to look at other women sexually. Sure, you can appreciate them and process that she is pretty, because as you say that is an objective [for simplification purposes objective, I realise that some may say ah but beauty is subjective but you understand my line of thought] and unconscious processing of visual stimuli. But anything more than that I believe just
is an occasion of sin via lust or covetting your neighbours wife.
Which is where the problem lies. Because if we were all just going around saying “Oh that lady is pretty” I am sure there would be no problem. Your wife would be the one that you pay all your sexual attention to. It might maybe be a bit idealist and not in line with experience but hey sometimes we need to put into effect that we are in this world but not of it.
