A good mentor doesn’t always get it perfectly right. But sometimes he gets it right enough to change the direction of your life.
Mine stopped me with a sentence I’ve never forgotten: “Shared feelings equals intimacy.”
He overstated the case. Sharing feelings isn’t always dangerous. But what he was pointing at was real. He was warning me that emotional intimacy with someone of the opposite sex — someone who is not your spouse — is a doorway. And doorways don’t stay neutral forever. You walk through them or you don’t.
I heard him.
I didn’t file it away and forget it. I went home to Nancy and told her what he said. We talked about it — really talked about it — and we made a covenant together. Not a cold rule handed down from a pulpit. A fence we built ourselves, side by side. We agreed: we would not share our feelings with someone of the opposite sex.
That was more than fifty years ago.
A fence before you need one
There’s a principle buried in that mentor’s warning that most people don’t discover until it’s too late. The danger in emotional intimacy isn’t always dramatic. It rarely starts with bad intentions. It starts with a conversation that feels harmless. A shared frustration. A moment of understanding. Someone who listens.
By the time you recognize the pattern, the path is well worn.
The wise response is to build the fence before the field becomes a temptation. Not because you distrust yourself. Because you understand yourself. The heart is capable of justifying almost anything one small step at a time. Proverbs 4:23 doesn’t say guard your heart when it feels like it might be in danger. It says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
What a covenant actually looks like
Nancy and I didn’t write it down. We didn’t sign anything. We sat together as husband and wife and made a choice.
We chose to be each other’s emotional home. The one we lean into when life gets heavy. The one we bring our fears, our doubts, our unfinished thoughts. Not because we were afraid of other people. Because we were serious about each other.
That covenant didn’t restrict our marriages. It protected it.
Over fifty-three years, we have walked through the full weight of a shared life — seasons of joy and grief, health and illness, raising children, burying parents, watching grandchildren take their first steps. Through all of it, we have remained each other’s confidants.
The fence held.
A word to the young
If you are early in your marriage, or if you are standing at the beginning of one, hear this:
The marriages that last are rarely saved by dramatic rescues. They are built on ten thousand small decisions. One of the most important you can make is to decide before you need to decide.
Put up a fence before you need one.
Talk to your spouse. Make a covenant together. Choose each other — not just on the wedding day, but on every ordinary Tuesday that follows.
Fifty-three years later, that advice still wears well.
Books by Mo Hodge
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