You Are the Man
A Husband’s Voice, a Pastor’s Silence
I found it easy to blame myself when I discovered my wife’s affair.
Running concurrently with the shock of discovery was the knowledge that I had been physically and emotionally disappearing while working at Chick-fil-A—the only job I could find after I was effectively canceled from my 20-year tenured position at a Missouri university.
My wife was equally exhausted—hers was more emotional and spiritual. She was tired of seeing me so tired. Tired of crying out to God for help and feeling like those prayers weren’t making it past the ceiling.
We were both living in the strange dichotomy of barely hanging on but still trusting God. Not really connecting, but continuing to say, “I love you” and “We’re in this together.”
We weren’t in a good place. I knew that. But I thought it was temporary. I believed our marriage could withstand this season, the most difficult we had ever faced.
What I didn’t account for was that loving my wife would become a competition.
And it wasn’t much of a contest.
I was loving her with the energy-saving techniques of the drowning: self-focused, doing as little as possible so I wouldn’t sink. Breathing slowly. Thinking slower.
It wasn’t romantic. But I leaned on the familiarity of sixteen years of marriage and kept telling myself: I’ll get better. I’ll wake up. I’ll become myself again. As soon as I get a new job.
What I was completely blind to was Erik Herrmann pursuing my wife with the intensity of a graduate student double-majoring in Shakespeare and Religion—quoting poetry, invoking theology, and cloaking his intentions in intellect and faith.
While I came home smelling like fast food and fryer grease, he was trading words meant to stir the soul—music, lofty ideas, and the philosophical meanderings of elite thinkers. He was noticing her. Paying attention. Poetically expounding on her inner and outer beauty.
I was napping daily.
Every affair inflicts bilateral destruction. The blast zone burns fiercest at the center of your soul and emanates outward, turning your bones to dust and flinging your identity as high and wide as the mushroom cloud will carry it.
I had started making observations. But I wasn’t present enough to connect them. My wife was home less and less when I got home from work. Our evenings were quiet—just the two of us on the couch, a show on, light conversation. But her fingers were preoccupied with her phone or laptop.
Still, I didn’t see any dots to connect.
Then came the morning of April 10, 2023.
With an instinct I didn’t understand, I picked up her phone while she was in the shower and read these words: “Good morning, my love.”
They were my wife’s words.
And they weren’t written to me.
I remember the adrenaline in my ears—so loud it rang with the high-pitched whistle you hear in movies when a soldier steps on a land mine and everything moves in slow motion.
There was a text from Erik, too, equal in sentiment. I couldn’t read anything else. Everything blurred. My eyes vibrated. Whatever I could see, I couldn’t understand. The words became disconnected, meaningless, and shattering all at once.
In the days that followed, I checked her phone again in stolen 30-second intervals. Each glance revealed more connection between them. But nothing overt. No concrete evidence that it was a full-blown affair.
I planned to confront Erik. I thought I’d meet him at his office at Concordia Seminary and say something like, “I’m noticing some inappropriate closeness with my wife. I want this stopped before it crosses a line.”
But on April 16th, I read a text from my wife looking forward to the next day—April 17th—the day she and Erik had planned to celebrate their six-month anniversary.
This wasn’t a warning anymore. It was too late for that.
I couldn’t wait for his office. I had to confront them both at his home.
My wife has shared more about the details of the affair and the events surrounding the confrontation elsewhere, so I’ll close with this:
Regardless of her consent, Erik took advantage of her dark night of the soul.
That night didn’t begin with the affair. It began in May 2020 when I lost my job—when everything familiar and stable slipped out from under us. It stretched through two long years of quiet unraveling, all the way to their first meeting in October 2022.
Those were years of vanishing—me from her, her from me. Years when we both felt ourselves getting smaller, more invisible. Years when grief made us strangers inside our own home.
Erik didn’t just see that.
He used it.
He studied the space between us and stepped into it—not as a friend, not as a pastor, but as a man who cast himself as her hero.
With precision. With persuasion. With audacity.
He brought her into his home.
He came into ours.
Every planned moment was a betrayal of both his marriage and ours.
He was in a position of authority.
He was one of the shepherds.
She was part of a flock.
Nearly two years later, my wife and I are in the strongest place we’ve ever been.
PRAISE GOD. HE IS FAITHFUL.
But getting here has been excruciating.
For the first six months, we made no decisions. We weren’t deciding to stay or separate. We were in survival mode.
Though I am put back together, the affair broke me. Utterly.
It’s one thing to have another man pursue your wife and fall in love with her. It’s entirely different when you discover your wife made an idol of someone to the point where she was not just in love with him enough to give him her heart completely, but that love was strong enough to match it with a physical surrender as well.
I remember how angry she was that I didn’t confront her first. I asked her who she would have chosen if I did.
“Him,” was the answer.
She was willing to trade sixteen years of marriage for a six-month affair.
That’s how sin blinded my wife.
That’s how sin was cast like a fishing hook from Erik into my wife’s soul.
That damage is real.
The self-esteem and self-worth lost in the wake of that sin are real.
My efforts to recover like someone beating cancer or running from a murderer are real.
The affair was real enough to capture my wife completely and nearly destroy both of us.
But God…
After David’s betrayal with Bathsheba, there was no immediate repentance. He doubled down. Killed her husband. Married her. Moved on. Never looked back. Never confessed. Never came clean.
It took Nathan confronting him, telling a story about a rich man with many sheep and a poor man with only one. The rich man stole the poor man’s lamb to feed a guest.
David was furious when he heard the story.
“That man deserves to die,” he said.
And Nathan replied, “You are the man.”
David finally confessed:
“I have sinned against the Lord.”
Erik is missing an opportunity.
He could help everyone if he would take it.
Erik, you are the man.
Now do the right thing.
–John
