So we're gonna spend time on the show talking about things that matter in life as we so often do, marriage, children, relationships, and that's gonna be a special focus of the show this year. Earlier this week on X, we were talking about some of this, and I made this point. I said, a married person simply should not have an opposite sex friend who is not also a friend of their spouse. And even then, there's no scenario with a spouse and the friend should be hanging out alone. These are the most basic boundaries. If you aren't prepared to put them in place and respect them, you shouldn't get married. That's obviously true. I've also said that kind of thing many times. Many people did not agree. There are a lot of comments, a lot of people responding to it, so we're gonna go through and read some of them now. In fact, I'm gonna read a few responses, a few comments, and then I'll offer a general response to all of them together. So, real clopec, right? To prove Matt's point, and just about every example of this, the spouse finds his, this friend physically attractive, and that is not a coincidence. Show me an example of a married guy who has a cross-eyed female friend who weighs 300 pounds and vice versa. Christina Wright's Matt doesn't trust himself to be alone with any of his female co-workers or does he not hire women. Either way, he needs to learn to grow up and not ogle other women. Climate Warrior Seven says, what are you supposed to do with your opposite sex friends when you get married? Dump them? Yes, that's what you're supposed to do, but we'll get back to that. Timothy Gordon says, this is a good post, but having female co-workers is as bad or worse than having voluntary female friends. Both situations are terrible, arguably the workplace is worse because you're a captive team member forced by equality in the workplace to spend 40 hours weekly on a project with some broad, not your wife. Paul Bollard says, the more likely someone is to cheat the more vehemently they'll disagree with this, there's emotional cheating too, which impacts intimacy, respect, honor, and relational experiences. And then notorious Kise K, K, strongly disagrees with me, says, this is bull, I have female friends that I've known since long before I met my wife and will still have lunch with them occasionally. My wife doesn't care because there's trust. Same applies to her and her male friends Matt is clearly insecure. And there are many more comments along those lines. Some in agreement, some in disagreement. And here's what I'll say to all of them. That yes, you should not have opposite sex friends if you are married. That should not exist. Now it's one thing, as I think I know, if you have a, if you're friends with a couple, if you as a couple are friends with another couple, and so then in that sense, your friends with the opposite sex member of that couple as well, then that's fine. And that's what, so when people say, oh, I've had these opposite sex friends since before, I got married and now I'm married, am I supposed to just dump them? Well, yeah, actually, see, when you get married and you grow up, you're gonna end up, you're gonna end up drifting apart from a lot of your friends. And especially if you have any opposite sex friends, that's the way that's gonna go. But if you wanna keep being friends with them, well now you are, you have dinner, like you have another couple, and you have dinner with them, as you invite them over to your house as a couple, and you sit and you drink wine and you eat dinner. Like that's grow up, okay, you're an adult now. I mean, so now those relationships are supposed to mature, and so you can be friends in that sense, but you should not be friends individually with a member of the opposite sex. And like this guy who says that, well, he has friends, he goes out on lunch dates with women. That's crazy. That is a crazy thing to do if you're married, and to let your wife do it. So you're telling me, who is this the notorious KCK? You're telling me your wife sometimes goes and hangs out with her male friends without you? You're telling me you're okay if you're wife? Does that have any go grab lunch with Jake? Okay, have fun, have fun you two, and you're okay. What are you some kind of, you're a cuckold? That is pure cuckold behavior. That's what that is, and you should be embarrassed. Okay, you should be humiliated, and she's probably, there's a high chance that she's cheating on you. There's a high chance that's already happening. So you can say, I trust you, I don't worry, I trust you. Here's the thing, you moron. If your wife wants to have one on one time with another man in the first place, if she wants to have that companionship with a man in the first place, you're already screwed. Or she is, in this case. Like that's already happening. And as a man, why do you want to say the thing when some of these comments from men say, I have all these female friends, what am I supposed to do? First of all, why do you have so many female friends as a man? Like why do you want platonic companionship with a bunch of women? That's either you having inappropriate levels of intimacy with other women or your gay. That's the other thing, it could be that your gay. A married man wants to hang out with a woman, who's not his wife, is either on his way to an affair or having an affair or is gay. Like those are your options. You're married, you already have a wife. I mean, you're around a woman all the time. You have a companionship with a female every day. So if you want to go out and have friendships, have a fraternal bond, have like male friendships, that's very healthy, you should have that. But going out and seeking more female companionship as a married grown man when you already have a wife tells me you're either having an affair or you're gonna have one or you're feminine. So here's the problem. What is a friendship? What is a friend? What is a friend? Well, a friend is someone with whom you have mutual affection and some level of emotional intimacy. That's what a friend is. That's what a friendship is. If you don't have that with someone, then they're not your friend. Now granted among men, we would never put it like that. I feel even kind of weird saying it, but if, because I give a friend of mine says, you know, I love this emotional intimacy we have. I love this shared mutual affection. If I'm going to a cigar bar having a cigar with a guy and he were to say that, I really appreciate this emotional intimacy. I really appreciate our mutual affection. Well, I'm never gonna talk to you again. We can't, I do it, I can't be around you now. But even so, that's what a friendship is. If we define intimacy in this case as, not a physical or sexual thing, but as a sense of closeness, you know, basically a familiarity, closeness, then that's what friendship is, right? So if your wife has a male friend, well, that is someone that she has emotional intimacy with. That's just what it means. And if she doesn't, then that's not a friend. That's just an acquaintance. Like, no one is saying that you can't have acquaintances that are of the opposite sex. You could even have friendly acquaintances. Some of this is maybe a misunderstanding of what a friend is. Right? But you could be friendly with someone. You could be cordial with them. You can work with them in that capacity, friendly and cordial way. You can make pleasant small talk when you see them and that sort of thing. That's an acquaintance. That's not a friend. Ash Wednesday is just two weeks away. So you're probably starting to think about what you're giving up for lens. Chocolate, social media, usual suspects. But here's the real question. How do you plan to approach this season? So you see real, lasting, spiritual change. Our sponsor and friends at Ascension Press invite you to join them for the Crux Lenten Challenge, a daily program that teaches you how to surrender your life to God each day. Dispense, take on four challenges, inspired by the Cross of Christ. Daily Scripture reading, a nightly examine, one physical exercise of your choice and one dietary fast of your choice. But don't worry, Crux isn't about extreme penance or white knuckled self-improvement. It's about encountering your weakness, honestly, discovering the God who meets you there. And you don't do this alone. Each day, Father Columbus Jordan shares short video reflections in the Ascension App to encourage you, guide you and your struggle, and help you recognize where God is inviting you to surrender. For a limited time, you can join Crux with 90 days of premium access to the Ascension App for just $4.99. Visit AscensionPress.com slash Walsh to download the app and get the free Crux Action Plan to prepare for the challenge and track your progress through that offer excludes current subscribers. A friend is someone that there's an emotional intimacy where there's a closeness, a familiarity, a bond with. Like somebody that you would sit down and have a meal with. Someone who you call and you talk on the phone. And so if you're married and you have a wife, and your wife has an actual friend, male friend, then that is by definition someone that she has emotional intimacy with. It's a man for whom she has affection. That's what it means. Now, that doesn't have to translate into anything sexual necessarily. If you're a straight person, it doesn't mean, you have a straight person, you have friends of the same sex, there's nothing special. And you have a friend who's a man who's a man of the same sex, there's nothing sexual or romantic there. So the closeness, the affection doesn't have to translate into that, but that's the rub here. If you're a straight person, that means that you do experience sexual attraction to members of the opposite sex. So if your wife has a male friend, and hopefully your wife is a heterosexual, it's just a male friend. Well, she already has emotional intimacy. Then what if she also happens to develop physical attraction? I mean, you can't help that, right? Like if you find someone attractive, you find them attractive. That's an observation. That's just kind of an objective observation that that person's physically attractive, or they're not. But when you have opposite sex friendships, there's automatically emotional intimacy because that's what comes with the friendship. And there's a high likelihood of physical attraction. And especially for women, because the other thing for women, men are much more visual than women with women, they, as the emotional intimacy grows, physical attraction also grows. Their physical attraction is dependent on the emotional intimacy. So the longer that they're friends with another man, the more likely it is that they're going to find that man physically attractive. And then one day, what do you end up with? Well, you end up with, my wife has a friend who she's emotionally intimate with and finds physically attractive. Okay, now you're in the danger zone. Now you're in the danger zone. Now you're in the zone where nothing good can possibly happen. Now you're in the zone where everything can be destroyed. Was it worth it? Is it worth it? Is it worth it to even get anywhere near this zone? And that's why when people, and I talk about this, and we've heard in some of the comments that, oh, well, what are you saying? You don't have self-control, but you got to have self-control. Now listen to your morons, okay? When I say morons, I don't mean everyone watching right now. I just mean the people that disagree. There are morons. Self-control should not even factor into it. Okay, you shouldn't put yourself in a position where the thing that is stopping you from having an affair is your self-control. That shouldn't even factor in. If you're in a position where the thing preventing you from having an affair is your self-control, you're, there's already a problem. Like it shouldn't even factor. It's like if someone asked me, why have you never murdered anybody, Matt? Why have you never killed anybody? I would not say, well, it's because I have self-control. Like I do have self-control, but that's not why I've never murdered someone. I've never murdered, I've never even, I have never gotten to the point where my self-control against murder needs to be activated. I've never been in a situation where there's a temptation to commit murder. If I said that self-control is what stopped me from killing someone, it means that I was in a situation where I was really tempted to commit murder and I had the opportunity to do it. And I had the knife in my hand and I had to like, I shouldn't do it, I shouldn't do it. Right? It means I'm holding the gun and I have the opportunity and I really wanna kill someone and the thing that's like, I have to have self-control, I have to have self-control. Well, that's a bad sign. There's already a problem. The thing that's stopping you from killing someone should be that there's never, you don't want to at all and there's no occasion and it's just never been, you've never come anywhere close to that where that's even been a factor. And the same thing goes for an affair. Right? Why have I never cheated on my wife? Well, I do have self-control but that's not even the primary reason. If I said, well, the thing stopping me from cheating on my wife is self-control. Well, what that signals is that I'm constantly in situations where the temptation and opportunity are there and it's my heroic self-control that stops it. That's bad. That means I am putting myself in these kinds of positions and guess what? If you're constantly putting yourself in those positions, your self-control, that final damn is not gonna hold forever, forever. If your self-control is activated, it should be self-control and not even putting yourself in the position where that's a possibility. Okay, you could be married for 15 years as I have, as I've never even been tempted to have an affair. It's like it's never even, I've never experienced the temptation to have an affair. It's never even been in the realm of possibility in as thinkable to me as committing murder. And that's not me being self-aggrandizing at all. I'm saying that this is just, it's very possible to have a marriage like that. It just requires boundaries, respect for those boundaries and not putting yourself in compromising positions. And you can easily do that. You can very easily do it. Man, it's the same thing for your spouse. I mean, how would you feel? Like really think about this, not, I mean, I'm harping at the point, but if your wife was going to hang out, if you're a man and your wife was going to hang out with a male friend and you said to her, hey, you express some concern about there being something else going on. And she would say, oh no, I would never do that. I have self-control. What is she telling you, genius? What is she telling you? She's telling you she's greatly tempted to do it, but it's her self-control that's stopping it. And again, the problem is that if you're putting yourself in those positions, you've already signaled that you don't have self-control. Like if, if, if, if actual temptation to commit adultery is here, your self-control needs to be all the way over here. Self-control comes into play way before you even get to the temptation. The self-control is what stops you from ever getting there. And what does that mean? It's actually really simple. It's actually really simple. Put up boundaries. You don't have friends of the opposite sex. You don't hang out with them. You don't form really any kinds of real bonds with them at all, not hard to do. Not hard to do it at all. And at the same time, you keep your marriage alive. You keep, you tend to your marriage and to your spouse. But you do, you do those two things and the risk isn't there. You start, you start messing around with this, surrounding yourself with friends of the opposite sex and all these kinds of things, relying on your, on your Herkulean self-control to save you. You start doing that, but you're setting yourself up for failure. Guess what? Every single person who's ever had an affair, every single one of them always told themselves it would never be them. Well, every single one always said, I got self-control, I would never do it. And then it happens. It's happened millions of times. And having respect for that, that acknowledging that does not mean that you don't have self-control, it actually means that you have an understanding of human nature. That's what that means, but basic understanding of human nature. So that is why if you have opposite sex friends and you're married, should you dump them all, yeah, you don't even need to dump them, just stop talking to them. Which is really easy to do, most of the time. And move on with your life, that's it. And we'll leave it there. 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