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The Cut has a knack for repackaging relational instability as self-discovery. The women-focused online arm of New York Magazine that brought us pieces like “Could Opening Your Marriage Lighten Your Mental Load?” and “I Regret Having Children” is at it again — this time with E.J. Dickson’s essay “The Secret to a Great Marriage? Crushes on Other People.”
In it, Dickson begins by describing a co-worker named Phil, whom she compares to a swarthier Jake Gyllenhaal, and who, she notes, didn’t know what a “nut graf” was. She emphasizes that she did not know him well: by the time they stopped working together, they had exchanged only about 40 words, most of them about Steely Dan.
She mentions him occasionally to her husband of nearly 10 years, who would joke about her “frissons of nervous energy” when asked if Phil had been at work that day. When she knew he would be in the office, she found herself lingering a little longer in front of the mirror — adding lip tint and mascara, taking extra care with her hair before meetings.
Actually, much of the piece focuses on workplace dynamics and so-called “work husbands and wives.” One interviewee, Jill, 32, recalls that her now-husband once confessed to having a minor crush on a co-worker. At the time, she was feeling sexually bored in their relationship, and she describes the admission as unexpectedly “deeply erotic.” The couple later folded the subject into their pre-sex conversations. Jill said it “recalibrated” how she perceived him.
“A crush while you’re married is like a little sweet snack that gets you through the 4 p.m. slump,” said Cara, 35. “It’s harmless and invigorating,” she said, “and reminds you you’re alive and kicking and yearning and thinking.”
While some pushed back on the piece in the comments, most others were predictable: “Brace for puritan moralism,” one said. “Sad to see so many people missing the point,” wrote another, “it’s not about infidelity.” And finally: “It’s not that deep man … having crushes is human. Enjoy.”
I was surprised to feel my body tense as I read the article through for the first time. I had lived out this theory as a college student, and the lessons were still living in my muscles — little “frissons of nervous energy” that I recognized now for what they were: alarm bells.
During a long-term relationship, I found myself co-creating a new music festival with an older mentor and friend. At first, it was innocent: writing grants after class, trading notes in a shared Google Doc. I admired his drive, his obvious talent. But admiration has a way of slipping its bounds. Soon, I felt that familiar, muscle-melting pull at the mere mention of his name.
As the months passed, we were pulling all-nighters, contacting venues, creating floor plans, evaluating artist applications, united in a common purpose and building a shared world from scratch. I found my mind wandering: what other worlds might we be capable of sharing? Electric fingers grazed my leg under the table. I was sick with confusion, regret, desire. I was in trouble.
If this wasn’t “that deep, man,” how did I get here? From ruminating on a nagging desire to indulging it? From a passing thought to a habit of mind; from a shared project to a divided interior life; from keeping a little secret to hiding whole chambers of my heart?
What I thought was rare, even clandestine, was anything but. Some estimates suggest that as many as 85% of affairs begin at work. “Now we have a shared purpose,” psychologist John Delony explains. “We’re talking about how we feel about things. We have a goal, we have metrics. I’m spending more time with her or him than I am with my spouse. Of course it happens at work.”
Conservative politicians have gone to great lengths to avoid precisely this kind of entanglement, most famously Mike Pence, who has said he avoids dining, traveling, or spending one-on-one time with women who are not his wife. Even among my closest friends, this rule tends to draw skepticism, dismissed as a relic of the aforementioned “Puritan moralism” or an overcorrection bordering on paranoia.
But is it overkill? The Christian ethic has never limited fidelity to outward behavior alone; it presses much deeper, into the interior life. Scripture consistently treats the heart as the true seat of fidelity, as Proverbs says: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). Jesus sharpens the point, saying, “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28).
Desire untethered from discipline, he points out, is not neutral; it is formative. Thoughts become patterns, patterns become habits, and habits, eventually, become actions. Crushes aren’t “harmless”; they’re the beginning of disordered desire that reshapes the heart and threatens our fidelity.
“Take every thought captive,” Paul writes (2 Corinthians 10:5) because what you dwell on begins to shape what you want, and what you want begins to shape what you do. To indulge a wandering emotional or imaginative life is, in a real sense, to erode the foundation of a covenant that is meant to be steadfast regardless of passing urges. In other words, master your desires, or they will master you.
This ethic serves another purpose: It keeps us from subtly turning one another into objects. The logic of the “crush,” as the article itself admits, depends on a kind of selective vision: “You’re getting to focus on the desirable parts of that person while ignoring the parts that wouldn’t actually be fun to deal with in reality. That’s super-sexy … Relish in the fantasy.”
That same logic appears more explicitly in other work by E. J. Dickson. In her 2016 article for the Washington Post titled “Don’t worry about sex robots. They won’t ruin sex,” she entertains the possibility that even deeply disordered desires might be safely redirected onto objects, writing that technologies like child sex robots could “serve as such an outlet.”
The mistaken assumption is that desire can be indulged, even trained, so long as it is displaced onto something non-human; that objectification is not only harmless, but potentially therapeutic. But to “relish in the fantasy” is, almost by definition, to flatten a person, to strip them of their full humanity and complexity and recast them as a vehicle for your own emotional or erotic gratification.
In our marriage, my husband and I have resisted this ethic in ways that might seem excessive to secular friends: There are songs I no longer play because of the memories they evoke, restaurants we no longer visit because of vignettes they hold. We’ve chosen, deliberately, to build a shared world. And with each quiet act of discipline, each decision to honor him in thought and action, my desire is shaped and redirected, returning to the person it was always meant for. Every time, my crush on him grows deeper.
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Grace Salvatore is the senior editor of media, arts, and culture at Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Restoring the West and a contributor to Independent Women’s Voice.
