Should My Spouse Be My Accountability Partner?

If you are married, you will especially want to be open with your spouse. Keeping secrets in marriage tends toward disharmony, suspicion, arguments, and worse. Instead, seek open, honest communication with your spouse to build intimacy and trust.

If you are intentionally and successfully pursuing purity, then it may be natural and beneficial that your spouse serves as your formal accountability partner.

Are you struggling and often losing this battle with impurity? Is your spouse aware of your failures? Then it may be overly burdensome for your spouse to receive detailed information about your impure choices. While you are certainly accountable to your spouse in all things, it’s possible that they might not be the best accountability partner in this case.

At the very least, your spouse will want to know that you are actively communicating with a trusted partner about these issues.

Questions to Consider

Here are some questions to consider together as you determine what would be best in your situation:

• If you have violated your spouse’s trust, have you both dealt with the hurt, bitterness, resentment, and broken trust that has resulted from the violation?
• Do you want to change? If you do not, then exposing your spouse to the details of your impurity will likely bring anger, resentment, and rejection.
• Whose idea is it to seek accountability? If you are not desiring accountability yourself, you will frustrate your spouse who will likely feel the need to police you or otherwise force you to disclose relevant details of your life. You might also seek loopholes through which you can continue your shameful activities without being found out. Without genuinely desiring accountability, you will likely fail to produce lasting change.
• Can your spouse fulfill this role without becoming defensive, taking the offensive against you, or seeking to control you?
• Could your spouse monitor your reports without becoming obsessed with constantly refreshing them to retrieve up-to-the-second results?
• Can your spouse reasonably trust your activity reports without constantly looking for reasons to disbelieve them and assuming that you’re hiding something?
• Could your spouse recognize that online accountability software is not perfect, that technology constantly changes, but that the reports strive to be as complete as possible? Will your spouse seek to communicate realistically yet graciously with you about your reports?
• Can your spouse remain objective and focused on the goal to be achieved more than the failures along the way?

These questions and other considerations may reveal that you and your spouse are either working together or that you are working against each other. You may need to enlist the help of a pastor or other counselor to help you identify and work through any obstacles in your marriage.

Transparency and accountability should be your goal in all aspects of your life. This is especially true regarding your purity and integrity.