235: Emotional Affairs

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are having an affair, or cheating on your partner, or engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  One of the things I often hear from new clients is, “I wish I’d started working with you a lot sooner.”  And so what I want you to consider is, if your infidelity situation is the source of any angst at all for you, let’s start working together now and find you some relief and a clear path forward.  You don’t have to wait for things to get worse before you start to do what you can to make things better.  Right?  It’s so funny how we attend to some things very quickly in life, but other things, well, we really let them fester.  Like, if your plumbing is backed up, if your toilets aren’t flushing, you call the plumber right away.  Or at least, I sure do, and I hope you do, too.  But there are some things in life that we know are major issues for us, but we put off dealing with them as if that is actually a strategy for resolving the issues!  But it isn’t.

So if you’re involved in any kind of an infidelity situation and you want to navigate it more skillfully, more efficiently, and more deliberately, let’s get to work.  You have everything to gain from getting a handle on your situation sooner rather than later.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach: we can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

All right, everyone.  I have held back on doing a podcast episode on emotional affairs for a long time, even though this is a topic that a lot of people are really interested in.  And there are a few reasons why I’ve held back on talking about emotional affairs, and one of them is this: a lot of the discussions “out there” in the interwebs and within the relationship advice industrial complex have a lot to say about emotional affairs, but this commentary, in my opinion, leaves a lot to be desired. 

For one thing, a lot of the discussion out there about emotional affairs suggests that they are these really significant – maybe even dangerous – experiences.  But many people who talk about emotional affairs don’t bother to define them.  What exactly IS an emotional affair, anyway?

And, on the one hand, I’m completely sympathetic to the common failure to define emotional affairs, because I really don’t think it’s possible to come up with a one-size-fits-all definition of what an emotional affair is, or isn’t.  But that’s not a get out of jail free card.  If we’re going to talk about a particular sort of experience in a meaningful way, we need to get as clear as we can about what we’re talking about.  And that may include acknowledging the fuzziness of a given concept, or a label that we apply to certain experiences.  We can acknowledge that emotional affairs escape easy definition, and may not be definable in any absolute way – and we can still sketch out the parameters of what we’re talking about when we talk of emotional affairs.

So I’m going to offer up a loose definition of emotional affairs so we’re all on the same page. 

My observation is that when people talk about emotional affairs, they’re generally talking about an experience that has three defining attributes:

First, they have an emotional connection with someone that they consider special, out-of-the-ordinary, and potentially inappropriate.  It’s an emotional connection that we think of as too close, or too intense for its context.  It’s an emotional connection that we think counts as infidelity, or we think could count as infidelity.    

Second, this special emotional connection is with someone who could theoretically be a romantic partner.  So let’s say you’re attracted to women, and you’re exclusively attracted to women.  If you find yourself getting closer and closer to a colleague who happens to be a woman who you happen to find attractive, this could be getting into the territory of what many people consider an emotional affair.  On the other hand, if you have zero attraction for men, or towards men, and you start to develop a close emotional bond with a colleague who is a man, you might not consider that to be anything close to an emotional affair!  Even if the two of you start spending a lot of time together, and even if your relationship is quite intimate in some respects.

The third element of what we often think of as emotional affairs is an absence of physical contact.  Or sometimes what we mean is, an absence of what we tend to think of as sexual contact.  Now, this can get tricky really quickly, because although you may not think of a hug as sexual physical contact, some of you know very well that a hug can be more sexually charged than touching someone’s genitals.  Or them touching yours.  But even though it’s important to recognize that ANY physical contact can be experienced as erotic, collectively, we tend to see getting naked with another person and touching them all over and them touching you all over as categorically sexual, and we tend to see a handshake as categorically non-sexual.  Or at least, with a handshake, there’s lots of room for plausible deniability.  This does get complicated, but what I want to stress is that when people talk about emotional affairs, they usually mean relationships that have a special emotional connection, but don’t have a physical connection.  Or at least, not one that extends beyond the kind of physical contact that might typically be considered infidelity.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying that this is THE definition of an emotional affair.  What I am saying is that these are the important commonalities I see in many people’s understandings of what emotional affairs are, and thus, I’m offering this as a useful working framework.

Now, even within this framework, people’s EXPERIENCES of emotional affairs vary A LOT.  Some people are in contact with their emotional affair partner as often as possible throughout the day – maybe in person, maybe virtually.  Some people consider thinking sexual or romantic thoughts about someone other than their committed partner an emotional affair – even if they’ve never so much as talked to the person, or have spoken to that person only a little.  Some people’s emotional affairs may not include physical sexual contact with their affair partner, but they do include sexual connection at a distance.  They may not be touching each other, but they definitely consider what they’re doing at that distance to be sexual in nature. 

So, you can start to see how the concept of emotional affairs can quickly drive us crazy.  Is it an emotional affair if you have phone sex with someone but never touch them?  Or does that take us out of the realm of an emotional affair, and into some other definitional territory?  It would take us FOREVER to articulate all of the questions we might ask about what emotional affairs are or aren’t, and even longer to come up with some reasonably robust answers.  And don’t worry, we aren’t even going to try to do that.

I say all of this because some people make some pretty ridiculous claims about emotional affairs.  One of my favorites is, “emotional affairs are more dangerous than physical affairs.”  This one makes me twitch because it implies that emotional affairs and physical affairs are two completely distinct things, and moreover, that physical affairs DON’T have an emotional component to them.  And neither of those things are necessarily true in practice.  And because I think it’s completely counterproductive to talk about infidelity as dangerous, no matter how much you may dislike infidelity, AND because it suggests that within the realm of dangerous affairs, one type is by definition more dangerous than another.

This kind of stuff is just total horseshit.  Total fucking horseshit.

And, just like within popular discussions of all kinds of infidelity, there’s a lot of horseshit within popular discussions of emotional affairs. 

Now, having said all of that, I do want to make it clear that concept of an “emotional affair” really resonates with a lot of people.  It provides a useful way of naming something that they’re experiencing.  And for that reason, it can be helpful to talk about “emotional affairs,” even if the concept is a fuzzy one, as long as we know that by using the concept, we’re just pointing at the thing.  That’s what concepts and labels do for us.  They help us point.  They can give us a useful starting point for understanding what a thing is.  And for many people, having a name for what they’re experiencing helps them legitimize their experience, and this can be very useful.  But we don’t want to get too carried away with labels and terms and concepts because the thing we’re experiencing can never be fully understood through the lens of any label or concept.

Some weeks ago, I invited people through social media to send me questions they wanted me to answer on the podcast about emotional affairs.  So now, I’m going to address some of the questions I received with the intention of offering insights that will be as helpful to as many people as possible.  Some people sent me questions about the specifics of what’s going on in their relationships, and although I won’t be able to respond to those questions in this episode, I think that my ensuing commentary will be helpful, and of course, you’re welcome to book an introductory coaching session with me if you want to talk about the specifics of your situation.

One of the questions that came up, in so many words, over and over again, was, “How do I know if I’m having an emotional affair?”

My answer to that question is, you decide.  You call it.  You say, “I think this counts as an emotional affair,” or “I don’t think this counts as an emotional affair.”  Some people will tell you there are definite, universal signs that you’re having an emotional affair – or aren’t having one.  But I disagree.  One person’s emotional affair is another person’s harmless flirtation.  What counts as a close friendship to one person could count as an act of infidelity to another.  Some people will tell you that you’re definitely having an emotional affair if you’re sharing things with someone that you wouldn’t share with your partner.  But that just doesn’t make sense for everybody.  A lot of people consider it perfectly normal and appropriate to share things with friends that they wouldn’t share with their partner.  Some people’s romantic relationships are not predicated on verbal communication.  I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about his partner and he said to me, “Yeah, our relationship is really better when we don’t talk too much.  Talking always leads to conflict.”  They communicate in other ways, they connect in other ways, but for them, talking isn’t of the utmost importance. 

So there really isn’t a clear set of guidelines for what counts as an emotional affair, and what doesn’t.  That means you get to make your own judgment call.

What might you consider in order to make that judgment call?  YOUR OWN PREFERENCES AND PRIORITIES AND VALUES.  Let’s use an example to think this through.  Let’s say you have a committed partner.  And let’s say you’ve been getting closer and closer to someone you work with, and you’re finding that you are very excited to see your colleague whenever you see them, and you’re very excited to talk to them whenever you talk to them.  The two of you see each other in person regularly, and you communicate frequently when you aren’t together.  You talk about work-related stuff, but you also talk about non-work-related stuff, and in fact, you talk about some very personal things.  You’ve even told this person things that you’ve never talked to anyone else about.  And when you think about this person, you think about them very fondly.  You may not necessarily feel love for them – or lust for them, for that matter – but then again, there might be a little of that in there.  And you know for sure that you’re way more enthusiastic about the time you spend with your colleague than the time you spend with your partner.

Is that an emotional affair?  You tell me!  Why or why not?

You could make a case that it is!  Some people would say, this is absolutely an emotional affair!  This person is telling their colleague things they’ve never told anyone else – they should be telling their partner those things!  This person is more excited about spending time with their colleague than they are about spending time with their partner!  That is a betrayal! Or, you could make the case that this is an intense connection, but it doesn’t necessarily constitute any kind of infidelity.

Or you could argue that these two people might indeed be drawn to each other, and that what they’re doing might potentially constitute infidelity, but maybe if things don’t go any further with their relationship, it’s not too big of a deal.

Where do you want to draw the line?

In order to figure out where you want to draw the line, it can be helpful to remember that if you want to be in a committed relationship, there are probably some things that you want to reserve just for that relationship.  There are probably some things that you only want to do with your partner, and you want your partner to only do with you.  So the question I want you to think about is, what kind of connection do you want to have with your committed partner, and what do you need to do and NOT do in order to create that kind of connection with them?  For a lot of people, not getting too close to other people in a certain way is important to keeping their relationship with their partner intact. 

So ask yourself this: do YOU think your connection with your colleague impinges upon your relationship with your partner?  Be honest with yourself.  If your answer is yes, well, then maybe it follows that in your estimation, the way you’ve been engaging with your colleague does count as infidelity.  Maybe by your estimation, you are having an emotional affair.  Maybe not the world’s most intense or extreme emotional affair – after all, maybe you and your colleague aren’t gazing into each other’s eyes and whispering “I love you so much” to one another – but still, an emotional affair.

It’s also worth asking yourself, if the shoe were on the other foot, how would you feel?  If your partner had a relationship with a colleague of theirs that’s like the one you have with yours, would you be okay with it?  This can be a good litmus test. 

Now, even if you decide that what you’re doing with your colleague isn’t exactly kosher, that doesn’t mean you have to label it an emotional affair.  You might want to label it as such, but you don’t have to.  You might just say to yourself, whoops, I’m getting into some murky territory here, now I’ve got to decide what to do about it.  And then you get to decide what to do about it!  When I work with clients who are having what they consider emotional affairs, or what other people might consider emotional affairs, that’s usually the more important question: what do you want to do about this special connection you have with this person?  Do you want to keep it going, do you want to make some changes, do you want to end the relationship entirely?  If you focus on the question of “Am I having an emotional affair or not?”, you may just delay the more important business of dealing with your relationships in a way that you feel good about.

On a related note, another common question people sent me was, in essence, “If I’m having an emotional affair, does that mean I don’t want to be in a relationship with my committed partner?”

My answer to that question is, maybe.  You have to decide!  If you’ve gotten super close to someone other than your partner, and you feel like you have an emotional bond with them that surpasses anything you’ve ever experienced with anyone – including your committed partner – you get to CHOOSE what you’re going to do with this.  It might be time to take a very close look at your committed relationship and seriously consider whether you want to continue that relationship or not.  It’s possible that you don’t really want to stay involved with the person you’re committed to, and your emotional affair is an indication of that. 

But it’s also important to remember that humans have the capacity to care about more than one person at once, or be emotionally intimate with more than one person at once.  If we’re open to it, we can easily get ourselves intimately involved with more people than we can keep track of!  We can develop intense emotional connections with people that have a hint – or maybe more than a hint – of romance or sexiness to them quite easily, if we’re open to that.

So it’s also worth considering the possibility that you do want to stay in your committed relationship, and you want to start setting some different boundaries around how you interact with people other than your committed partner.  Sometimes emotional affairs happen because we just don’t know where to draw the line.  We start connecting with someone who isn’t our partner, and at first, we’re sure it’s totally platonic, and not a big deal.  But connecting with that person feels really good, so we keep doing it, and the connection starts to escalate, and we aren’t really monitoring the situation, so before we know it, we find ourselves engaging with that person in a way that we definitely think counts as infidelity.  Oops!

So if you’re in a committed relationship and you’re having what you consider to be an emotional affair, and you’re wondering what you should do about this, I encourage you to stop wondering and start deciding.  The answers to whatever questions you are entertaining come from YOU.  And if you need help recognizing these answers, let’s work together, and I’ll help you.

Another question people asked was, how do I know if an emotional affair is real or not?  And I have to answer that question with a question: what makes a relationship “real”?  And then I have to follow that question up with another question, which is, why are you asking if your emotional affair is real or not?

Sometimes people want to know if their emotional affair was real because the relationship has ended, and they’re heartbroken, and they think it seems crazy for them to be experiencing so much grief.  They didn’t have physical contact with their affair partner!  Their relationship was a secret!  They never experienced real life together!  Surely that means the relationship wasn’t real, they think – so they shouldn’t be so incredibly sad about its end. 

If you’re in a situation like that, I encourage you to step away from the question of whether or not your relationship was “real,” and ask yourself this instead: was the relationship important to you?  The answer is probably yes.  It’s probably a HELL YES.  And isn’t that what matters?  Focus on THAT.

Now, some people want to know if their emotional affair is “real” or not because they’re trying to decide what to do about their emotional affair.  For example, some people want to decide whether their emotional affair is something they want to continue, and transition into a different kind of relationship.  So they ask themselves, “Is this relationship real?” over and over again, and they have a hard time coming up with an answer.  And this is understandable, because who knows what a “real” relationship is!  Unless you have clearly defined this for yourself – and if you have, good for you – you probably will not get very far by asking yourself this question.

What the person in this situation often really wants to know is, “Do I want to give this relationship a shot?  Do I want to make the changes in my life that I would need to make to give this relationship a try as a non-affair relationship?”  Those are answerable questions.  You might not have arrived at your answers to those questions yet, but you can decide what your answers to those questions are.

It’s really important to recognize that there are answerable questions and there are unanswerable questions.  And it’s also important to recognize that we can waste a LOT of time and energy asking ourselves and “trying” to answer questions that really cannot be answered.  So if you’ve been asking yourself a question over and over and you haven’t been able to come up with an answer, it may be time to adjust your question a little bit.  “Was or is my emotional affair real?” is going to be hard to answer unless you can define what you mean by real.  And if you can do that, great.  But if you can’t, ask yourself what question or questions lie behind that question.

A common question that came up was, “If I think I’m falling into emotional affair territory, what should I do?”  I think this is a great question, and my answer to this question is going to echo some of what I already said.  If you are in a committed relationship, and you think you’re getting a little too close to someone else, if you think your relationship with this other person is starting to look like infidelity, I encourage you to call a duck a duck.  Even if we can’t come up with a universal definition of what counts as an emotional affair and what doesn’t, you CAN be really honest with yourself about what YOU think is okay for you or not.  You can be honest with yourself about whether or not you think what you’re doing counts as infidelity.  If you think you might be crossing what counts as a line for you, take the time to ask yourself: what’s going on here?  What am I doing?  What am I opening myself up to?  And do I want to be doing this?

A lot of people don’t ask themselves those questions.  They just swept up in the exciting feelings they’re feeling as they are getting involved in what we might consider an emotional affair.  And then things evolve and escalate, and potentially start to seem more complicated, and become an even bigger thing to deal with.

The second you start to notice you’re crossing what counts as a line to you, you have the opportunity to pump the brakes and ask yourself some very answerable questions like, “Am I okay with what I’m doing?”  “Do I think my partner would be okay with what I’m doing?”  You don’t have to definitively decide whether or not something is or is not an emotional affair in order to decide whether you’re okay with participating in something or not.  You can simply say to yourself, “WHATEVER this is, I don’t want to keep doing it.”  And then you take a step back.  Or ten steps back.  You don’t owe it to the person you’ve been involved with to continue interacting with them in a particular way, after all. 

Or, on the other hand, if your answers to the questions I just asked are, “Whatever this is, I DO want to keep doing it!  I know this might not pass the smell test, but onwards I go!  If consequences arise, I’ll deal with them!”  After all, if you think you’re having an emotional affair, there’s nothing that says you HAVE to stop.

You can do yourself a great favor by being willing to make these kinds of judgment calls, and to make conscious decisions about what you’re going to do in the service of your judgment calls. 

On that note, some people asked about how to end their emotional affair, especially if the emotional affair is with someone they see regularly and need to maintain their relationship with, like a neighbor, or a colleague, or a friend of a friend.  How do you stop the emotional affair, without ending the relationship?

What I see with my clients is that the practical answer to this question depends to a great extent on the nature of the emotional affair you’re having.  If you and your affair partner have been professing your undying love for one another, and have been making plans to be together in a non-affair capacity, and taking action in your respective lives to make that happen, and you’ve decided you don’t want to do that anymore, you’re probably looking at executing a breakup.  The fact that the two of you have not had a physical relationship may not matter much at all: if you’ve stated your love for each other, and made plans and promises, you may want to inform your affair partner of your change of plans.  You’re ending the romantic part of your relationship, and we usually think of that as a good old-fashioned breakup.  And then, figuring out how you’re going to navigate your non-affair relationship going forward, if that’s something you’re going to do.

On the other hand, if you and your emotional affair partner have never made commitments or promises to each other, if you’ve never really acknowledged the nature of your bond – even if it’s pretty obvious to the two of you that you have a thing for each other – you might be able to establish new parameters simply by changing your behavior.  You might not need to have a breakup where you officially announce that your emotional affair is now over.  It might be fine – or better than fine – if you start to pull back a little, and then a little more, and then a little more.  Sometimes that works out well, because it gives everybody an easier out.  Oh, we had this really intense connection for a while, and that was getting a little crazy, because you’re married, and I’m married, and eventually we were going to have to acknowledge the elephant in the room and that would have been weird and awkward and I’m not really sure if I wanted to do that and oh, whew, you’re letting us de-escalate this thing that we had in a really classy way?  Now we just get to go back to being “normal” coworkers, or neighbors, or whatever, without having to talk about what happened?  PERFECT.

That can work out great in some cases.  Other people, though, might freak out if you don’t text them as many times as you usually do within a given period of time.  If you and your coworker usually text into the wee hours of the night and you shut your phone off at 9:00 pm one night and then walk into the office the next morning and your coworker, who looks like they’ve been crying all night rushes up to you and says, “We need to talk NOW,” then something more along the lines of an explicit breakup may be in order.

And breakups can be a bummer!  For sure.  The end of any relationship that’s important to us, or a big change in any relationship to us can be a big deal.  But that’s getting into another topic – there is so much to be said about breakups in and of themselves.  I have a few – or maybe more than a few – podcast episodes on breakups, and I have a section of my online course, You’re Not the Only One, dedicated to helping you prepare for a breakup.

To wrap up this discussion of emotional affairs, I want to emphasize something that I mentioned earlier: if you’re getting stuck on questions like, is your emotional affair a real relationship or was it a real relationship, or does what you’re doing count as an emotional affair or not, I want you to take a step back and ask yourself if you’re asking yourself questions that you can actually answer.  To echo what I said earlier, if you’re grieving the end of a relationship that you deemed an emotional affair, you may never be able to conclusively answer the question of whether the relationship was “real” or not.  But you CAN answer the question of whether the experience you had was important to you or not.  And then you can decide what you want to do from there.  You might want to simply ALLOW yourself to grieve the end of the end of the relationship, instead of spending another minute doing anything but that. 

If you want help figuring out how to navigate your emotional affair – or any other type of infidelity situation – in a way that’s truly right for you, I can help you do it.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my online course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  I can’t wait to meet you.

Thank you all so much for listening!  Bye for now.