243: Stop Texting Your Affair Partner so Much

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are cheating on your partner, or having an affair, or you’re the “other person,” or you’re 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.  So much of the “advice” that’s out there for people who are cheating is little more than thinly veiled judgment, but that is not what I provide.  I give you guidance and support that respects the fullness of your humanity, and the complexity of your situation – no matter what you’re doing.  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 private, online course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of those options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com. 

Okay people, if you have been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I’m not really big on giving prescriptive advice.  My role is not to tell you what you should do or have to do.  My role is to help you figure out what you want to do.  And yet, every now and then I will break my own voluntarily established rule, and tell you that you really do have to do something, or not do something.

And today I’m going to tell you that you really ought to put limits on texting with your affair partner.  Some of you are texting your affair partners – or otherwise communicating with your affair partners – way too damn much, and you know it, because you are losing hours of your day to communicating with them, and with that, you are losing sleep, sanity, productivity, and god knows what else. 

So I’m not telling you to put limits on texting your affair partner because I am the fun police!  Nor am I asking you to do this for the sake of moral goodness, or anything like that.  Rather, I am telling you to do this because what I see over and over and over and over again is that setting limits on texting with your affair partner will make your life better – and will make your relationship with your affair partner better, too.

I want to acknowledge that it’s REASONABLE to enjoy texting with your affair partner.  For lots of reasons!  And by extension, if you have gotten totally sucked into the vortex of texting with them for hours and hours a day, and your life basically revolves around texting with them, that’s understandable.  For one thing, you like your affair partner – at least presumably – and it’s totally reasonable to simply enjoy communicating with them.  On top of that, though, you get an intense amount of pleasure, or at least entertainment, out of communicating with them in this manner.  Texting with your affair partner provides you with a reliable source of dopamine hits, and of course you like that.  Who doesn’t like a nice hit of fun brain chemicals? 

But – as you may well know from your own experiences – the enjoyment you get from texting with your affair partner probably comes with some drawbacks, especially if you’re doing a LOT of it.

Let me pause and clarify something important: I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t text your affair partner at all.  Nor am I suggesting that there is a universally appropriate amount of time that it’s okay to spend texting with your affair partner in any given day.  The point isn’t to cut back on texting your affair partner because cutting back is fundamentally virtuous, and that less texting is fundamentally better than more.  And it’s possible that you are currently quite okay with the amount of time and energy you spend on texting with your affair partner.

But I see a lot of people who are spending way too much time texting their affair partner, and they know it, and they are suffering, but yet they do not stop.  And these people I am referring to are not unemployed, by the way.  These are people who have big jobs, and big responsibilities, and a lot of demands on their time and energy.  And yet, they are finding time to text their affair partner for hours out of their days, and although on the one hand they’re getting something they like out of doing this, it’s also driving them crazy.  Because… they have so many important things to do in their lives, and their obsession with texting with their affair partner makes it harder to do those things!

Also, even though all of the texting with the affair partner may be exciting, it may not be the good kind of exciting.  If you and your affair partner are having endless arguments via text – and trust me, a lot of people are – your brain may get some benefit out of the entertainment this provides.  But even as you sort of enjoy the drama, you may also hate the drama.  Or just be really exhausted by the drama.

Furthermore, endless texting with your affair partner may not be helping you create the kind of relationship with them that you actually want to have.  Texting, when it’s going well, can be a source of immense and intense pleasure.  You stand to get a lot of instant gratification out of texting.  And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.  But what can and does happen is, people start to see their affair partner as a continuous source of instant gratification.  People start to RELY on their affair partner as a continuous dispenser of dopamine hits, or at the very least, a little entertainment.  And if you are relating to your affair partner in this way, you may be creating a relationship dynamic that you don’t end up liking very much. 

You get to decide what you want out of your relationships, of course.  It’s not for me to tell you what you should or shouldn’t want your relationships to be like.  But I will tell you that if you are relying on your affair partner as a constant source of good feelings or at least entertainment, you are effectively relating to them as your drug of choice, AND your drug dealer!  And that usually doesn’t make for a sustainably satisfying relationship.

In addition to that, the potential for miscommunications or misunderstandings to occur via texting is pretty high.  You may know this very well from your own experiences.  While there is the potential for misunderstandings to occur no matter how you communicate with someone, texting contains, for various reasons, more potential for misunderstandings to arise than through other modes of communicating.

And with that, it can be especially difficult to clear up misunderstandings via texting, AND it can be easy for what starts off as a simple misunderstanding to quickly escalate into the equivalent of a nuclear war being waged via text.  Right?  I know that language is a little dramatic, but I’m using it because difficult text exchanges have so much potential to get so extremely unpleasant, so very rapidly.  If you know, you know.

And if you don’t have regular opportunities to communicate in ways that allow for more nuance to be transmitted – like talking face to face, or over the phone or video call – these text-based dramas can fester and really poison the well that is your relationship.  Your relationship can become defined – or significantly impacted – by misunderstandings that arise from texting.  Or habitual patterns of communicating via text.

And that just isn’t fun for anybody! 

So I strongly encourage you to set limits on texting with your affair partner, even if texting hasn’t become a major source of problems in your relationship - yet.  By setting some limits on texting, you get to maintain – or reclaim – your ability to be present and engaged with what is happening right in front of you in your life.  I’m not saying that connecting with your affair partner isn’t important!  It is!  But it’s probably not the only important thing in your life.  AND you get to have a relationship with your affair partner that isn’t entirely based on getting instant gratification out of texting with them, and a relationship that isn’t tainted by the difficulties that so often come along with texting!  These are pretty great benefits, in my opinion.

Now, when I’m talking to clients about this, they’re usually like, yeah, I totally get all of that, and I want that, but HOW do I set limits on texting with my affair partner?  How on EARTH do I actually do that?

It’s actually really simple.  You decide on the limits you want to set.  And then you put those limits in place, and you stick to them.

Now of course, there’s more that goes into that.  Deciding what limits you want to set may take some thoughtful consideration on your part.  Putting the limits you decide to set into consistent practice may take a lot of effort – and it may be uncomfortable to set your limits!  And your affair partner might not like the limits you set, and that might mean you get the opportunity to practice dealing with the discomfort you feel when they’re uncomfortable – without trying to fix their feelings by abandoning your own priorities.  It might mean that you and your affair partner end up needing to have challenging conversations about the nature of your relationship – but those conversations could be very productive!

Sometimes people tell me that they can’t do any of these things because they’re way too complicated.  But are any of the things I just mentioned complicated?  I would say they really aren’t.  So often we think that if we find something uncomfortable, that makes it complicated.  But I would argue that that’s a thought error, AND I would argue that learning how to skillfully relate to discomfort is one of the most worthwhile things we can do – both for the sake of our relationships, and for the sake of our overall quality of life.  If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you’ve probably heard me say that about a hundred times.

If you need help with any of this – and by that I mean, setting limits on texting with your affair partner, dealing with your discomfort or your affair partner’s discomfort, or any other aspect of your infidelity situation, for that matter - I’m here for you.  Although setting limits on texting with your affair partner doesn’t need to be complicated, you may still find it challenging!  And that’s totally legitimate!  And sometimes the most efficient way to deal with our challenges is to get some help dealing with them.  And you know there are two ways I can help you: we can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you enroll in my private online course, You’re Not the Only One.

And now we are going to shift gears, and I’m going to tell you the answers to the quiz questions I presented in the last episode.  We got a good amount of submissions, and I think I was able to personally read all of the answers we received, and I really got a kick out of reading them.  So I want to say a big, enormous thank you to everyone who participated!  Especially in this day and age, when it is SO easy to consume and consume and consume and so easy to participate in life less and less and less, I think engagement and participation are so important.  So again, a big thanks to all of you who engaged with me on this.

Question number one was, what is my favorite Guns’n’Roses song?  I’m pretty sure that most common response I received was Patience, but that is not my favorite Guns’n’Roses song.  My favorite Guns’n’Roses song is Locomotive, which is on the album Use Your Illusion II.  I think I remember reading or hearing that Axl Rose wrote that song with his former relationship with the model Stephanie Seymour in mind, and my reasons for liking this song had and have to do with a difficult relationship in my life, but I’m not going to get into the details of that right now.  Or probably ever, for that matter. 

The second question was, what literary character did I draw significant personal influence from?  The most common answers I received were from To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.  I got more than a handful of Atticus Finch answers, and more than a few Scouts.  And I’m flattered by these guesses, but neither are correct.  The correct answer is Zooey Glass, from J.D. Salinger’s books on the Glass family, and of course primarily, Franny and Zooey. 

The third question was, what is my favorite animal that only lives in the wild in Africa, and the answer is, the giraffe.  Because of course!

The answer to the fourth question, what is my favorite cocktail, is a Negroni.  That’s all you had to say to get the answer right, but just so you know, I want my Negroni made with Hendrick’s gin, easy on the vermouth, and up, of course.  I have been to so many hipster bars that look at me like I don’t deserve to be alive when I ask if they have Hendrick’s gin, and to all of you hipster bartenders who think you and your fancy hipster gins make you a better human than I am, I have three words for you: I don’t care.

The fifth question was what are my two favorite colors, and the answers are, pink and green!  I love them both, don’t make me choose!

The sixth question was what is my favorite condiment, and the general answer is hot sauce.  Yes, I do have some specific brands that I especially like, but for me the best is when a particular dining establishment makes their own house hot sauce and it’s awesome.  Costa Rica, where I was living for a bit, until earlier this year, isn’t really known for spicy food, but if you ask, you can probably get the kitchen to bring you some of their special hot sauce, and sometimes what you get by asking is FUCKING TRANSCENDENT.  I can still taste the hot sauce from a few places I frequented in Costa Rica and I miss those flavors a lot.  If you’ve been listening to recent episodes, you know that I’m currently in Tucson, Arizona, and I had thought that Tucson was going to be hot sauce heaven.  And I was wrong.  There is a lot of very mediocre hot sauce here and I am deeply disturbed and disappointed.  However, I would like to give a shout out to Time Market.  They have a hot sauce that comes with their fried chicken sandwich, and I don’t eat chicken, so I discovered that they had hot sauce by accident.  And then I tasted it.  And it is excellent.  I think they call it the Tucson hot sauce.  So if you’re in Tucson, go to Time Market – just go, trust me – and if you like hot sauce, ask for a side of their Tucson hot sauce and just slurp it out of whatever container they put it in for you.  You’re welcome.

The answer to the seventh question, what condiment do I refuse to eat, is mayonnaise.  No thank you!  I want nothing to do with it. 

The eighth question was, what was my favorite movie of 2025, and the answer is Bugonia, which was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.  I can’t universally recommend this movie – just like I would never tell anyone who doesn’t like spicy food to try my favorite hot sauce – but there were things I liked about this movie A LOT.  And, without giving too much away, the ending is what really did it for me.  I see a lot of artsy movies that I think are pretty good, but don’t have great endings.  This movie had not only a conclusive ending, but an awesome ending, and I loved it.

The ninth question was, who was my favorite contestant on the TV show Top Chef?  I got some interesting guesses in response to this question, and I have to admit that I deeply admire many of the contestants on Top Chef and would very much like at least several of them to come to my home and be my personal chef and maybe be my friend while they’re at it.  I might or might not have had a former Top Chef contestant as my personal chef for a brief moment in time, but that’s another thing that we don’t need to get into the details of.  Anyway, among the many cheftestants who I admire and am amused by, and whose food I’d love to try, my all-time favorite is Richard Blaise.  And there are a great many reasons for this, but I’m not going to subject you to that list. 

Tenth and last question: who was my favorite person on television when I was little?  Almost everyone who answered this question answered Mister Rodgers.  But no, dear listeners, I didn’t like Mister Rodgers.  My parents pushed Mister Rodgers hard, but I thought Mister Rodgers was “baby stuff.”  My favorite person on TV when I was little was the one and only LeVar Burton, of Reading Rainbow.  I loved LeVar, and I loved Reading Rainbow.  Finding out that he was also in Star Trek was deeply disturbing to me when I was five or five-ish.  I was like, no, this human exists only for the purpose of being the main human of Reading Rainbow.  That is ALL HE IS, the end, period!  How could anybody want to be anything more than that?  Later I came to understand that being on Star Trek was pretty cool too - but, like I said, that came later.

So there you have it.  Congratulations to the folks who won a prize for their correct answers, and thanks again to everyone who participated.  I had a lot of fun with this quiz thing, and I hope you had some fun with it too.

All right folks, you know the deal.  If you’re ready to deal with your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you and you want my help doing it, there are two ways we can work together.  You can enroll in my private, online course, You’re Not the Only One, or we can work together one-on-one via Zoom.  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!  That’s it for today.  Bye for now.