Theresa Byrne ponders what we can learn about all relationships from the ones that begin as emotional affairs.
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Please understand I’m not advocating affairs.
Far from it, I’m a proponent of healthy committed relationships and what occurs when we open ourselves up fully to another human being. The depth of intimacy, healing, and connection available is off-the-charts.
But I’m also not going to pretend emotional affairs aren’t happening, and hurting, which led me to begin asking the question, “What’s the draw? What’s pull? What’s the deal with emotional affairs?”
They aren’t real life.
With the advent of social media, people are on display 24/7 and you can look at their pictures and check out their posts and enjoy their dialogues as if you were right beside them. What you see are the snippets of a person’s life, and if they work on the interwebbery like I do, then it’s usually only parts and pieces because, like me, a lot of people like to keep their private life, well, as private as possible.
It might surprise you to know that many women and men are getting private messages from people they’ve never met, that run the gamut from “just saying hi” to “I love you and want to marry you”. I draw online boundaries and usually don’t interact with someone I don’t know privately. (My friends thought it was hilarious that I have been courted by gentlemen I met through Facebook. Oh just you wait, pretty soon it’ll be a thing. Facebook will have a dating section.)
It might surprise you to know that many women and men are getting private messages from people they’ve never met, that run the gamut from “just saying hi” to “I love you and wnat to mary you”.
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I know women/men that have ended up being the “other woman/man” when they had no idea their counterpart wasn’t single. Which is why I say “set limits” when you’re interacting online with someone. And if someone crosses your limits, it’s a red flag. Boundaries are good.
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Back to emotional affairs: how and why are they happening? And they are happening. All over the place.
- When you befriend someone, you can create an imaginary ideal of what they must be like, basing it on what you see, or if it’s online, the photos you see and they life they are leading.
- You can tell them all the things you like, care about, love, and admire.
- That person can be anyone you imagine them to be, like a movie star on screen. They don’t have to see you at your worst. They aren’t there to witness your hot mess days.
- And they don’t know that you can’t seem to fold the laundry out of the basket, even though it’s clean. Or that you dislike emptying the dishwasher, but love recycling day like a little kid likes show and tell.
- Eventually you can share bits and pieces of your struggles with them and they only have to know your side. You can get vulnerable, but only as you choose.
- They live in an imaginary place on your computer, in your office, at school, or in your head. They have their own little room that stays static where they never change. You pick them back up and everything is rosy again.
- There are no expectations.
- They won’t yell at you for forgetting to pick up milk, your socks, or the kids at school.
- They’re happy to see you. To talk to you. To hear from you. That alone is enough, to them.
- They don’t have anything invested in you, or in the relationship. They are interested in connecting with you, and that alone seems enough.
But is it? Do most emotional affair participants want or plan to meet eventually? Does one or the other start to require a bigger, deeper commitment from their digital counterpart?
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Instead of asking the “why” questions, I turned to the what’s.
- What are the attractors in emotional affairs?
- What can we learn about them?
- What’s the message?
It must be something deeper, it must be some other kind of need that drives someone to start (and continue) an emotional affair outside of a committed relationship. (If you are looking for answers to these questions in this article, or judgement, I can only promise you theory and thought based in study.)
Some of our basic psychological needs: to feel safe; to feel heard and seen, to feel valued, and to be accepted. Maybe that’s the attraction emotional affairs are offering, at the outset. Roses and acceptance. The other person is excited to hear from us, they want to know how that important meeting went, or how we really feel today. They make us important, to them. They listen.
Our partner may not offer constantly undivided unconditional acceptance because they are invested and attached. They have made a big investment of time, love, emotional currency, commitment, children, animals, finances, friends, and they care very deeply about the things that aren’t working. They care so deeply about these things that they discuss them with us, and share displeasure at times. They may also be busy with their own lives and work, and may not have as much time for us.
Some of our basic psychological needs: to feel safe; to feel heard and seen, to feel valued, and to be accepted.
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Our partners may have seen us in our hot mess moments, and they may have worried about us. They may have seen us at our worst, and know the whole story of our lives. We may be known to them. For some maybe that’s a struggle, if they don’t like who’ve they’ve been. Maybe an emotional affair is a “clean slate” with someone new.
If you met someone that offered you unconditional acceptance and excitement like a puppy, they seemed relatively normal, kind or funny, were good-looking and employed: would you build all kinds of scenarios around that? Keep in mind, they only hear the parts of your life you want them to know. And they aren’t invested OR attached, not in the way a partner would be eventually.
In a way, it occurs to me that it could be a sort of relational escapism. An emotional affair can be used as a way of numbing against the difficult parts that come with life. Or the difficult parts in an existing relationship. Could this be part of the lesson?
Anytime you start a relationship there are fun chemicals, and who doesn’t love fun, naturally occurring, oxytocin? Eventually it fades, but in the beginning it’s there. That way you may not have to think about the issues with your partner, the house, the mortgage, your job, or any one of the myriad of things that could keep you up at night. You instead could avoid the other issues and think about the person that makes your oxytocin shows up.
What seems like unconditional acceptance at first is in fact, quite conditional. It’s conditions are based solely on the fact that this relationship is currently happening in one particular area of life; whether it’s at work, online, or in a support group for recyclers.
An emotional affair can be used as a way of numbing against the difficult parts that come with life.
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And with it being conditional, you get to focus on the best conditions, at least for a little while. You don’t have to look at the other areas of life that aren’t working, you can focus on being the best person available based on what this person sees or knows. At least for a little while.
Does that mean that emotional affairs aren’t built to last? Does that mean that there are no fairy-tale endings? Or would that be “the exception” (as they say in He’s Just Not That Into You?) Do people that meet and create a relationship that started as an emotional affair have a chance to build a lasting relationship? Can they find an “affair to remember”?
Again, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know. I like to ask questions and wait for the answers to show up. And please know that if you’ve ever been in a relationship where someone had an emotional affair, this article is not meant to romanticize affairs. It is meant to take a step back, ask questions, and look at them objectively, to see if there’s anything to learn.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
Whether we want to admit it or not, the symptoms of an emotional affair are the same symptoms of “falling in love.” To ask how emotional affairs happen is basically to ask what happens when people fall in love. Your feelings during an emotional affair may be the same feelings you had when you first fell in love with your existing partner. In some cases, the cheating person wants to recapture feelings from earlier times with the committed partner. Just because having an affair is wrong doesn’t mean that the feelings are not real. Just because something is an affair… Read more »