And there was a poster on here that said offering to shake hands with a woman is the same as raping her. Just because some people find something to be something, doesn’t make it so.
I’d like to hear more about this emotional affairs. What makes it an emotional affair instead of simply a good friendship. Can a man have an emotional affair with another man?
This could probably serve as fodder for a new thread, but I’ll take a shot. An emotional affair is different than a good friendship because it is non-consensual on the spouse’s part and involves emotional intimacy of the sort which the primary couple shares with each other (or once shared with each other) but not generally with other people. It’s covert, hidden from the spouse, and the person engaging in the emotional affair knows that were the spouse to know the depth of the emotional contact, they would feel betrayed by it - that’s *why *they hide it.
The non-consensual, hidden and guilty parts are the keys. Any couple can decide to have emotional or physical relationships with other people, and as long as they are consented to freely, they are not “affairs” or cheating. On the other hand, even many polyamorous people have boundaries they expect their partner to respect, and if those are willfully violated after being agreed to, then that’s an affair/cheating within the context of *that *relationship.
So, to some extent, these things are subjective, or at least unique to each relationship. That’s why honest, open and frequent communication is needed, to make sure each person and each couple’s boundaries are understood and agreed to freely. Once they’re agreed to, violating them is cheating.
I’m sorry, you’re trying to equate the idea that someone is spending all of their time and emotional energy, keeping secrets from their spouse, having sexually-charged conversations, sharing intimate knowledge with another person, with the idea that unwarranted handshakes=rape?
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
The difference between a good friendship and an emotional affair is huge. And yes, it’s possible for a man to have an emotional affair with another man. Just like it’s possible for a man to have a physical affair with another man. The use of “he” in the following paragraphs is not to suggest only men can cheat in this fashion, simply that we’re talking about an instance where a man HAS cheated in this way before.
It’s not just “Oh yeah, this is my buddy Jill we catch up on facebook and share jokes”. If someone’s having an emotional affair, they will lie about or downgrade the importance of their existing relationship (“My housemate” aka wife, or “She just doesn’t understand me, not like you do”) to the other party, AND they will lie about and downgrade the importance of their relationship with the other party to their spouse. Instead of turning to their spouse for comfort from stress, to share joy and pain with, they share it all with the other person and try to keep it hidden from their “significant other”. They might have text sex or phone sex with this other person, or send them erotic pictures. They might spend excessive time in contact exclusively with this other person, going out of their way to do so.
With a friendship, they catch up when they see each other online or maybe ring once a week or every so often “Hey buddy, what’s going on with you?”. In an emotional affair, the “cheating” partner will go out of their way to see this other person, because again, they’re giving their emotional focus to them. Instead of coming to bed at night with his wife, he may be online chatting with the other party well into the small hours. He might pretend to be staying back at work because a project is on the horizon, in reality he’s carving out some quiet space to be able to call them and spend a couple of hours on the phone with them. He might send them money. At the very least, extra money is going on phone calls or texts or other methods of keeping in communication. He may be telling this person he loves them. He may mean it. He may still love his wife, but he’s not being honest with her about how he feels.
When things are being shared with an external party to the relationship and being excluded from the ostensible “Significant other” it means the party having the affair has checked out. And at that point it is an affair. It doesn’t matter that they may not have had physical contact with the other person, their concentration, desire, love and affection is all being funnelled away from the primary relationship.
[ETA]: Does this mean the OP’s husband is having an affair with any of the 6 women he friended on FB the other day? At this point, probably not. It may be all above board and he’s just a bit clueless about it. But I can certainly see where the OP’s uncertainty comes from in light of their history.
I don’t really object to the term emotional affair, but I object to it’s equivalence with an actual affair. An affair is a violation of every relationship, unless specifically authorized. An emotional affair is much vaguer, and ends up depending on the eye of the beholder.
Romantic feelings and sexual attraction (assuming a monogamous relationship).
My uncle’s marriage just dissolved due to an emotional affair. He had this “good friend” from his running club who ran with him every morning, did spin class with him every evening, took yoga classes with him most afternoons, did “helpful, friendly” things like go with him to try on coats so he could see how they looked on when he bought my aunt a fur…never mind that she’s 6" shorter and built much slighter than my aunt.
He objects to characterizing it as an affair, protesting that he was always faithful to my aunt. Which is just a huge steaming load of bullshit. There are more ways of breaking faith with your partner than having intercourse with someone else. When you’re in love with and giving all your time and emotional energy to someone else, when you’re just waiting for that person to leave her husband to bail, you’ve broken that faith.
Bullshit. An emotional affair is just a much of a violation of trust as any physical affair ever could be. And that is the key point here. An affair is a violation of trust. Someone in an open marriage can still have an affair if the actions they undertake violate the trust and understanding that they negotiated at the start of a relationship, for example having sex with an ex-partner who it had been negotiated was off limits. It’s the same with an emotional affair. You are taking someone’s power to make their own decisions about their relationship away by engaging in deceipt and duplicity, and that is a betrayal, pure and simple.
Out of curiosity, is there a reason you put “long term” in there? What about a one night stand?
What gets me about treis’ argument is that “actual” affairs are just as subjective as emotional ones. Some people see a single one night stand as an affair, or a pattern of the same as having “multiple affairs”. Some people see an intricate emotional friendship with physical contact but no sex as an affair, some people will only find a betrayal in their partner actually having penetrative sex with another party.
The definition of an “affair” is by necessity subjective. Emotional affairs and physical affairs are simply two sides of the same coin. Trust is broken. One partner is betrayed by the other partner holding their own feelings and desires in higher regard than the feelings of their partner.
Exactly.
And every couple defines this differently.
I think what you’ve written here is worth printing out and handing to your therapist. There’s a lot of emotional information in those sentences.
Of course if someone wants to cheat they will find a way, but I wonder how many cheaters think “What I need is an affair! I’m putting that on my to-do list.” It would seem to me that cheating is often based on opportunity.
I have had a friend (let’s call her Celeste) whose husband (calling him Bill) was carrying on quite a relationship with a woman on Facebook. Bill didn’t have Celeste blocked, but the other woman did. So Bill could post right on the other woman’s wall without Celeste seeing it. If you go to someone’s wall you cannot see anything there that the other party doesn’t allow.
This other woman was a friend of one of Bill’s friends. Bill saw her comments to their mutual friend and clicked on her profile and saw a couple of pictures and found her attractive. He added her and pretty soon they were exchanging inbox messages and that’s when she blocked Celeste. She’d post sexy pictures up that only he could see and other flirtatious things. Pretty soon he started calling her on his way to and from work and during his work breaks. After that, it turned physical.
for the tl;dr crowd: Facebook doesn’t cause people to cheat, but it can be a handy vehicle (as a lot of other things can) for someone who has a roving eye. It allows the amount of privacy you choose and let’s you communicate with that person easily and often.
I don’t know if the OP is overreatcting or not. I do disagree strongly that emotional affairs aren’t real. You don’t have to have sexual contact with someone to cheat, IMHO. YMMV (the general you) but knowing that my partner was pouring their heart and soul into someone on an emotional level would be far more devastating to me than finding out they were at a party and saw someone and their peener JUST HAD TO DO IT and they had a quickie and never spoke again. I wouldn’t like either situation, but a throwaway fuck to me is purely physical. Emotional stuff, for me, would make it much harder to forgive
What if the cheated on partner chooses not to or is incapable of, fulfilling the emotional/physical needs of the cheatee? Does the cheatee fulfill those needs elsewhere or should they be forced into emotional/physical celibacy?
This is why my first question was if the OP had sex with him that night or if she left him up horny on the computer with his Facebook girls. If it’s the former, he’s a dick, if it’s the latter, well, his behavior here isn’t exactly unexpected. It doesn’t make it acceptable but it’d make it explainable and give them a starting point to dig into the problem.
Maybe I’m old fashioned or something but I don’t agree. IMO, and understanding of the term, an affair involves sexual involvement with the same partner more than once. A one night stand or even several of them , picked up or paid prostitutes would be cheating , but not an affair.
I’m not familiar with the term emotional affair but I think I understand it. When someone either thinks they are in love with someone other than their SO, or they use a close relationship with a member of the opposite sex for their emotional needs while avoiding dealing with problems in their primary relationship. I’d say that’s a serious relationship problem, but I haven’t heard it called an affair.
It’s completely irrelevant whether the OP and her husband had sex that night, so I’m not going to address it beyond this.
And the answer to your question is that if there’s any sort of decency in your soul, they tell their partner “I have these needs, but they are not being met right now and I’m tempted by [course of action]” Then they discuss it. If their needs and their partner’s limits are incompatible, then they discuss whether it’s worth continuing with the relationship.
There is NEVER an excuse to cheat. Either man up and take [your] lumps by saying you want it to be over, and/or by admitting that what you need isn’t being met so you’re wanting to seek it elsewhere, or put it back in your fucking pants - whether that’s metaphorically or not.
It’s not about what the actions are, be it sleeping with someone else or spilling your heart to them late at night on the computer. It’s about betraying a trust. You owe it to the other person you have given the appearance of being committed to to give them the truth, and let them make their own decision accordingly.
If it turns out your partner can accept you having cybersex with these hot girls, so long as no physical contact occurs - then having cybersex is not having an affair, because you’ve negotiated that as a part of your relationship. But having a physical relationship, even if it’s with the same girl your partner is okay with you having cybersex with, would be an affair because you’re breaking their trust and the agreement that you made.
I don’t see an affair. I see your uncle with a good friend.
I don’t agree. Virtually everyone will look at a long term sexual relationship outside a marriage and call that affair. There may be some fringe area where there can be some debate, but that doesn’t change that almost everyone is in lockstep agreement for most cases.
Did you miss the part where the relationship ended because of his involvement with that woman? The fact where he valued his relationship with her over that of his own wife?
That. Is. An. Affair.
His emotional needs were being met by this woman to the exclusion of his wife. His marriage ended because he refused to accept that he was giving more of his time and energy to an external partner, and apparently did not see spending all his time with this woman as being a betrayal of his wife.
I put long term in that because that’s what I’ve always thought the common definition of affair is. It’s not that I feel a one night stand is ok or anything, it’s just not what I would call an affair.
Why? Is every instance of social interaction on facebook insignificant? Does it matter if its interaction with people you know or people you don’t? Does it matter if the interaction follows usual norms of social behavior or is completely out of the ordinary (i.e., removed from immediate consequences) behavior? Can it be serious if it’s public interaction, or does it have to be private?
Would you say that this is nothing to be upset over?
What type of social interaction do you sanction, if not facebook?
I don’t think your generalization is accurate or fair. Not everyone interacts with others by the same means. And sometimes it’s not the medium, it’s the behavior.
Except where they’re not, such as here where you’re being repeatedly told that betraying your partner, even if it’s “Only” in an emotional fashion, is still a betrayal and an affair.
And that’s not a definition that’s limited to this thread or this messageboard.
Hell, let me throw a wikipedia pageat you
And another quote from the same page
In the case of the OP and CCL’s uncle, both instances meet the criteria of an affair without having had sexual play or sexual intercourse involved.
You. Are. Wrong.
Yes, I did miss that part. I didn’t miss the part where the failure of what was probably an already failed relationship was blamed on a friendship. I mean, he became friends with someone in his running class that enjoyed similar activities. The horror.