A friend of mine with whom I’ve had many conversations about feminism and older men/younger women relationships wrote me a note last week about a close acquaintance of hers, a young woman of 21 who is having an “emotional affair” with a man of 44.
I’ve blogged enough lately about age-disparate relationships, and I intend to do much more writing on the subject. Today, I’m interested in writing about this strange and troubling beast called the emotional affair, a phenomenon enormously abetted by modern technology.
I’m not treading on new ground when I remark that when it comes to love and sex, humans are generally very good at deceiving themselves. We are particularly good, as a rule, at justifying certain kinds of betrayals because they don’t meet our own contorted and legalistic definitions of what constitutes genuine infidelity. The paradigmatic example, of course, is that of Bill Clinton. A great many of us believed, and still believe, that our 42nd president was absolutely sincere when he denied an adulterous relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he had constructed for himself a moral calculus in which only intercourse constituted authentic infidelity. In 1998, as the nation watched the Clintons’ all-too-public agony, a great many folks were challenged to think about their own little webs of deceit and justification. If the politicians we elect are mirrors for our best and worst aspects of ourselves, then President Clinton — a man of extraordinary gifts and extraordinarily banal frailties — reminded us of our own capacity for duplicity.
Most people have no trouble labelling oral sex with an intern behind your wife’s back as adultery. Bill Clinton is easy to admire, and easy to ridicule. But lesser men than he — and a great many women too — have shown a similar capacity for self-deception. And we are particularly prone to this sort of self-deception when it comes to affairs that don’t have a physically sexual component. For those of us who define fidelity in terms of what actions we don’t undertake with other people, it’s all too easy to slide into an emotional affair.
For the purposes of this post, I’ll define an emotional affair as a non-physically sexual relationship characterized by mutually intense psychological intimacy, accompanied by words or gestures that traditionally are reserved for one’s romantic partner. That’s a vague definition, of course; emotional affairs are notoriously difficult to define. (One thinks of the perhaps apocryphal Potter Stewart remark about knowing obscenity when he saw it.) The slipperiness of the line between “good friend” and emotional “lover” allows those involved in these affairs a great deal of plausible deniability, both to themselves and to those around them. “We’re just friends”; “It’s totally innocent”; “You’re reading too much into this” are the sorts of things that can be said with genuine sincerity in response to suspicious queries from others.
Both men and women are equally prone to self-deception about emotional affairs. For men, acculturated to think of sex in purely physical terms, it’s often difficult to grasp the degree to which an emotional betrayal can be just as devastating as an explicitly carnal one, but women are not immune from this misunderstanding either. One of the ugliest aspects of the emotional affair is that the participants often applaud themselves for what they see as their own admirable restraint. A couple that goes to lunch every day, exchanging intimate chatter and exchanging longing glances, may feel both the agony of unsatisfied longing and the perverse satisfaction of imagined virtue. It’s easy to say “Oh, Frederick, aren’t we wonderful people? We know we want to be together, but too many people would be hurt! It’s proof of how special our love is — and proof of how good we both are — that we are only exchanging these texts and emails and longing looks rather than getting naked at the Good Nite Inn out by the interstate.” As the kids say these days, epic fail.
Whether monogamy ought to be the preferred option for human relationships is debatable. For a host of reasons both psychological and spiritual, I tend to be enchanted with the idea of enduring monogamy (four marriages by age forty is confirming evidence of that enchantment, if not of the requisite ability to honor the pledges made.) But assuming we are going to make monogamous pledges, and be friends with others who have made those pledges to their partners, we have a responsibility to remember that fidelity — like every other aspect of sexuality — is ultimately holistic. In other words, heart and head and body ought to be connected.
My old Twelve Step sponsor, Jack, told me many times that being faithful was a matter of what you do with your body, what you feel with your heart, what you say with your mouth, and what you think with your mind. When I first heard that, I was aghast; who could be expected to police their very emotions? Besides being alcoholics and addicts, Jack and I had both briefly studied for the Catholic priesthood, and had a similar vocabulary. So when I heard this line from him, I said to Jack, “I thought virtue wasn’t the absence of desire to sin, but the conscious choice to resist the desire.” Jack nodded. “True. But there’s a difference between a fleeting desire over which you have no control, and ‘entertaining’ an immoral desire, playing with it in your mind, fantasizing endlessly about what you would do if only you weren’t so self-consciously virtuous.” He pointed out that the kind of radical congruence of body, heart, and mind was difficult, but immensely rewarding. “Being faithful to someone isn’t about being perfect, but it is about trying to honor your relationship with everything you do and say. When you’re doing it right, people will be able to sense you’re married even if you forgot your wedding ring at home.”
I’ve never forgotten that.
In the end, I confess I’ve always been exasperated by folks who have emotional affairs. Part of it is my own temperament, which is not inclined to such half-measures. Martin Luther suggested that if one were going to sin, one ought to at the least “sin boldly.” In my past, I honored that suggestion with zeal; I never had an emotional affair that didn’t end up as a physically sexual one sooner or later. Some of that is due to my ENFP Gemini impulsiveness, and some of it due to an awareness that there is no particular virtue in practicing both physical self-restraint and emotional abandon. After all, I highly doubt Hillary Clinton was impressed by Bill’s self-denial in refraining from intercourse with Monica Lewinsky; betrayal is betrayal is betrayal is betrayal. As we used to say in AA, if you hang around a barbershop long enough, you might as well get a haircut. There is no virtue, none whatsoever, in pressing one’s proverbial nose against the proverbial window pane, longing with every fibre of one’s being for what lies on the other side while all the while enjoying the bittersweet pleasure of self-righteous self-denial.
This was eye-opening. Thanks, Hugo. I wish you-know-who would read this.
Interesting.
I am not sure I agree, although I think I understand what you are saying.
Specifically, if my partner had an “emotional affair” (which basically sounds like being infatuated with a really good friend) I don’t think I would get particularly outraged (under the theory (that you seem to reject) that one can hardly control who are attracted to).
But yeah, I can see how it might be better to not even let these situations develop.
“I said to Jack, “I thought virtue wasn’t the absence of desire to sin, but the conscious choice to resist the desire.†Jack nodded. “True. But there’s a difference between a fleeting desire over which you have no control, and ‘entertaining’ an immoral desire, playing with it in your mind, fantasizing endlessly about what you would do if only you weren’t so self-consciously virtuous.—
I tried to explain that to someone once–during a conversation about the difference between keeping the letter of your word that you’ve given and keeping the spirit of it–how the first can entirely lack genuine morality and the second, even when it violates the letter, can be a much more genuine behavior. (In that particular case, it went in one ear and out the other.
)
As the kids say these days, epic fail.
Haha!
Great post. I think I good rule of thumb here is that if you can’t and/or don’t talk openly with your partner about an infatuation, you’re almost certainly doing something wrong. I’m not saying one should burden one’s partner with the knowledge everything fleeting attraction, but if the attraction grows to the level of a full-fledged crush, or is for a good friend one already loves platonically, discussing it is, I think, an excellent measure against betrayal. Both my girlfriend and I have had a handful of minor crushes over the course of our relationship; talking about them has always more or less dissolved them (an infatuation has a lot more power when it’s a secret fantasy), and also been an opportunity to remember our commitment to and love for one another, and to clarify boundaries. For example, I recently experienced a brief attraction to a not-very-close friend of mine. I told my girlfriend about it and asked her whether she’d prefer I not see this person. She didn’t care, but I feel strongly that giving her the option was the right thing to do.
On that note, Benny — I agree that we can’t control who we’re attracted to. But we have total control over what feelings we decide to indulge, who we spend time with, etc. It’s one thing to be attracted to someone else while in a monogamous relationship; it’s quite another to nurture that attraction, especially when the nurturing is done in secret.
Dang, Hugo. You could be talking about my behavior thru much of my 20s. Epic fail, indeed. I’m on the cusp of leaving that decade and now leaning more towards the behaviors that Daisy Bond’s describing. (It helps that my erotic dreams tend to be hilariously bizarre yet pg13, so they’re an accessible starting point.) But I do think that if you’re in an emotional affair and patting yourself on the back for not having sex, you’re doing so because privately you do feel very guilty.
Not that this excuses anything, but for emotionally repressed people like me, who in their 20s may not even know their own needs very well, sometimes the emotional affair is that clubbing over the head that you need to realize that all is not right in your relationship. The lesson to take from that though, is to improve your awareness and relationship skills so you don’t need to clubbed.
“As the kids say these days, epic fail.” Huge success!
I am relating to today’s post on many complicated and vague levels. I wonder how this applies to “entertaining” fantasies that would be an emotion betrayal of yourself instead of a partner. Is it the same thing or is it different? Where is the morality when it’s only to yourself that you have made certain promises? Hmm… Off topic
Well, you’re obviously not concealing anything from yourself, so you avoid that moral trap, at least.
Hugo,
No comment on the rest of your post, but I’m not sure you are reading Luther correctly. I confess that I don’t know what his “Sin boldly” injunction meant, exactly, but I don’t think it meant anything as simple as what you suggest.
If I had to guess, I think Luther was not suggesting that we try to go out and sin, but rather that we should try to do good to the best of our ability, without worrying whether we transgress some detailed bit of moral casuistry, in the faith that Christ “is the victor over sin, death, and the world.”
Of course I’m updating the Good Heretic’s thoughts. Here’s the passage in context, from a letter to Melancthon:
If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but
the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the
true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only
imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let
your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the
victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we
are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We,
however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new
heaven and a new earth where justice will reign. It suffices that
through God’s glory we have recognized the Lamb who takes away the
sin of the world. No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to
kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day. Do you think
such an exalted Lamb paid merely a small price with a meager
sacrifice for our sins? Pray hard for you are quite a sinner.
So imagining that one is a better person because one’s sins are small and thus more easily redeemed is a false conception, or so he implies.
And Jenny, I’ll get around to a post on the issue you raise as well…
Love this post! Full of win!
Feeling an attraction is different than acting on an attraction. And carrying on an emotional affair is certainly acting.
I tend to agree with you here, Hugo; I don’t have any patience at all for self-delusion, and emotional affairs seem to be just another way to snip “But it doesn’t count!”
Hugo.
I am not so sure I agree wholeheartedly with the tone of this post. One of the biggest issues i think keeping the sexes at odds with one another is a failure on the part of most men to discern appropriately the difference between emotional and sexual intimacy. Sure, we are good at using the separation to justify sex without emotional intimacy, “No Strings Attached” but to believe that emotional intimacy must be sexual in nature seems like a big reason that women can’t be more emotionally available without fear of harassment… Emotional availability is too often misunderstood by men as an invitation to physical intimacy because the men haven’t learned that the separation goes the other way as well. Men seem to believe you can have sex without being emotionally available, but can’t be emotionally available without the sex.
James, the point of the post is simply that emotional infidelity is equivalent — and just as serious — as physical infidelity. Your remarks about the way in which men are socialized to disconnect are well-taken, but they don’t vitiate the central point of this post.
The friend you label earlier could have well been me. My husband decided that it was more important to hide his new girl “friend” from his AA meetings than to tell me about the hidden calls, the rides that he gave her, etc. More important than dealing with my dislike of the situation. He is now 44 and his new “friend” at work is 21. Do I think the same situation will repeat, yes, as he has already “hidden” a ski outing that they had. And prior an email to a previous co-worker, female of course. We have been separated for the past 4 months and he states, nothing has ever happened with any of these women. Does it matter that he yelled that his AA partner understood him more than I did? He denies having an emotional affair with her, but he fits all of the criteria, the deception, the hiding and the lies (he said she was fat and ugly and not his type). That supposedly made it all ok.
I think a big part of the difference between an “emotional affair” and emotional intimacy with friends of the opposite sex is that the “emotional affair” would likely include things you’re hiding from your spouse.
My husband has always had close female friends other than me, and I’m glad he does, but neither of us is hiding anything from the other about what friends we have. Nothing wrong with having more than one person you can confide in.
Hugo,
Just out of curiosity, what about a couple who are open about having emotional affairs with other people? Say a couple who don’t love or even much like each other, but stay together for whatever reason (religious objections to divorce, children, finances). Each of them has permission from the other to have emotional affairs, but they don’t _sleep with_ other people.
I don’t think I would consider this on the same emotional plane as a couple of ‘swingers’ (I am totally against ‘swinging’ by the way).
I guess then, that i was just unclear on the demarcation between emotional infidelity and strong emotional intimacy and bonding between friends of the other sex outside of the marriage. Is it just the secrecy, and perhaps that your partner has no say in the outside relationship?
It felt like you were saying bonding = infidelity. If secrecy is the defining characteristic then I understand better.
Hector, I’ve never met a couple who permitted emotional affairs but not physical ones — it’s beyond the realm of my experience, and not something to which I have given any thought. Were I to hear of such a couple,and learn their story, I might have more to say.
Hugo,
I don’t know any such either (and, it must be said, ‘permission’ is often a nebulous thing). But given the range of human behavior, I’m sure there are such couples out there somewhere.
My friends sex partner spoke to me on the subject and agreed to be quoted. “Baaa-ba-ba Ba-ah.”
Personally I am thankful that I live on the east coast.
Right – it’s the affair, not the emotion, that’s the problem.
Oh. Wow.
Just hit me like a ton of bricks: I had an emotional affair with a much older married man several years ago, and I remember how proud I was that I wasn’t sleeping with him. We ate our lunches together,texted and emailed a dozen times a day, and we told each other how much we loved each other. I loved him more because he wouldn’t touch me…
Live and learn, I guess. Thanks for this. I’m so tempted to send a link to it to him. But even I know enough to know that would just be fishing.