Have you ever had an emotional affair with someone? Where/with whom?

Yes…it was with a co-worker who was in another dept. There was never any physical contact other than an occasional hug. We worked on a couple of projects together and developed a mental chemistry…the type when you can look at each other and know what the other is thinking and feeling.

It probably met a similar need for both of us. He was in an unhappy marriage, and I was still nursing the wounds from a broken up relationship. While unspoken, it was a source of happiness and strength from knowing someone understood you and still liked you.

It lasted about a year, maybe less. He got a divorce, and at some point said that he was in love with me. The feelings were not returned, so I just kept my distance in order for him to work through it. He eventually met a woman, and they married.

Ok… the guy perspective.

Emotional affair?!?! What the heck is an emotional affair????

I am, of course being sarcastic. However, in general we ‘Y’ chromosomers do not fathom the concept of an emotional affair and generally have a “no touch, no foul” attitude in such matters. The double X crowd, on the other hand, totally define the relationship in terms of emotional bond.

I came to understand this in a conversation with my wife about somebody who was rather upset at her spouse because he was carrying on an “on-line affair” with a woman he had never even seen in person. Of course, my reaction went something like: “How the heck can you carry on an affair with somebody you have never been in the same room with? Why would she be so upset?”. My wife, of course, enlightened me on the female perspective of whole emotional affair thing.

Yes folks, women and men are simply wired differently.

Yes I have, at a point in my life where I knew my marriage was dissolving. I know it was the wrong thing to do and I still deal with the guilt, shame and remorse it brought. If I had it to do over again I would do it completely differently.

I think of an emotional affair as being a relationship where two people have a very intense emotional and intellectual connection that does not play itself out in a physical way. Mine was not in the workplace and it happened mostly as a result of my feeling completely ignored by the man to whom I was married (we are now divorced).

“an emotional affair as being a relationship where two people have a very intense emotional and intellectual connection that does not play itself out in a physical way.”

God! I love that. :-)

Then you got to have sex

Oh gosh. I’ve had at least a handful of them. Mostly they happened when I was getting sick and I was desperate at the emotional separation between me and my wife, I had no idea what to do. I believed that if I spoke to her about what I felt I needed, she’d just divorce me and I didn’t want that.

I thought I could have a sexual affair, but it didn’t really work out that way. In the end, I started meeting women online at a site not unlike this one. It was really weird, looking back on it now. I just read a series of letters I wrote to one of the earlier ones, trying to figure out how it happened. I realized that the mania I had gave me a confidence and recklessness that I didn’t have when I was healthy.

It’s sad to me that I have to be manic to be like that. I’m not really an attractive person (love-wise) when I’m normal. Women just seem to overlook me that way. I’m sure it’s the sensible thing to do, but still, it would be nice to know I was attractive that way, still.

Anyway, I was looking for someone who would love me and have sex with me, and be satisfied with that. I got the former. Maybe the latter, if you count simultaneous masturbation. Personally, I don’t think it counts, but I can see how people would think that it does.

Anyway, I went through a series of these things, each one last approximately a month. It was like an addiction. I would get high during the falling in love phase and I would be on top of the world, and then reality would hit (they were all in parts of the country far from me, and they all had husbands or other constraints) and I would feel like they no longer cared for me.

I think I was pushing them away by demanding more from them. They would go away and I would crash and be nearly suicidal until the next one came along. And she did. God knows how or why. In fact, some of them practically lassoed me. So, up again. Crash again. Up again. Crash again. I think this happened five or six times. Then I told my wife what I was doing.

She was both badly hurt and badly worried. Worry won out. She kept her hurt in, and got me to a psychiatrist, and then stood by me for two years, helping to nurse me back to health before she finally let herself feel the hurt. It turned out that she loved me more than I could have possibly imagined. I’m a lucky, lucky guy.

One of the lessons I learned from this is that there is no one better than my wife. No woman can fix me. Only I can fix me. If I were to get into a relationship with someone else, it would end up in the same place because I would make it end up there, somehow.

I don’t understand how it works. I believe that I must put out some kind of invisible (at least to me) signal that I am available or I am unavailable. People seem to be able to read me in some magical way.

This is not the only way people seem to magically read me. Prospective employers seemed to magically know that my heart wasn’t really into working for them. It was as if “raving socialist” was written across my face.

I don’t really think it’s magic. I think it’s some kind of attitude or body language or edge to words or something that subliminally tell people who I am and what I am up to at the moment. Strange. I felt really bad about myself and these emotional affairs with a number of women did nothing to fix me. I feel good about myself, and my marriage is working.

Scary.

Several. I came to figure them a little late in my life but it’s been a valuable lesson. When I discovered the social internet then I got into an emotional affair with a man who was in a bad relationship as I was. Over a year’s time we platonically supported each other, fell in love, left our partners under the guise of independence but really in hopes of coming together to marry and “finally have the happiness we were fated for” but it was a big disaster instead. I fight emotionally attractions when I’m partnered like now but I’m aware of them and now know how compelling they can be. For better and worse, I’ve seen both.

No, never.

I did once with someone on-line, but I was at a very different place in my life. It was never harmful to my relationship, in fact it inspired and put some spark back into my “real life” relationship.

This happened to me once in college. I made friends with a really outgoing and quirky guy in my studio art class named Alan. I met his best friend, Joe, a while later; he was more the shy intellectual type. The three of us would often hang out playing video games, adventuring around the city, smoking hookah, or going to parties- college stuff.

Alan and I dated briefly, then we put it behind us and stayed friends. A while later we were at a party and Joe leaned in too close to whisper something in my ear. There was something very intimate about it, and I realized that I liked him being in my space. He started to do this a lot, and would do small things like light my cigarette. He became much more talkative, and would often ask me outside for a smoke or a walk, and we’d have these really meaningful conversations. He also started to tease me all the time. I began to develop a huge crush on him.

Often times we’d be in a big group of people and our eyes would meet, and then we’d step outside and share a cigarette. I joked that transitive theory said we’d kissed now. I always (thought) I saw all these signs that he was into me, but I could never bring myself to say anything about it. Of course we were both still friends with Alan and nobody was willing to cross that line. I didn’t know what to do and finally decided to stop hanging out with both of them.

Sort of. Years ago, I worked with a man that I got along with fantastically. We were both in committed relationships, and had no intentions of leaving or being unfaithful to our partners. We just really enjoyed each other’s company and openly acknowledged that if we weren’t already spoken for, we’d be together. He was like my ‘office husband’. My actual husband knew about the whole thing, so nothing sneaky or anything.

We worked nights, and ate dinner together every evening in his office with the door closed, just so we could talk freely (not about each other necessarily, just anything). That started the office rumor mill, and we both decided we needed to take a step back from that. We were very careful to never be in the same room with a closed door ever again. The perception of infidelity was almost as damaging in the workplace as real infidelity would have been. It definitely changed the nature of our relationship. It was really quite sad.

So glad you asked this question., I have been in a (one sided) emotional affair with my ex boyfriend for 15 yrs. Mind you, I am married, and he is too. I lived in Michigan (my husband is form there), for 10 years. When we moved back home, it was four years before I saw my ex. he actually saw a relative of mine and told her to tell me he was looking for me. i told her to give him my number when she saw him again; she did and we communicated over the summer. His wife found one of my text (which we were supposed to get together) and that was the end of that, he asked me not to call or text again. Needless to say, I am not over it, but I push on. I am not over it, because I found out that he is not happy, but with a house and children and whatever else comes with marriage, I guess he has opted to stay. I see him in passing because we now work on the same side of town. I sometimes wish I had never met him in the beginning.

Yes I have. My wife saw a photo of me with a co-worker at an event. She noted that she was there and never saw this woman. She said she knew by the look in this womans eyes that she liked me. I had been talking and texting this woman several times a day and keeping it from my wife. I had locked her out of my phone and was deleting the messages. I never considered that I was cheating. She checked the phone records and discovered another woman I was texting and talking to. I was blaming my marriage problems on my wife and I was actually the problem. My wife was having health problems and I was texting other women. No sex, just talk. My wife said she was done, she wouldn’t compete. At that moment I realized what I had been doing. I never spoke to any of these women ever again. I didn’t realize until my wife said that what I had done. I am sorry every day for this. The pain I see in my wifes eyes is unbearable at times. I am not the man I thought I was and I will spend every day being a better husband.
I paid to have all of my old text messages recovered (as many as possible) to show my wife it was nevver about sex and just idle talk. But that doesn’t matter what matters is that I at some level knew it was wrong. I could have tod my wife I was talking to them, or not put a password on my phone. I take responsibility If you are not tellling your spouse, you are cheating.

theres only two types of words that exist in my life… cheating and faithful

emotional affair? is that like sugar coating the meaning of cheater… cad? loser…. disgrace… dishonest…? if your unhappy with some one you dont go finding another while your still commited… you either step up or end it. simple.