Husbands and emotional affairs

[Anonymous]

About a month and a half ago my husband began an emotional affair with a colleague he was on a two week business trip with. I knew about it - sensed it - almost immediately and we began addressing it as soon as he got home. We've had a lot of stress in our marriage recently (and since I talked to the other woman I know that she has in her marriage as well) and I am not surprised by the connection and support they found in each other, but we are now going through the painful and messy process of working through this issue as well as the issues that originally caused him to turn to her. We are both committed to our marriage and I do believe we will be able to get through this, but it's tough to see the end of it - the eventual peace we once had - right now.

If you are willing to share, I would love to hear stories of other women who have been through this, and made it through. What does success look like? How long did the process take for you? Does the feeling of betrayal ever go away despite understanding the motivation? Almost exactly a year ago there was another thread on this topic. If the original poster is out there, could you tell me if you were able to work through it?

I feel a new emotion almost every minute - sadness, hurt, optimism, disappointment, hopefulness, hopelessness, confusion, peace... I know that what I'm going through is not unique, I'd love to hear from people who understand...

[Anonymous]

My husband had an EA that lasted for 10 months with a colleague - in spite of his insistence starting at two weeks later that there was nothing going on.

Go to www.survivinginfidelity.com for support. I have found lots of it there. And be prepared for more - and worse - information. There is generally a period of "trickle truth" where your husband doesn't want to hurt you by telling you anything other than the essentials.

Does her husband know? Not "yes, my DH tells me that she told him." You must speak directly to him. The best defense against the continuation of this affair - or the escalation of it - is for two people outside of it to be vigilant.

Good luck.

[Anonymous]

I have to admit that I've never heard the term "emotional affair" before. I did a little research and found this ...

An emotional affair generally starts innocently enough as a friendship. Through investing emotional energy and time with one another outside the marriage relationship, the former platonic friendship can begin to form a strong emotional bond which hurts the intimacy of the marriage relationship. David Moultrup has broadly defined an extramarital affair as "a relationship between a person and someone other than (their) spouse (or lover) that has an impact on the level of intimacy, emotional distance and overall dynamic balance in the marriage. The role of an affair is to create emotional distance in the marriage. The critical principle to consider is the possibility of unconscious emotional benefits gained by the uninvolved spouse. The goal of therapy is to resolve the intimacy problems in the couple relationship so that an affair will no longer be 'needed.' This model does not consider the possibility of accidental affairs nor those that arise out of individual pathology or habit rather than relationship difficulties."

Is this what you're talking about? Is this sort of like having an "office spouse" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_wife)?

[Anonymous]

I'm the second poster - and this is not the same as an office wife, imo. My husband put his "friend"'s needs above mine repeatedly, e.g., he'd stop a conversation with me in order to respond to an e-mail from her - that sort of thing. According to him, he was in love with me and committed to our marriage throughout the whole thing. It did not stop the EA from happening. He insisted they were "just friends." And he had had many female friends before, but I, too, knew almost instantly that there was some other dynamic at play here.

Also, read the book "Not 'Just Friends'" by Dr. Shirley Glass. Your husband should read it, too.

[Anonymous]

OP here again. To the first poster, I am so sorry you went through this. You're right about constant diligence - not only do I think it's the key to making sure the situation doesn't escalate, we have some serious trust to rebuild and, for right now, having 'proof' he's telling the truth is helpful. Regarding her husband, she told me she told him. I know it sounds weird, but I kinda played therapist to her. Like I said, my husband and I have been going through a LOT the past four months or so, so when this first came to light I was more resigned than anything else. I don't harbor any real hostility toward this girl (although I certainly don't respect what she's done) and I wanted to understand her motivations so actually had a beer with her!! She told me about the problems in her (less than one year old) marriage and I gave her my thoughts based on my 12 year fairly happy one. She told me later she and her husband have had many heart-to-hearts and are now in couples therapy.

Luckily my husband will be leaving the company in a few weeks and the other woman is moving to another city so there will be at least demographic distance, giving me another measure of comfort. The key issue for us now is to hunker down and figure out the key issues that have quietly arisen in our marriage and figure out what to do about them.

How did you guys handle it?

[Anonymous]

Well, as I said, it isn't as though we had lots of issues in our marriage. My husband was going through a mid-life crisis. It manifested itself in a serious drinking problem as well as the EA. We are in therapy to deal more with the fall-out than the causes. I don't think therapy is ever a bad idea, frankly.

I wouldn't believe anything the OW told you, frankly. Why, when you don't trust your husband, would you trust her?? Are you in therapy? Individual and marital?

I am glad about the changing jobs and move for you. My husband told OW they could no longer discuss anything not related to work. And she left the company soon after, thank God.

[Anonymous]

I haven't been through an emotional affair, but my husband and I did bounce back from a separation caused by emotional distance (about two years ago - and our relationship has been wonderful for the past year and a half or so). I am a big proponent of imago couples' therapy, and the books by Harville Hendrix (esp. Getting the Love You Want and the accompanying workbook). http://gettingtheloveyouwant.com/ It sounds cheesy, and a lot of it is, but it saved my relationship with my husband. You both have to be committed to it, and it takes a lot of work -- and you both have to be willing to recognize your own faults and personality traits, etc. that may have led to the emotional distance that provided the window for the affair. It took my husband and me a good 6-8 months to get close again, trust each other (even w/o a betrayal, the fact that he'd left me was a lot to get past), etc., and there were plenty of times I thought it wasn't going to work. Two years later I still have trust issues sometimes (every few months, maybe), but am able to reassure myself because I know how good the relationship is now. Stick with it, be honest and patient with yourselves and each other, and trust the process. GOOD LUCK!!!

[Anonymous]

Our issues of the last four months are mainly due to my own husband's mid-life crisis, interestingly. His behavior began to change. I wasn't paying attention to what he needed - chalked his behavior up to childishness and essentially told him to get over it - so he put on a mask and acted out more. In no way to I blame myself for what happened but looking back I understand how it did.

We are in therapy on and off, but have actually had more progress in what we call "marriage meetings" where we sit down a few times a week after DS is in bed and talk. Our therapist recommended a John Gottman book that we've been working through and it's helped.

[Anonymous]

I posted here last year about a somewhat similar situation. Eventually I stopped posting because the responses were not helpful and kept on telling me to leave the bastard, I was dumb and naive if I thought there was no sex, etc. Well I can tell you I did not leave the bastard and I am 99.9999999999999999% positive there was no sex. I also caught this inappropriate friendship very very early on. I don’t know if I’d really call it an emotional affair because it hadn’t really developed that far. But it was certainly on that track.

For months, dh fought me on whether his friendship was inappropriate. I was a wreck because he lied to me, I discovered his lies, he said I was psycho and paranoid, and he liedbut “nothing has happened” and the usual go round when it comes to these things. His interpretation of “nothing has happened” was that nothing physical happened. But to me, it might as well have been physical because in my opinion, he was valuing someone else more than me. Eventually he admitted it was inappropriate because he admitted being attracted to the person. He still talk to her because they shared a common activity, but he wasn’t constantly in touch with her like he use to. (I checked the phone records.) After a couple months, this common activity ended and she was out of the picture.

Around the same time, he started another friendship with a female that was platonic, but I was in no condition to accept any opposite sex friendship at the time... and so the cycle continued. I’m psycho, he’s insensitive, why are we married, there’s no such thing as an emotional affair, etc. We went into therapy but eventually he dropped because he said the problem was mine, not his since again he was doing nothing wrong. Long story short he eventually realized I wouldn’t be fine with this other girl around and he realized he wanted to stay married so he dumped her. That took a long time (months) to get there though

In my opinion I honestly don’t know if it’s good to go searching through infidelity sites. It will make you go mad and every situation may be similar, but they may also be different. You should know your husband best.

The root of many of these issues come from the fact that the relationship was ripe for an affair to begin with. This kind of thing doesn’t seem to typically come from out of the blue, but from a love starved marriage. That’s what the therapists and books say anyway. The affair is just the explosion that brings the issues to light and forces you to make a decision and can either make things stronger or make things end. For me it made us stronger. We came to terms with the fact that our marriage had grown distant for so long and that we were not fillign each others needs... so we began to focus on that and rebuilding everything and it has made a real difference.

I think it will help your situation that this lady moves away. If your husband is serious about honoring you and rebuilding your trust, he will stop talking to her. But at the same time you ultimately have to decide to trust him without monitoring his everyday life. If you think you can trust your husband, and if you can both work to make each other feel more appreciated and loved then I think you will be fine in the long run. It’s hard but it’s doable if both of you are committed and it sounds like neither of you has given up yet.

[Anonymous]

what does a mid-life crisis look like, exactly? What are the typical characteristics...?

[Anonymous]

I don't know if there are 'typical' characteristics (maybe the internet does, though) but my husband also had what I consider a mid-life crisis. It was as though he reverted to his 19 year old self. He began drinking more, went out drinking with single friends more, didn't want to do neighborhood BBQs or soccer games, said he felt 'trapped' in his life. He picked up expensive new hobbies only to quit them a short while later. He was entirely unhappy and said he didn't really know what happiness looked like anymore. He, too, developed relationships with women I didn't feel right about, but, for me, I knew they were in the context of what he was going through. It took him almost a year, and he did do some therapy, but he's come out of it with a better understanding of what he wants out of life and what makes him happy. It was awful to see him go through it - and live with him during - but he is and we are stronger for it.

[Anonymous]

a good friend of mine in a city out west is going through the exact same thing. don't know if it helps, if you might find comfort in a similar struggle, but she's keeping a blog about it...

www.watertotea.blogspot.com

[Anonymous]

It's terrible to say, but I work in a pretty much all male office as a support person (suprise suprise). These guys looking for an emotional connection to another woman are everywhere. I really cannot understand what is going on with these guys or why they all want to tell me their home problems. Maybe it is because I'm one of the few females int he office? They always claim to want a female perspective, but I'm not so sure what they really want. I think their wives would be furious to know the intimate details that they spill around the office, but I have to wonder why they don't share these problem they are having with their wives and work it out.