Define Emotional Affair

I keep getting asked about the ingredients of an emotional affair.

But, before we talk about emotional affairs (and there’s plenty to talk about), it’s time for the results of your poll.

The most popular question you want answered was . . . “How do I deal with sexual energy and beauty in guy/girl friendships?”

So to answer your question, I give you another short video (complete with enthusiastic facial expressions) from my interview with Dan Brennan. I also have plans to cover this question in more detail in the coming months. For those who voted for another question, I have good news for you (look under the video).

Every question in the poll has been answered and is available in audio at iTunes.

These question and answers make up some of the best ideas from this Emerald City with Dan Brennan. You can choose the answer to your question or purchase the whole conversation. My favorite one, “How do I stay above reproach? is Track 4. Thank you to Dan Brennan, Trever Klingenmeier, and Sarah Kappen for contributing and compiling this work.

Finally, one short announcement. For the month of May, I’ll be taking a one month leave-of-absence to devote my time to Soulation’s inaugural SoulGym. This eCourse will introduce you to Soulation’s online community as we all learn about how to share “Spiritual Truth without Spiritual Arrogance.”

If you’d like to join us it’s not too late to sign up.

I’ll be back June 4th with some fun insider scoop on my most recent book, Invitation to Tears: A Guide on Grieving Well (now available in Kindle and paperback at Amazon).

Let me know if you’d like to join my read-along.

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Define Emotional Affair

After some provocative questions from Happy, a real life emotional affair from a friend, and the original concern from Mary DeMuth, I’ve decided to compile what I’ve heard and let you add you two cents. This will the the concluding post on cross-sex friendships for this month of April. Thank you to those who have followed, voted, commented and encouraged me through this subject.

Let me open by saying the idea of an “emotional affair” sort of scares me. I’m frightened by it because I really don’t understand it.  And I’m afraid that because I’m an emotionally intense person I may have committed an emotional affair without knowing it.

That’s why I don’t like the term: it’s vague in my mind. But, perhaps, that’s simply because I haven’t studied it enough.  Or, perhaps it’s because the concept is complicated

I’ll let you judge. I do offer my own attempt at a definition of an emotional affair at the end.

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Questions from Happy that affirmed many of my own questions (from the comments last week):

I think my question about “emotional affairs” would be – is that even really a thing, or is it a term “we” made up to define something potentially dangerous? In my reading of Scripture, my understanding is that adultery = sex with someone you’re not married to. That doesn’t say anything about emotions, tho maybe it’s implied. I do believe that it is possible to be unfaithful to one’s spouse in other ways, too, but I’m not sure that any other kind of unfaithfulness would be possible only in married relationships specifically.

I can “cheat” on a friend by divulging their secrets, or disrespecting them. I can tell them I care about them deeply and then be unkind by not noticing what they’re going thru or by not hearing what they are trying to say. I can be unfaithful to a friend by not showing up when they need me. But the only way I can think of that I could be unfaithful to a spouse in which I couldn’t also be unfaithful to a friend is about sex… Unless I am missing something completely….?

Webster defines an affair as a sexual relationship outside of marriage, over a certain span of time. So what exactly IS an “emotional” affair? I wonder sometimes if it isn’t a term we’ve invented out of fear: “if I *feel* something “too” strongly (whatever that means), it’s possible that it could turn *into* ‘something more’ that would lead to adultery – so it would be better to steer away from intensity of feeling altogether.” I don’t know. Wise boundaries specific to specific relationships are …well, wise. But I hear fear in the words “emotional affair” – fear that strong emotion will lead somewhere it shouldn’t – and I’m not sure that preventing ourselves from feeling – or fearing intensity of emotions – serves us well.

Just some thoughts and honest questions….

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My friend, A, made a good case for why the term is confusing. She offers a key word in understanding what an emotional affair is.

I think “emotional affair” is very vague. A common thought or definition is that an emotional affair is having an emotionally intimate relationship with someone outside of our marriage. But if that’s true, then most friendships are emotional affairs.  This “any emotional intimate relationship is an emotional affair” is a broad and flimsy definition, and applies to any emotionally intense person. As humans bearing God’s image we are wired to connect with multiple people on multiple levels… not just one person.

So are we hardwired for emotional affairs?

We need to define an emotional affair more clearly, maybe “betrayal of exclusivity.” In the context of a marriage, betrayal of exclusivity would mean a spouse is replacing the value of their spouse with the value of another. It’s not the addition of the value of another because it’s perfectly good, healthy and beautiful to open ourselves up to another person’s value.  But replacing our spouse’s worth with another’s worth, key word REPLACING. So, replacing your spouse’s beauty with another’s, replacing their power, replacing the impact of their soul.

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But to round out these questions and suggestions, I offer you this poignant, real life example of an emotional affair experienced by my friend:

Yes, an “emotional affair” is a real thing, and it’s just as destructive and just as devastating as a technically adulterous (i.e., physical/sexual) affair is to a marriage. An emotional affair is characterized by the following (I will share as if the husband is the one committing the emotional affair):

A husband becomes emotionally entangled with another person by getting involved in her problems and her life in emotionally intimate ways;
The spouse then prefers the other woman to his wife and elevates the other woman above his wife, making decisions that hurt his wife in order to support the other woman;
The spouse continues to behave that way and ridicules his wife for feeling slighted and degraded and especially, disregarded;
The spouse threatens–often–to leave his wife if she won’t let him keep the other woman as a close friend;
The spouse then DOES leave his wife for that close friend.

And all the while–the whole time–the spouse insists the relationship is not physical/sexual, and at least on that note, he seems to be telling the truth.

Is this sin? Yes, absolutely, it is. An emotional affair creates behavior that is as damaging and destructive to a relationship and to emotional & physical health as a regular adulterous affair wreaks. 

Cross-sex friendships for married people are really hurtful and dangerous when the spouse connects with the friend on a deeper, more intimate level than he does with his wife . The connection then becomes sinful, as the spouse prefers the friend to his wife . 

Cross-sex friendships are fine as long as they don’t cross such boundaries, but I believe the focus of married couples should be to seek out friends who can’t and don’t pose such threats to their marriages. 

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Dan Brennan also shared some thoughts about his trouble with the phrase (from comments last week):

I struggle with language to call something that is truly an unhealthy disruptive force within marital fidelity. “Emotional affair?” “Emotional infidelity?” “Emotional purity?” What constitutes an unhealthy disruption to marital trust? 

The tricky or challenging thing is the whole issue of what emotional/spiritual depth looks like that is “exclusive” within marriage and what does healthy emotional/spiritual depth look like shared between friends who are married but not to each other or at least one of them is married (friendship between married and a single). 

At first glance, of course, in our contemporary evangelical view of things there is this great rush to protect all emotional/spiritual depth to be exclusive within marriage. But then, at a closer look, there are significant New Testament threads (and the sibling bond/metaphor is a very rich counter-proposal to that) which invite us to more. We need moral discernment. It doesn’t follow that all significant emotional/spiritual depth over the course of time is a violation of marital trust and fidelity.

I can’t help but quote Mary DeMuth‘s powerful insight.  I’m going to take it out of immediate context but it so applies to the question: 

“Restoration meddles with what they’ve learned to handle,  removes what they’ve learned to live with, bestows what they’ve learned to live  without. In short, we become adept at living with a gaping wound. It’s our  comfortable place, what we embrace as our lot in life. Dysfunction is our safe  place; it’s what is knowable and navigable. The prospect of healing frightens  us because we don’t know what it

looks like. Living  with freedom would be new,  different—

alien to the way we’ve conducted our lives until this moment.”

Not Marked, by Mary DeMuth

In my own life and journey as a married man in this, I’ve come to see that married people must be aware of internally comparing the beauty of their friend’s strengths with the weaknesses of their spouse . This is a clear boundary we much exercise very early on in relationship. A significant part of owning and maintaining your spouse’s beauty (keeping their whole embodied presence within the marital bond) is to not engage with surrendering that beauty for your friend’s strengths. It’s a healthy and beautiful thing to recognize and even to come to rejoice that your friend’s beauty attracts you in ways, stirs you in ways, meets your needs in ways that your spouse’s beauty doesn’t–because they’re two different, profoundly unique beautiful people bearing witness to God’s beauty within them and in your life. To be able to appreciate both while maintaining an appropriate distinction is huge: one is your covenanted spouse and the other is your friend–even close friend, is to mirror the BEST and closest adult sibling bonds where one or both are married.

We have to exercise a healthy caution up front with the possibility of rushing into emotional-spiritual sharing of great depth. A great chemistry connection is one thing; intimate sharing of emotional/spiritual depth up front is risky business. Intimacy takes time and trust and if we don’t respect that we will leave ourselves vulnerable. That’s not to say we can’t suddenly find our self in a context in which we trust our instinct and it feels appropriate to share our hearts about something with a new relational movement, it just means we have to nurture an ongoing prudence to developing the discipline of intimacy that honors our marital trust.

So here are my thoughts in 2 short paragraphs

An emotional affair requires more than emotional closeness. For instance, if a woman shares a secret that only her closest friends (including her spouse) know and she decides to share this secret with her close guy friend, she has not entered into an emotional affair. For if this were true, then sharing secrets between opposite sex siblings would also be taboo.

Emotional affairs seem to be essentially about what you do with your power for intimacy. Emotional affairs require that you cheat on the power your spouse deserves and siphon it off to someone else. Married people owe a significant measure of intimacy to their spouse.  For how can you make love and be faithful romantically unless you spend a good deal of your power for intimacy on your spouse?!  So with this definition a single woman cannot have an emotional affair in the same way a married woman can.

My stab at a definition.

An emotional affair = removing your power for intimacy that belongs to your spouse, and giving it to someone else.

I’m still left with these questions

Does an emotional affair always require two people? Or can you have a one-sided affair?
Can single people have emotional affairs?
Can you have an emotional affair with non-persons, like with your video games, or romance novels, or your smart phone?
What about an intellectual or spiritual affair?
Is it fair to call an emotional affair, an affair? Are we sexualizing something that is not sexual?

A penny for YOUR thoughts . . .