EMOTIONAL INFIDELITY – 1^st June 2006

 

Texts, e-mails and the internet – there’s never been more ways to flirt. But beware the dangers of emotional infidelity.

 

hen Harry met Sally, he told her that men and women can’t ever be friends. Sex always gets in the way, so the friendship is doomed.

 

‘What if they don’t want to have sex with you?’ Sally demanded, when Harry admitted that men pretty much want to sleep with every woman they meet.

 

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he shrugged, ‘because the sex thing is already out there.’

 

We’ve all seen the movie. We know that in the end Harry and Sally couldn’t just be friends. But his philosophy isn’t always true, we find ourselves thinking. After all, I’m friends with a member of the opposite sex. And there’s absolutely nothing going on between us.

 

That long, leisurely lunch we had last week was perfectly innocent – though of course I haven’t quite got round to telling my spouse. But I’ve got nothing to hide.

 

Naturally, we flirt a bit, tease each other, and share the odd friendly hug and pat on the back. But it doesn’t mean anything. It just brightens the day.

 

After all – and here’s the crucial, get-off-the-hook bit – we haven’t even kissed, much less slept together. So what harm can it possibly do? Actually, quite a lot. According to countless websites on marital problems, having an Emotional Affair is the new infidelity.

 

It seems sharing secrets, dreams and fears with another person can be as dangerous to your marriage as the old-fashioned exchange of bodily fluids.

 

Women shouldn’t be surprised by the news. The sexes have markedly different attitudes towards relationships. Despite the rise of casual sex and ladettes who are as generous with their bedroom favours as the boys, women tend to equate sex with love.

 

A woman who bares her soul to a man feels intensely attached to him, even if she doesn’t actually sleep with him: you only have to look at the tendency for women to fall in love with their psychiatrists and priests to see this in action.

 

Men are able to distinguish between the two more easily. Women give sex to get love; men give love to get sex.

 

A man will see absolutely nothing wrong in developing a relationship with a woman as long as it doesn’t become physical.

 

By and large, it takes the cement of sex to bind a man to a woman. Without it, the relationship, however intense it seems, remains casual.

 

That doesn’t mean he isn’t planning to get sex out of it. He’s just learned, in this day and age of the caring, sharing, listening New Man, to play a longer game. As Harry observed in the movie, ‘No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.’

 

The number of men and women indulging in emotional affairs is on the increase, and with it, the heartache that all too often follows.

 

According to the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, 15 percent of women and a quarter of men have extra-marital sex. Add in the non-physical relationships – emotional affairs – and those figures rise by more than 20 percent.

 

 

nd it’s easy to understand why. As women have flooded the workplace, the opportunity for friendships, platonic and otherwise, has increased.

 

Many of us spend many more hours with our colleagues than our spouses, and our scarce time at home is often spent discussing children and other domestic issues.

 

We end up sharing the more interesting and intimate experiences with close friends at work – our fears, our hopes, our feelings.

 

Having minutely picked over the lost promotion, the secret idea for writing a book, the terror of hitting 40, with an attractive, flirtatious colleague, there’s no need to repeat yourself telling it all over again to your husband or wife.

 

Slowly, insidiously, you start shutting your partner out. Contrary to popular myth, it’s not the big events that build and strengthen a marriage – birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day and Christmas – but the day-to-day intimacies: the shared laughter and the special confidences.

 

Remove them from your relationship with your spouse, and what’s left? Conversations about gas bills and whose turn it is to take the dog for a walk.

 

Add this to the inevitable waning of sexual frisson that takes place in any long term relationship, and it is but a very short, dangerous step to seeing your platonic friend as more exciting and desirable than the dull, boring person to whom you are married.

 

Don’t forget, this is how you ended up married in the first place: by what is rather quaintly known as courting.

 

Remember the thrill of waiting for the phone to ring? The excitement of dressing up for a longed-for date. The getting-to-know-you ritual of exchanging personal details.

 

Why would you want to do this again with someone new? The job is already taken.

 

When you get married, you are making a choice and a statement: this is the person with whom I wish to share not just my life and my bank account and my DNA, but the very essence of who I am. It’s not a role that requires an understudy.

 

However much you want to kid yourself, when you indulge in an emotional affair, you are auditioning someone for more than a walk-on part.

 

If your spouse doesn’t understand you, it’s probably because you haven’t been explaining yourself to them.

 

But instead of admitting the truth, you tell yourself you’ve grown apart. You want different things from life. You don’t make each other happy. It’s like living with a stranger.

 

Your special friend, on the other hand, seems to know you inside out. Sometimes you don’t even need to speak to know what’s in each other’s minds.

 

Little wonder, when you’ve spent the past few months studying each other as if they are your specialist subject on Mastermind.

 

In and of itself, a close friendship with a member of the opposite sex shouldn’t be a threat. But if it tourniquets the lifeblood of your marriage, your relationship will wither and die.

 

Marriage needs constant and attentive nurturing. By all means, enjoy a drink with friends after work, chat about the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

 

But if you value the person you’ve promised to cherish until death parts you, make sure it is into their ear – and their ear only – that you whisper those sweet nothings.