Re: Emotional Affair

Re: Emotional Affair ----- From: David - Date: 18 Dec 1997

I really feel for you and I understand how agravating, frustrating, humiliating, painful a situation like yours can be. My wife also had a (mostly emotional) affair. I HATED the guy (he had been one of my better friends). I would have gladly given every cent I have if it would buy me a situation where I didn't have to see or hear of him again. I considered him a mortal, lifetime enemy. But my wife didn't share my feelings. She didn't want to have enemies. She didn't want to isolate herself from her other friends (he runs in the same social circles we do) and she also wanted to have a continuing friendship with HIM!! When I threatened to leave her if she so much as contacted him, she went behind my back and did it anyway. Just the fact that she WANTED to maintain any kind of contact was enough to make me want to die.

I did a lot of the same things you are doing, but I think you are (and I was) making a mistake. You cannot control what he does. Even if you could, it would only cause him to resent you and drive him further away. When I finally let go of control, the my wife had to resolve the situation herself. And she did.

I told her, "I'm not restricting you anymore. If you want to talk to him, or whatever else you want to do, you are free to do it." I only asked that she be honest with me (which, though I didn't know it at the time, she wasn't). Anyway, then it was clear to everyone that I wasn't responsible for keeping them apart, that I wasn't setting her boundaries for her. That forced her to wake up and make a real decision about what SHE wanted. Instead of pulling against me and toward him, she decided she didn't want that and they are far more distant today than they ever were when I was trying to force them apart.

It seems to me (I sound so confident giving advice I so totally ignored for so long) that you have two workable options. You can tell you can't live with/be with him under the current circumstances, then leave until he resolves it in a way you can live with. Or you can tell him he is free to do what he wants, and you want to continue to stay with him in spite of it, at least for now.

Both ways involve risk. If you stay, you may have a lot of hurt when he doesn't do what you would like him to. But you can try to strengthen your relationship with him and fill up the place that is occupied by the other woman now. If you leave, he will be forced to take some action, but it's always possible that he will let you go, possibly even end up back with the person he had the affair with. If that happens, you will at least have some separation and be prepared for it. Either way, you make him responsible for his own actions. Right now he may be able to think that he is trying to accommodate both of you in some kind of "reasonable" way, that a lot of the situation is "beyond his control." He can react instead of act. And when we are reacting to someone else, we often blame them instead of taking responsibility for our own actions.

Don't take the worst of both worlds, where he still lives with you but you make him miserable and he can pleasantly escape with her now and then. That just makes him wonder if he really would rather be with the other woman. If I beat up on my wife for what she did and make her miserable, do you think that will make her look back on the "fun" times she had with the other guy and think how glad she is that she stayed home? He must have needed something when he got involved with the other woman in the first place. I doubt if the thing he was missing was someone to order him around. If you can't stay close to him and love him and let him be responsible for his own actions, you need to get some space.

I don't blame you if you hate hearing or even totally disagree with what I said here. I couldn't do it part of the time, even when I thought it was the best way. Sometimes there's so much pain that it just seems impossible to deal with. Look back at the responses to my earlier "Love has no pride?" post. To paraphrase one of them, at least you have a husband who still wants to stay and work it out with you. If he wanted to be with the other woman instead of you, he would already be there, and you couldn't do a damn thing about it.

My wife stayed with me because she loved me more than anyone else. She didn't want to leave me, even when she was confused and hurt. I'm trying to reinforce that and make her glad she made that decision by making her home with me a supportive, fun, loving place to be. I had to let her go (in terms of control) but at the same time bring her close by sharing with her, trying to meet her needs, trying to give her some of the admiration she had felt from the other guy.

I'd be willing to bet the other woman thinks your SO is a GREAT guy. What do you think?

Damn it's hard to do this. It's hard not to hang up on the idea that I was WRONGED and she should "make it up to me" for the next 50 years. Half the time I still find myself trying to fall back to blaming, condemning, demanding, etc. If you can do it better and more consistently, maybe you can give ME some advice. It's been a long time and I'm still struggling. Good luck.