Welcome to my podcast. Happily, even After. I’m life coach, jen, I’m passionate about helping people recover from betrayal. I rode the intense emotional roller coaster and felt stuck and traumatized for years. It’s the reason I became a trauma-informed, certified life coach who helps people like you navigate their post-betrayal world. I have the tools, processes and knowledge to help you not only heal from the betrayal but create a healthy future. Today we begin to help you live happily even after. Hey friends, welcome to today’s podcast.
So today I’m talking about emotional affairs. And what are they? And I think, since we had social media, emotional affairs are on the rise because we can, you know, go look up someone that we dated in high school and, like, send them a private message and they might. You know, we’re just curious about them, right? I see this in women. I know men have emotional affairs, but I think women have a tendency to do this more, maybe because they feel like it’s safer. They’re never going to see this person. They live states away. You know it can happen with people at work there. There’s lots of scenarios that an emotional affair happens. However, I think those women that are, you know, communicating with someone, like from their past that doesn’t live in the same state as they. They do, it feels safe, but they’re getting something from it. So I just want you to know and like, think about, like, have you ever been emotionally unfaithful with your spouse with someone of the opposite sex? Or, if you’re, you know, homosexual is someone of the same sex, right? So I think it’s important to know, because is that who you want to be? And don’t lie to yourself? Being honest is the first step of you know, healing and coming clean. But I think our world is really running rampant with people having emotional affairs and it’s ruining our marriages, it’s ruining our relationships, it’s affecting our jobs, how we feel about ourselves, our kids, how we’re talking to them. So I just think it’s so important to understand what an emotional affair is. Just know it occurs when someone invests a significant amount of energy, time and emotional intimacy in someone who is not their spouse or partner.
If you’re sending messages either texts, emails, marco Polos however, you send a message Facebook Messenger that you wouldn’t want your spouse to read, I would say red flag and maybe check, you know, do a self-check and like, oh, this might have gotten out of hand, okay. Or if you feel yourself like excited, like checking your phone. Did they text me? Did they send me a message? What are you know? What are they going to say about me? So, just, you know, if you are having an emotional affair, it might seem harmless at first. You might think, oh, this isn’t a big deal, I’m just, they’re just an old friend, like we just have a lot in common, okay. But you know, when you’ve crossed the line, just like in a physical affair, you know when you’ve crossed the line right, the second you start kissing, holding hands, it’s gone, you’re gone, and so you’re just playing with fire, you’re taking away something that you could be giving to your spouse.
Not all emotional affairs lead to physical affairs, but they totally can and easily will, if you you know, get together in the same room. I so many people are like well, my spouse said they only had an emotional affair, but they went away for a long weekend in a hotel room. I’m like your spouse is lying to you, right, like no one has that much self-control. So they’ve been emotionally together for months and months and now they spent a long weekend together. I don’t think so, like maybe they didn’t have sex. But there’s lots of other things besides actual intercourse that you can do with someone, and so they might be like well, I didn’t have sex with them, so that doesn’t count. No, they’re just lying to themselves and lying to you, right, because they got caught. Usually, an emotional affair is reciprocated, meaning not only is one investing more of their emotions into the person outside of their marriage, but they’re also receiving emotional companionship from the person they’re having an emotional affair with. So it kind of takes two people to. You know, create the emotional affair.
Signs that your spouse might be emotionally cheating or that you are. You’re hiding your phone, you’re texting someone of the opposite sex a lot or sending them messages. If your spouse is constantly talking about a friend, a new friend especially, right, they’re not saying whether it’s a guy or a girl, they’re just saying, oh, my friend said this and, like, their friend just gives all this great advice. Just, you know something just to consider, right, I don’t want you to just go like, oh my gosh, my partner has a new friend. Like what if it’s not? But just something to consider If you start believing that your new friend understands you better than your spouse.
So if you’re like, oh my gosh, this person, they just get me, they just know who I am. Well, they don’t know who you are because you’re the version of you who you’re showing them. Right, they’re not living with you, they haven’t been with you for years and years. Right, it’s all a fake facade and you don’t know who they are really. Right? It’s just, it’s their words on a text message on a computer, on a phone, and so they could be totally someone different than who they are. But they can be that version of themselves with you. Okay, so it’s not really true.
If you start sharing things with the other person that normally would only be shared with your spouse, it’s just red flag, right? Pay attention. If you’re doing this, like, you don’t need to be sharing certain things with other people, it’s just none of their business Comparing. If you start comparing your spouse to the other person you’re, you know it’s going to be sign you’re emotionally cheating, right, because you’re for sure going to only see the good qualities in the other person and the bad qualities of your spouse. And it’s just a recipe for disaster If you find yourself being secret, or your spouse if there become super loud of secrecy, unexplained absences, hiding conversations, being evasive about what they’re doing. It’s just something to pay attention to If you feel emotional distance in your relationship or you become emotionally distant.
You know you’re not wanting to connect or you get withdrawn, something to worry about or decreased intimacy, like if your spouse doesn’t want to be intimate with you but they in the past they did want to. That could be a sign of something going on, a preoccupation, meaning they’re just really distracted all the time. You try to share something with them and they’re like don’t hear you, they’re not listening to you. They just feel like you’re always thinking about someone else. There’s any change in behavior. They become super irritable or defensive. Anyways, these are just warning signs for the person maybe in an emotional affair as well as someone that is thinking their spouse might be having an emotional affair.
The thing is, a lot of times people think well, it’s just an emotional affair, it wasn’t a physical affair, so it’s not as upsetting. It’s simply just a lie. Okay, because you’ve broken trust. You’ve been lying to someone that you were married to and you were going to be faithful with. Right. So they still feel the trauma of the infidelity. Okay, so there’s broken trust, the damage that an affair causes. There’s a lot of guilt and shame and there’s going to create distance in the relationship of you and your spouse. So there’s a lot of damage that happens the loss of trust, the loss of you know chances are your spouse, if he knows like you’re paying attention to someone else, low self-esteem, right, a lot of confidence issues, even though it wasn’t their fault. You’ve got to take ownership.
If this is what you’ve been doing Probably lack of communication, because here you’ve been communicating if you’re the one having the emotional affair, but if you are the person that is, you know, left after your spouse had an emotional affair, there’s just the lack of communication. So there’s just a lot of damage that can happen with emotional infidelity. And I don’t I wouldn’t say well, if you were the betrayer, well, at least I wasn’t physical with them. That’s unhelpful to hear, okay, because emotionally you became invested in someone else besides your spouse and it is painful and you’ve got to give space for your spouse to feel that pain and for you to realize what caused you to do that in the first place.
What need are you not getting in your marriage that you need to have the conversation about? Maybe there’s some things you can create a better marriage if you have the conversation with your spouse, as opposed to going outside of your marriage and talking to someone else. So what should you do if you find out that your partner is having an emotional affair? I think first of all, you want to. You know, don’t go in it. Reactive, which I know is really hard, it’s really hurtful, but, you know, having a conversation with your partner about what’s going on. Okay, you get to decide if you want to stay in that marriage.
But I totally think if someone is having an emotional affair, something maybe for them, you know, figuring out what need were they getting, what was going on for them, what’s going on for you, figuring out a way to repair the marriage if they’re willing to give that up. Now, some people will not be willing to give that up or they are convinced what they are doing isn’t wrong. Right that they are. Like I can talk to Fred. He lives in Maine and we live in California and I’m never going to see him and it makes me happy. Okay, then you can decide. Do you want your wife to talk to Fred and decide if that’s something you want and if you do, great. If not, then you have that right to say you know what this isn’t okay, I don’t. Do you want me talking to Sally and chances are she’s going to say no, right, she doesn’t want you doing it, but it’s okay for her to do it. So just really decide what you’re willing to put up with, what you’re willing to, what you’re willing to put up with, what you’re willing to. You know how you’re willing to negotiate this.
There is a difference, I think, between a friendship and an emotional affair. I think it’s harder to be married and have like guy friends or girlfriends, like I don’t. I don’t believe that’s healthy at all, but sometimes people do right and so. But if you text something to your friend and your husband or wife saw it, you’re not going to feel upset that they read whatever you texted because you wouldn’t be hiding it. So that’s the difference, right, you know. Like, if you send a text to someone that you’re emotionally involved with, chances are if your spouse read it, it’s not going to go well, right, and they’re going to feel there’s a different energy, there’s a different feeling.
I think a lot of times the person that’s having the emotional affair really has to figure out what was going on for them. Sometimes it happens they’re bored, they’re in a routine, but you know, what grows in our garden is what we water, and so, of course, our grass is not growing because we are watering someone else’s yard, right. And so I think we just have to really get honest. Like, why did you start reaching out to Fred in the first place? What was that? What was going on? Were you bored? Were you just stuck in a routine? You’d been married a long time. You just wanted some excitement and newness, because, yeah, it might be exciting and new until your spouse finds out and then it’s not very exciting and new and it really could ruin the best thing in your life, your marriage, your family.
I always think of people that you know leave their relationships because of betrayal. Right, they choose something else and maybe for a moment that is exciting, but I think what they gave up could be amazing. Now, sometimes there’s lots of reasons. Divorce can be good, and sometimes it is better to get divorced, but a lot of times I think what they give up is never better than what they left. Okay, and it’s because they were focusing on the wrong thing. They were trying to find excitement from another human being. There are lots of ways in the world to find excitement. It doesn’t have to be another person, okay, and so I just really I just have seen this more and more that more people are getting emotionally involved in relationships and it’s really destroying, first of all, your spouse.
It’s very hurtful and painful. It didn’t matter that you didn’t have sex with them. It still hurts, it still stings. Why weren’t you telling me about this? Why did you have to talk to Fred? And then, if you are the spouse that had an emotional affair that happened to you, do a check-in. Like, am I a safe person to talk to? Like, if my wife came to me and she needed to share this with me, could I handle it? And maybe you have some work to do on that end, right, but it still wasn’t okay that what they did. However, I just want you to focus like, okay, how could you be a better support for your wife? Or how could you have better communication? Because it probably is.
You know the need for excitement or whatever, but also maybe someone it’s a perceived view that they understand them better. Okay, but usually for sure, always comes from insecurity, needing adventure, excitement, they’re bored and you know Facebook, it feels harmless, right, this person? I’ve had conversations with people online. I’ve never met them in person, but just you have conversations like oh, they sound nice and for me I’m talking like maybe to other coaches or something, other women, but I don’t know them really right. But we can all put on a different face, different attitude. We might be really charming on Facebook Messenger and then we meet in real life and we aren’t as great as we, you know, came across.
So if you find yourself experiencing an emotional affair and you need help like there is totally help out there and it’s important to heal, it’s a wound. It’s okay that you’re upset, it’s okay that you feel betrayed, because it is a betrayal. Your spouse was choosing to share things about their even about their day, about their life with someone other than you. So just know that it is an important wound to heal. Also, know that if your spouse can, you know, give up the person, like stop talking to that person and take accountability for what they did and figure out why they were doing it, you can heal from that and you can have an amazing marriage, as long as you both are doing the work to figure out how you got there in the first place and then how you can repair to get back to a better, stronger marriage. So I hope this was helpful.
I hope that you’re willing to look at what you’re doing in your life and, if you’re doing some of these things that I talked about, that you can do a check-in and figure out why Maybe stop doing it, because it is not going to help your marriage, even though you’re pretending it’s making your marriage so much better. It’s not. And especially after discovery and to be honest with yourself and be honest with your spouse, because they deserve to know the truth of what you have been doing, and that’s important in healing, and we all make mistakes and so know that that’s a good. You know, maybe your marriage will end, I don’t know, but it’s a possibility that could be better than it ever was before. Anyway, so thanks so much for listening. If you like this podcast, please leave a review and I will talk to you next week. If you want to learn how to live happily even after, sign up for my email at hello at lifecoachjenwith1ncom. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at Happily Even After. Coach, let’s work together to create your happily even after.
