River: An emotional affair

[mdlbear]

Note: This is one of two River posts that have existed as completed, ready-to-post drafts since mid-September. They kept getting postponed for various reasons, and put on hold when things fell apart in November. I'd like to get them out there before the somewhat arbitrary date of February 13, which is when I posted "The River" and, in essence, started this whole wild ride.

Anyway...

While researching Friendship and Love I was particularly interested in relationships that were somewhere in the wide space between simple friendship and romantic love (or whatever you choose to call "love with all the emotional and erotic trimmings". Naturally this includes platonic love and romantic friendship. (It also includes familial love, which is what I feel not only for my actual kin but for the many people who are my chosen kin -- that sounds like a good subject for another post downstream, because chosen kin are important in my life. A hint: if I ever call you "sweetie", it means I'm probably thinking of you as one of my chosen children.)

I also ran across the intriguing concept of an emotional affair:

An "emotional affair" is an affair excluding sexual intimacy but including emotional intimacy. It may be a type of chaste nonmonogamy, one without consummation. When the affair breaches a monogamous agreement with one or another spouse the term infidelity may be more apt. Infidelity tends to exclude one or both spouses of the affair's partners. Citing the absence of any sexual activity can neutralize the sense of extramarital wrongdoing by one or both partners of an emotional affair.

Emotional affairs can be portrayed in fictional writing or drama as life changing experiences (good or bad), subjects of racy romance stories that teeter on the edge. However, they can also be catastrophic for all concerned when it is clandestine, unsanctioned and unintentionally exposed.

Sometimes an emotional affair injures a committed relationship more than if it were a one night stand or about casual sex.

Um... yes. What they said, there.

I know from direct experience that an emotional affair can be every bit as damaging as a sexual affair -- perhaps more so because (as in my case) it might not be recognized as an affair until the damage has been done. A little about this can be found in my earlier post, The Silicon Mistress. There's more to it, of course: there was a real person on the other end of the IM wire. Now that I have a name for it, I understand that, in any sense that really matters, I was having an affair.

The potential for damage isn't even confined to monogamous relationships, or to clandestine affairs -- this was an already-approved relationship that got far out of hand because I was too stupid to listen to the two women involved. (If they'd been able to talk to one another and gang up on me the whole thing probably would have ended very differently and much more happily; there were, unfortunately, problems that prevented it.) And it wasn't so much a matter of neutralizing "the sense of wrongdoing" as my not realizing that anything was wrong in the first place.

Going forward, I think the trick will be recognizing when a friendship has reached the emotional point at which it's necessary to talk about where it's going, and to recognize that at exactly that point, if not before, it's necessary to check in with Colleen and make sure that she is OK with where it's going. And the same on the other side, of course. In other words, to treat any friendship deep and close enough to qualify as a form of "love" -- deep enough to be worth taking seriously and talking about -- as a form of polyamorous relationship whether or not romance or sex has even been thought about.

It will also help to make sure that Colleen and the other woman are talking to one another -- that they're already friends, or well on the way to becoming friends before things go much further. (In most cases that's a given; Colleen makes friends more easily than I do.) A relationship, at least for me, is mostly an ongoing conversation; fortunately, Colleen and I seem to be mostly comfortable talking about our friendships these days.

The situation hasn't come up again, but given my new-found capacity for emotion and near-total lack of experience handling it, it wouldn't surprise me if it did. I don't want to be surprised by it again, because I want things to stay under control. It's good to have someone to talk to about it.

Comments

[firecat]

Here's something Aahz said that has some echoes with what you're talking about:

it really doesn't matter whether your partner is failing to live up to obligations because of another girlfriend, being a workaholic, being a cocaine addict, too much Quake II, or just plain laziness. -- Aahz

For me and the OH it works better if we talk to each other about all (or as many as possible) of the people we interact with in any significant way, not just about relationships that seem to be "going" somewhere. That way the conversations about people we like are not all conversations about permissions or check-ins, which are more likely (for us) to cause anxiety. And it also means one does not have the anxiety about "am I at exactly that point?" Because sometimes one only sees the point after one has passed it.

[mdlbear]

Good point. And I think we're probably doing that, without thinking much about it. Maybe we should think more about it.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

This. . . has provided myself and a friend with much food for thought. Thank you.

[mdlbear]

You're very welcome. It's a tricky subject -- took me a very long time to see just what had gone on.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I definitely think you're on to something here. One particular friend of mine is exuberantly polyamorous, to the degree that he has lovers on three continents. The only reason it works, and has worked for him as long as I've known him, is that the women are all friends with each other (and some of them are also lovers). Now if I could just figure out how he schedules everything... ;-D

[mdlbear]

I have an earlier post on that subject, where I realized that the only way a sustained poly relationship could ever work for us was if it was basically a threesome/triad.