You text each other a lot. Is it an emotional affair?

A connection can become inappropriately intimate, even when it isn’t sexual

An emotional connection outside of your marriage can tell you about what’s missing in your relationship, says McMasters. Picture: istock

Kelly McMasters didn’t expect a response when she messaged her college boyfriend late one night. They hadn’t talked in years. But he wrote back within minutes. Soon the two were exchanging multiple emails a day, sharing the minutiae of their lives. “How did the salmon turn out?” he once asked. There’s one detail that McMasters didn’t disclose: The fact that she was married. And she didn’t tell her husband, or anyone else, that she was corresponding with her ex. The relationship never became sexual. But she had stronger feelings for him than she wanted to admit. “I knew, on some level, that we were not above board,” says McMasters, 48, a professor and writer in Port Washington, N.Y. Are you texting and emailing with a friend, or is it a kind of an affair? It can be a slippery slope. You likely have close confidants. But when you find yourself sharing more with someone than you do with your partner, developing romantic feelings for that person, and keeping this intimacy a secret, you may be having an emotional affair. The experience can be revealing, therapists say. Emotional infidelity may tell you that your marriage has broken down. Or it could also show you what you need to work on in your relationship, such as connection or attention. Researchers say anyone could be susceptible to an emotional affair, especially in our online age. Social media has both expanded our opportunities for connection and made it easier to hide them from others.

‘Do you love her?’

An emotional affair doesn’t necessarily mean sexual attraction, therapists say.

Seven percent of Americans who have ever been married say they’ve had an emotional affair at some point, while 10% say they’ve had one that is both emotional and sexual, according to a 2019 study on infidelity conducted by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which studies the health of marriage in America. The number of people in these intimate relationships is likely higher than surveys suggest, depending on how emotional infidelity is defined and whether people answer honestly, says Brad Wilcox, a sociologist and director of the project. Of those who have non-sexual emotional affairs, 56% were women and 44% were men, according to the study, which was co-sponsored by Brigham Young University. A long-held tenet in psychology, supported by some research, posits that men are more upset by the idea of their partner having a sexual affair and women are more distressed by the idea of their partner having an emotional one. “Women are more likely to ask: ‘Do you love her?’ when they learn of their partner’s affair,” says William Doherty, a marriage and family therapist and emeritus professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota. However, newer research shows that men and women are equally upset by emotional and sexual infidelity because both are a breach of trust, says Justin Garcia, who, as executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, studies sex and relationships. “You can tell your partner: ‘Honey, it was just emotional,’” he says. “But your partner is going to say: ‘You might as well have had sex, because you betrayed me and built this emotional connection with someone else.’”

‘The story I told myself’

A friendship can slide into emotional infidelity when you keep it a secret from your spouse and prioritise the relationship over your marriage, says Galena Rhoades, a couples therapist and research professor of psychology at the University of Denver, who studies infidelity. You take time away from your spouse to connect with the other person, for example, or share confidences that you would normally share with your spouse. An emotional connection outside of your marriage can tell you about what’s missing in your relationship, she says. McMasters says her marriage was “crumbling” and she was the loneliest she’d ever been — living in rural Pennsylvania, far from family and friends — when she reconnected with her ex.

Almost immediately, they fell into a familiar old rhythm, discussing work, the weather, friends, co-workers, books and what they were cooking. “His emails gave me hope, just to get through to the next day,” she says. A year or so into their correspondence, McMasters realised she had fallen back in love with her ex — who she refers to as “Heathcliff,” after the tortured “Wuthering Heights” character. She wondered how he felt, or whether he was in a relationship, but was too scared to ask. Instead, she says she fooled herself into believing that nothing inappropriate was going on between them. After all, they didn’t even talk on the phone. “The story I told myself was that this was not an affair because I needed it so badly,” says McMasters, who wrote about the experience in a 2023 memoir, “The Leaving Season.” Eventually, she left her marriage — not to be with her ex, but because their relationship helped her imagine something better, she says. “I could be stronger and funnier and brighter, and that is what helped me leave,” says McMasters. Then one morning several years after she left her husband, she wrote “Heathcliff” an email about a recent snowfall. When he responded, he complimented her description of the snow-laden trees, and she wrote him back.

She never heard from him again.

The Wall Street Journal