A friend of mine, his girlfriend’s father has cancer, it’s terminal. Needless to stay, he’s been a bit depressed and has been seeing a therapist. Since my friend is often at his girlfriend’s house, he has a fairly good relationship with the father, and sometimes, the father unloads on him a bit.
The girlfriend’s parents have a bit of a strained relationship, which will sometimes happen after years of marriage, and on a recent visit to the therapist’s office, the therapist suggested that the husband have “an emotional affair” to alleviate some of his depression and emotional baggage.
Now, it may be the word “affair” but my first reaction and the initial reaction of my friend were “How can a therapist encourage a patient to have an affair…..” Yeah, there might be baggage that makes it hard to share some of the pain and more raw emotions that a diagnosis like this brings with it, but an affair is an affair, right?
Well, fast forward a few weeks and I am listening to a podcast from Hidden Brain titled “The Lonely American Man.” I recommend listening to it yourself, but as it relates to this post, it was about how there seems to be a correlation between a lack of meaningful social relationships where men in American can be emotionally vulnerable and ill health. It went on to say that, more and more pressure has been placed on the bonds of marriage to be a sexual and friendship-based relationship where once you had a wife AND a friend or a close confidant outside of your marriage who you could unload on emotionally.
And re-enter this idea of an “emotional affair”.
If you take out the word affair, the dirty word that brings to mind notions of broken family ties, emotionally ravaged parent-child relationships, and thoughts of evil step-parents, how is having a close friend who you feel comfortable sharing certain things with that you couldn’t talk to anyone else with so different? If you take the affair out of it, I do think there is something to be said for having more than one emotionally meaningful, non-familial relationship in one’s life.
Meaningful doesn’t have to mean that someone is coming in to wreak your home. It could be as simple as having that coworker that you can call up in the evening before bedtime to bitch about how unorganized the people in payroll are. Your significant other might not care as much because they have their own work problems to deal with, but John from two cubicles over is surely just as invested in the unraveling of the payroll department as you are.
To unpack this a little bit more, maybe marriage cannot be expected to provide for every type of love that a human needs, being the social beings that we are. Can a partner really be expected to provide care in sickness, sexual stimulation, coy mental stimulation, care in a familial way, to put their partner’s needs always in front of their own, honest criticism and friendship all in one? That seems like a tall order, especially when tapping into the commitment phobe within. While people are dynamic enough to be able to offer up two or three dimensions of love in one relationship, to expect one person to be everything all the time is unrealistic and can place a strain on a perfectly functioning union.
What’s more, similar to how when dogs grow up in pairs and then one dog dies and the other is thrown into a state of depression (yes I am about to relate human and canine emotions), it is even harder to recover from an intimate loss when you don’t have a support system to lean on.
So, as with many things, it seems to boil down to one simple thing: communication. It is important to talk and laugh with the people around you. Be they in your office, in the dog park, or in the supermarket. Communication as in, if you talk about the things that bother you or make you sad if only just to give the ones you love that see you each and every day a break. Communication also as in, don’t hide your relationship from your partner and significant other. Assuming you and your partner agree, you don’t have to detail everything that you talk about, say or do, or even every visit that you have with your pal, but if you feel the need to actively hid your extramarital/outer union relationships with the person you have decided to commit yourself to then you might need to evaluate why you feel the need to hide.
Caia Rose 