An Emotional Affair

I am still amazed that people have such little regard for their public reputations. I am not talking about a teenager sexting pictures of herself to the soccer team.

While a teenager is presumed not to know better, adults should. Yet, because they feel compelled to rationalize their bad behavior, adults often reveal some of their worst character flaws, making them appear to be points of pride.

In terms of public reputation, they would do better to walk around naked.

Take the case of Lucy Cavendish-- her real name. Since Cavendish writes her own story for the London Daily Mail, we will imagine that she thinks that the story vindicates her behavior. Link here.

Surely, she did not believe that her story of how her emotional affair broke up her first marriage would make her look as bad as it does. If she did, she would have kept it to herself.

In another sense, Cavendish seems to know her audience. Most of the experts consulted and the commenters seem sadly oblivious to Cavendish’s own character flaws.

She wants their sympathy, and, for the most part, she receives it.

Apparently, it is so customary to absolve women of all responsibility for their own actions that we believe, almost as a conditioned reflex, that a woman’s bad behavior is necessarily a man’s fault.

Here’s the story: One day, several years ago, Lucy Cavendish’s husband had to relocate from England to New York to advance his career. Presumably, she agreed to the move, so she accompanied him to the great cosmopolitan metropolis. At the time, she was caring for a two year old toddler.

Cavendish did not adapt well to her new surroundings. Her husband was working long hours, and she found herself alone, isolated, and bereft.

As she tells the story, it never seemed to have crossed her mind to make friends with other mothers or other British ex-pats… of which New York has a plentiful supply.

Instead, she complained to her husband, blamed him for working too much and for failing to spend enough time with her and their child.

Another woman, one of sturdier stock, would have tried to become part of the local culture. New York abounds with activities for toddlers. Another woman would have signed up for a few of them and would have met and commiserated with other young mothers. Another woman would have struck up new friendships and generally shown herself to be a resourceful adult adapting to new circumstances.

Cavendish's was not, after all, a novel experience. She had not been dropped into the middle of a third world country where she did not speak the language and had to stay at home all day because going outside would have been too dangerous.

Lucy Cavendish chose to deal with her situation by becoming vindictive. She seems to have decided, unconsciously, that she would punish her husband for the indignity of having to care for a toddler without paternal support.

She began by complaining constantly about how lonely and needy she was.

It is hardly surprising that a human male would not be rushing home to see his wife and child if he knew that, upon first stepping across the threshold, he would be assaulted by a litany of complaints.

After a time, complaints were not enough. So, Lucy Cavendish got involved in an emotional affair. She insists that the affair did not cross a line into sexual congress. Let's take her at her word. As we will see, that is not the point.

She struck up a friendship with a British gentleman she met one day in Central Park. Without having been asked, this man spontaneously chose to help her care for her child.

Already smarting from her husband’s absence, she was thrilled beyond reason to meet a man who offered to help without being asked.

Perhaps she thought that she had found true love. At the least, she found a man who could play Prince Charming to her damsel in distress. How irresistible is that?

She does not say it, but she also discovered that she could use this man as a cudgel to punish her husband for working too hard to advance his career and better support his family.

As she tells the story, Cavendish has no awareness whatever of her husband’s point of view. She tells us nothing of what he thought or felt or said. She is so consumed with her own grievances that she can only think about her own needs.

Cavendish presents herself as a woman who is being starved for affection and who is therefore being pushed by her cold, heartless husband toward an emotional affair.

In truth, she is nasty and vindictive, and is doing everything she can to sabotage his career. When that doesn’t work, she destroys a marriage.

Now, everyone stand up and cheer.

Let’s get back to the story. After she met her Brit Cavendish began to spend more and more time with him, to the point where, as Cavendish explains: “In the course of about four months, I grew to rely on him enormously. He became my companion at social events, and a surrogate weekend father.”

At first her husband accepted the arrangement because it meant that Cavendish would stop complaining about how lonely she felt. After a time, however, the friendship deepened and her husband started feeling increasingly threatened. He was convinced that the affair had passed beyond the emotional into the physical.

Cavendish insisted on her innocence, and replied that if her husband wanted her to stop seeing her friend, then he should work less. In itself, that tells us what she is trying to do.

Fights and arguments ensured, eventually leading to divorce. The marriage died but Cavendish’s friendship with the British gentleman continued, and continues to this day.

Let’s be clear about what happened. Cavendish did not sneak off for a mid afternoon tryst with her paramour. She did not make use of her toddler’s nap time to make “the beast-with-two-backs.”

I do not mean to justify clandestine affairs, but had she been discreet she would have been showing respect for her husband’s pride. She did not.

She went out with her new friend to social functions and even brought him into the family to become a substitute father to her child.

Instead of respecting her husband’s pride, she assaulted it.

In the old days, when people were supposedly less sophisticated, discretion was an important ethical principle. So was the quaint notion of keeping up appearances.

When a married woman systematically goes out to public functions with a man not her husband (and not a walker), she is making a statement. And it is not a statement about her emotional neediness.

Cavendish did not just share an affectionate affinity with this man. She made him an integral part of her life.

As always, it is best not to try to divine what is in people’s hearts. It is usually sufficient to observe how they conduct their lives.

Of course, Cavendish does her best to rationalize her vindictive assault on her husband by blaming it on him.

She writes: “For my part, my extra-marital friendship blossomed because I felt a lack of love and support in my primary relationship, and while the intimacy developed slowly, even innocently, between us, before long that relationship had filled the existing gap in my marriage.

“For women with children, whose husbands no longer seem to notice them, and their children are busy, an emotional affair is both attractive — and addictive.

“After all, it has all the elements of a real affair, but without the complication of a physical relationship that would clearly cross the line into marital infidelity.”

And finally: “It’s quite clear to me that emotional affairs aren’t just about feeling emotionally content, but about the desire to be loved, supported, listened to — and intellectually stimulated.”

In truth, it’s about teaching your husband a lesson.

In order to justify her behavior, Cavendish closes her article by saying that she has since remarried, to a man who is perfectly comfortable with her continuing friendship with the Brit she met in Central Park.

And, by the way, the friend has since married himself and now has children of his own.

Which means that the two of them are probably not going out in public any more. And that she is not using the man as a surrogate husband and father.

Cavendish wants us all to ignore her moral responsibility. She trots out the second husband to show us, unmistakably, that her weak and insecure first husband overreacted needlessly. A better man would make nothing of it.

As I see it, that is not the moral of the story. As I read it, a better woman would have dealt with the situation ethically and would not have created a massive psychodrama that ended up destroying her marriage.