Emotional Affairs

As though it were not sufficiently humiliating to discover that her husband had been having an “emotional affair” with a woman fifteen years her junior Lucy Hawkins decided to expose it all to the public.

She wrote up the story of her husband’s emotional affair in the Daily Mail. I would like to think that she is writing under a pseudonym, but apparently that is not the case.

Whatever happened to the old advice that you should not wash your dirty linen in public?

Hawkins discovered her husband’s affair by hacking his cell phone. Naturally, we all believe that she had no right to do such a dastardly thing, and she herself has no real explanation for her perfidious act. Still, I suspect that she harbored a suspicion that something was going on.

It is not very easy to hide a major emotional shift from your spouse.

According to Hawkins’ husband, the affair was purely emotional. He and his paramour Lorna did meet in person a couple of times, and, by his account, did not consummate their romance. They conducted the affair via text message.

Reasonably enough, Lucy Hawkins considers the emotional affair a betrayal. For her part Kiri Blakeley suggests, correctly, that it was worse than, say, a hookup.

Blakeley writes:

In fact, I think a lot of women would prefer their husband have a meaningless one night stand rather than a long drawn-out emotional affair, sharing tender words and deepest thoughts.

A hookup might expose a wife to a health risk, but an emotional affair puts her at the far greater risk of losing her husband and her family life.

No man leaves his wife for a hookup or a hooker; a man might well leave his wife if he falls in love with another woman.

Thus, Blakeley is correct to differentiate the risk levels between the two.

How does a man allow himself to get involved in an emotional affair? First, men are naïve. They believe that if they are not engaging in carnal relations with another woman they are being faithful. They consider it an amusing game, something that might have been lacking in their lives.

Thus, a woman might well prey on a man’s naïveté, by pretending that it’s just a lot of good clean fun. After a while, however, the man in question will be thinking about his emotional affair all the time. Her image will overrun and occupy his consciousness. As the woman reveals more and more intimate details—in an emotional strip tease—he will eventually find himself lusting after her in a non-emotional way.

If men are naïve about affairs of the heart, women are not. If Hawkins’ husband did not know what was happening to him, his emotional lover, Lorna, certainly did.

Second, men who did not learn to date before they were married are especially vulnerable. They do not know how to read situations, how to understand the cues and how not to get carried away by an emotion they do not understand.

When married men get involved in emotional affairs they are not merely playing an away game, but they are playing on a field and according to rules that they do not understand. No man is a master of the game of love. A woman might let a man think he is, but he is not.

If the hapless husband did not realize the danger lurking, his wife, Lucy certainly did.

Obviously, Lorna is not just in it for the sex. If she had just wanted sex she would not be involving herself with a married man who lived on another continent. Of course, she was poaching another woman’s husband. If one wants to be judgmental, as I am sure that everyone’s non-judgmental soul wants to be, Lorna deserves most of the blame here.

According to the Daily Mail, more and more married couples are having emotional affairs. They have caused more than their fair share of divorces.  

Naturally, everyone blames it on the internet or Facebook or the iPhone. It is simply the most modern way to shift responsibility away from oneself and one’s culture and on to a gadget.

Try looking at the problem from a different this angle. For those of us who have been wondering what happened to dating and courtship in a hookup-laden world, then perhaps emotional affairs provide an answer.

At a time when young people seem normally to believe that they should be having sex before the third date relationships must be suffering from an absence of romance and perhaps even an absence of desire. If sex is merely a quick hookup, then eventually the desire will drain out of it. Without any anticipation, there will be no desire. If two people get naked before they know each others’ names, they will have erased the mystery. What more do they have to look forward to?

When it comes to the Hawkins husband and Lorna, they had a lot look forward to.

We know that some couples who meet on line lie to each other and misrepresent themselves. In the case of Lucy Hawkins’ husband, the two people did meet in person and did have an initial conversation before developing their emotional affair.

When distance makes sexual congress impossible, couples have the opportunity to get to know each other, to develop their feelings for each other, and to stoke the flames of their desire. They will have the opportunity, increasingly uncommon in our time, to get to establish an emotional connection before they establish a coital linkage.

It appears that men like the Hawkins husband are not starving for sex. And yet, they seem to be starving for romance. If they did not court, did not date, did not develop a romance but got down to business before they knew each other, then perhaps they found it that much more difficult to connect with their wives emotionally. 

Thus, they are perfect and almost-too-easy prey for young women who are looking for husbands.