Home

Emotional Affairs

October 29th, 2003

The below is taken from When 'just friends' is wrong, which is a review of Not "Just Friends": Protect Your Relationship from Infidelity and Heal the Trauma of Betrayal by Shirley Glass, from which the following evidently originally appears:

Has your friendship become an emotional affair?
  1. Do you confide more to your friend than to your partner about how your day went?
  2. Do you discuss negative feelings or intimate details about your marriage with your friend but not with your partner?
  3. Are you open with your partner about the extent of your involvement with your friend?
  4. Would you feel comfortable if your partner heard your conversation with your friend?
  5. Would you feel comfortable if your partner saw a videotape of your meetings?
  6. Are you aware of sexual tensions in this friendship?
  7. Do you and your friend touch differently when you're alone than in front of others?
  8. Are you in love with your friend?

I imagine guys don't hang out with their friends—especially their female friends—nearly as much as when the guys get girlfriends because they're worried about what the girlfriend might think, or what the answers to the questions might be (the "wrong" answers would be "yes" to questions 1, 2, 6 and 8, "no" to the other questions) might say about the guy. That goes for women too, I imagine.

Yes, it's the year 2003, and we're supposed to be civilized and mature about these things, and people are supposed to have unproblematically platonic relationships with friends of the opposite sex. But when it comes down to perceptions, well, perceptions, as they always have, matter.

tags: dating, friendship, marriage