Me [29F] and my wife [29F] have been in a relationship for 10 years, and been friends for 16 years. We have an amazing, unique and special relationship and I’ve never been unhappy.
Nearly 2 years ago, I made a friend [33F] online via an internet blog, and we started writing letters/emails to each other. Writing and exchanging emails/letters with people is one of my favourite things to do, and it’s been something I’ve always done in a lot of my friendships. It’s also how my wife and I discovered our romantic connection.
I was so happy to find this online friend – when we started talking we discovered we had the same personality type and interests and I’d been really missing a friend in my life that I could share those things with. My wife has a very different personality type to me – I love the things about her that make her different from me, but it was also really nice to be able to find someone like me, and connect with someone over shared experiences. I felt like it was important to have strong platonic emotional connections outside of your relationship, as it’s unhealthy to expect our partners to be everything for us – and that’s what I had hoped to find through her. She was also someone to share the joy of writing with – while I love having my daily life intertwined with my wife’s, it’s meant that I tend to share my feelings with my wife through our conversation, rather than through writing.
Over time my online friend and I built up an extremely unique and creative correspondence. Through writing we were able to become very close, and we wrote to each other very frequently and at length. It was really fun to be able to write and share letters with someone who lived on the other side of the world, and to have somewhere to channel my creative energies. I did end up feeling very addicted to the correspondence and the act of writing to her. My online friend recently wrote a very kind letter to me saying that she thought she was going to have to end our friendship as she had developed feelings for me. This made me confront the fact that I had also developed intense feelings for her, which until then I had been trying my best to reframe into friendship, because I couldn’t face the idea that after having wanted a friend like her for so long, I’d have to lose her from my life.
I told my wife that I realised I’d developed feelings for this online friend, as I wanted to be honest, and she was extremely hurt and betrayed. She is of the view that I had an emotional affair. She wants to stay with me but she says her trust in me has been completely shattered, and thinks that our relationship will never be the same again, which is heartbreaking to me.
The friendship never crossed the line into explicit declarations of romance or flirting, and I never complained about my wife to my friend at all. I also never met or spoke to this friend in person, our friendship was entirely based on writing and intellectual closeness – we didn’t share a lot of photos of each other, we only ever shared a couple so we knew what each other looked like, and while we had talked about possibly meeting in person one day, neither of us was in a rush to do that.
However I realise that I did withdraw into the friendship a lot, and often prioritised it over my wife, which I really regret. While it wasn’t a secret from my wife, I was not as forthcoming about the friendship or the topics we discussed as I realise I should have been. I regret this as I would actually have liked to talk about it more – I was proud to have a friend like her, I think I was just worried about misunderstanding, and wanted a bit of space separate from my wife as we spend almost all of our time together. I did talk with my online friend about things I didn’t always talk about with my wife and we had a lot of shared inside jokes and private slang, but I never talked to her about things I wouldn’t have also talked about with my wife had the opportunity come up. I find it a lot easier to express feelings through writing and I also felt it was healthy for me to be able to talk about things with someone who could relate through shared experience. I hadn’t seen this as a betrayal of my wife, although I do realise that I didn’t devote enough energy to trying to connect with my wife through this experience, and I wish I had put more time into my relationship with her.
I still have feelings for my online friend, but my love for my wife hasn’t changed. I accept the need to end my online friendship, and focus on my wife and our relationship, but I my friend will always be important to me and I will always miss our friendship for what it was. I hadn’t been seeking a romantic connection, I’ve always felt romantically fulfilled by my wife – it’s the potential friendship that I will miss.
My questions are –
1) does this count as an emotional affair? Developing the feelings wasn’t a choice, but acting on them is, and while I know the way I acted wasn’t good for our marriage, I had thought that emotional cheating has to involve declarations of romance or flirting or venting about one’s partner. In my case, once I came to terms with having the feelings, I told my wife about them in an attempt to be open and transparent.
2) how can I move on from here with my wife and rebuild our trust? She has been severely hurt by this and I feel extremely guilty that I haven’t prioritised her more during this time. She feels particularly betrayed by the fact that our own romantic connection started via writing as well, that I saved important parts of myself for another person, and says she will always compare herself to my online friend. I would like to get to a place of empathy and understanding, where I acknowledge the ways in which I acted were very harmful to our marriage, while being able to reach an understanding that this was an important friendship for me while it lasted, and that I didn’t mean to hurt her through it.
3) how can I respond to my online friend’s letter confessing her feelings for me without hurting my wife even more? I feel like it’s cruel after sharing such a close and deep connection with someone, and having received such a kind and caring letter, to cut her off without responding to what she said and acknowledging that I’ll miss her and our friendship for what it was, and what I wish it could have been, and that she’s been very important to me. But my wife doesn’t want me to tell my friend any of this. I feel like it will be harder to for me to move on from the feelings if I don’t, because I’ll always have regrets about the way I ended things.
TL;DR I told my wife about feelings I’d developed for a close online friend. Did I cross the line into an emotional affair, how can I heal things with my wife, and how can I close off and move on from my online friendship?
Comments
Dude, wise up. Yes you had an emotional affair. Don’t respond to your friend’s letter if you want to keep your wife — you would still be prioritizing this friend over your wife. This is elementary.
1). Yes. It’s an emotional affair. Intention doesn’t factor into it. You put extensive energy into growing an emotional connection with someone other than your spouse and to the detriment of your marriage.
2). Get professional help and dig into WHY you needed that level of connection. Fix yourself and whatever is missing from your marriage. Do the work.
3). Your friend’s feelings shouldn’t be a consideration. You need to focus and prioritize your wife’s feelings. Just say, I agree that we should cut things off. I am a married man who loves his wife and needs to focus on my marriage. And if you think this is too much to say, YOU are much further along in your emotional affair. Do NOT say you appreciated and will miss her friendship. Because this is no longer a friendship.
You claim that you love your wife, but you have put this ‘friendship’ above your marriage. If your claim that you still love your wife is true, then this is a critical opportunity to pick your wife and repair some of that damage that you have caused.
Don’t concern yourself about being cruel to someone who writes their married ‘friends’ inappropriate declarations . She certainly didn’t care about being cruel to your wife when she wrote her feelings, rather than just creating distant. Nor did she care about you, when she attempted to damage your marriage. She doesn’t sound like the wonderful person you have convinced yourself she is. Google ‘affair fog’, this may apply to you.
Yes. This is an emotional affair. You admit yourself you often prioritized the relationship over your marriage, and that you maintained secrecy about what you talked about. You talked about things with your friend that you didn’t share with your wife; you try and say you would have talked about it with your wife if the “opportunity” came up makes it worse. Because why does your wife need to have an opportunity to talk about it but you were open about these topics with your friend?
The fact that you were worried about the friendship being misunderstood should be a sign that part of you knew this wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.
Emotional affairs aren’t just about declarations of love. It’s about where the person puts their energy, focus, and intention. And you were putting it on this friend — not your wife