Q:
My partner and I are in a monogamous relationship, but for some time now I’ve noticed they have escalated what started as a work friendship into emotional cheating. They deny to be cheating at all, and consider their friend to be “just a friend,” but I can tell by the intensity, frequency, and intimacy of their bond, that it’s more than friendship.
We can’t agree or find a common ground on this issue, because they are sure that they’re not doing anything wrong since there’s no hidden agenda or intentions with said friend. I, however, feel like they’re playing with fire and subtly “leaving the door open” for something else to develop between them.
My partner says they’re not flirting, and I think they are. What do I do?
A:
OK. I’m gonna be honest with you. Really honest. I think you’re stoking the fires of what might escalate into real cheating more so than your partner.
It’s this simple. I don’t believe emotional cheating is a real form of cheating. Or, rather, I don’t believe that having deep platonic relationships outside of a monogamous romantic relationship is cheating. I don’t even consider having harmless crushes on your cute friends cheating, if no one is being secretive about it or acting on it. I think both of those things are frankly normal, healthy, and fine for most people in relationships.
The whole panic about emotional cheating is deeply heteronormative. And one of the best things about being queer and having queer relationships is that we don’t need to abide by heteronormative ideas. In a hetero relationship, you have a man and a woman, your Adam, your Eve. Adam has platonic man friends. Eve has platonic woman friends. The number one relationship is supposed to be, in super hetero land, the sacred marriage.
The marriage is monogamous and both Adam and Eve are, obviously, very straight, exclusively straight, a Kinsey zero. Both Adam and Eve can have friends and even very close friends so long as they 1) don’t get in the way of the marriage, and more importantly, 2) are of the same gender. They can even go on overnight trips with these friends, share a hotel room, get trashed alone at the bar together, have secret inside jokes, have special places and songs, and reserve time outside of the marriage just for these same-gender (read: non-threatening to heteronormativity) friends. You know, “girls’ trip!” or, “boys’ night!”
And in this heterosexual garden of monogamy, it’s understood that the heteronormativity implicit in the marriage is very important to maintain, and any threat to it breeds insecurity. So talking to a different-sex person becomes a gateway to flirting, and flirting is a gateway to cheating. Therefore same-gender friendships can be intense and deep so long as they stay in their proper platonic intimacy boxes, and different-gender friendships are actively avoided (Can men and women even be friends?! har har har), leaving the only sexual attraction left to exist between the husband and wife. Of course, we know this isn’t how most people relate to attraction. You’ve heard the adage: “I’m married, not dead,” inferring that even married people can see that other people outside their marriage are hot. Duh.
From that you may deduce that, yes, emotional cheating is real. Because, frankly, the world is very not exclusively heterosexual, and isn’t that how so many classic lesbian rom coms start, a girls’ trip that turns into a gal pal tumble into that shared hotel room bed, a straight girl realizing her boring husband actually isn’t meeting her emotional needs and falling into the arms of the mysterious lesbian next door while the husband doesn’t even realize he’s losing her?
In the queer world, the reality is that our friends don’t live in such a separate world from our partners. Quite the opposite! We often find it safest and most convenient to be close with those like ourselves. Unlike the heterosexual world, there isn’t this gender division between romance and friendship and I think that’s a much better model. And it also adds a different layer of nuance to the question of so-called emotional cheating or flirting with friends.
For example, when a straight girl comments a heart emoji on a thirst trap of their same-gender best friend, there’s implied platonic intent. No one has to wonder. (Maybe they should — see lesbian rom com trope — but I digress.) When a queer girl does the same, there’s a hint of cutesy flirting because regardless of intent, there’s a different implication when a queer girl tells another queer girl they look hot. And I think that’s amazing. We get told we’re not desirable by the world all the time, so to see the hotness in each other and comment on it? It’s fun! It’s necessary, even!
If my partner was worried every time I had a close friend who is also queer, or every time I said something flirty to a queer friend, or even every time I had a legit low-key crush on a friend, we’d not be together and monogamous for almost two decades. Our queer relationship subverts the norm in so many ways and one is the way in which we can invest in queer platonic intimacy. I can’t be everything to my partner and I don’t want them to be everything to me.
One of the most fulfilling aspects of queer platonic friendship is how we see the hotness in each other, hotness that lives outside of ableist, heterosexist, cisnormative, racist, sizeist beauty standards.
Look, I say this as someone who has cheated, a lot, in past relationships, when things got tough and I wasn’t mature enough to work it out or say what I needed. But never in the past two decades have I cheated on my long-term spouse partner queer married boi person. Why? Because we trust each other, and because we communicate with each other, and we aren’t threatened by other people because of the trust we’ve built. Do we sometimes have harmless crushes? Or think our friends are cute? Or have intense platonic attractions and relationships? Yes, of course. And it’s not a big deal. And we don’t hide it or pretend it’s anything it isn’t.
I don’t know your situation exactly and maybe there are things you aren’t saying, but from what you describe, it sounds like your partner is telling you that you can trust them, and you feel you aren’t able to do that. Maybe there’s a legitimate reason you haven’t disclosed that your partner has broken your trust, but if the reason is just that your partner is having a close relationship with a friend outside of your relationship and they have a little bit of chemistry, I’m sorry. That’s not enough to constitute cheating or even a slippery slope to cheating.
Continuing to show that you don’t trust them and that you believe they are cheating or will cheat will, however, almost definitely manifest in cheating or the end of your relationship. If not with this friend from work, with someone else down the road, or just by bringing distrust and jealousy into your relationship to the point that your relationship can’t bear it.
There are things that are warning signs and, as someone who, like I said, used to be a panic cheater, the warning signs are pretty clear:
Is your partner hiding things about the friendship from you?
Are they often complaining about your relationship to the work friend?
Are they being secretive about what they talk about or do with the friend?
Are they blowing you off to spend time with the work friend?
Are they lying to you about the friendship?
Does your partner compare your relationship to their relationship with the friend?
Are they keeping important life events from you, but sharing them with the friend?
These are all signs that yes, you should be concerned that your partner is starting to walk away from your relationship or is unsatisfied with your relationship. If you had described any of the above behavior, I’d be truly concerned that your relationship is in danger. I would suggest that you need to find a better way to communicate stat. I might suggest that you seek out couple’s counseling. And yeah, I’d be worried that your partner is already one foot out the door.
I don’t think the friendship itself is cheating. Not yet. But this dynamic can lead to that if it isn’t resolved. The issue isn’t the friend, though — it’s your relationship. And you need to work on it to save it.
If the red flag behaviors I mentioned above aren’t currently present, I am a little worried that you could create friction and distance in your relationship — that doesn’t need to be there based on your partner’s behavior! — with your own current behavior. If you continue to express that you don’t trust your partner to maintain appropriate boundaries, over time, they will learn to avoid this conflict with you by hiding the details of the friendship from you, and as that boundary and mutual respect of your relationship weaken, so will the health of your relationship. That breakdown of communication and trust is what could lead to cheating, not just having an attractive close friend from work.
It’s not your job to police who your partner’s friends are or how “intense” your partner’s friendships are. It is your job to work on your own insecurities and to communicate and work on the relationship with your partner itself.
Long story short, I don’t believe in emotional cheating. Or, rather, I think the idea that we must save our intimate, intense feelings only for our partners is a deeply heteronormative one, and I don’t want us to adhere to it. Queer relationships make space for us to experience connections to people in many ways, even and especially within monogamous relationships, and setting up an expectation that monogamy means you can’t ever be close to someone else or even have an innocent attraction to someone else is unreasonable.
What should you do? You should talk to your partner. You should really listen. Ideally, you should trust them, though it sounds like, from the tenor of your question, you’ve already expressed pretty clearly that you don’t trust them. Frankly, if you want to keep this relationship, you should work on yourself and the idea that you are required to or should provide the only intimate emotional connection to your partner or any future partner. When you feel secure in yourself, you will be better able to gauge whether a partner is being secretive and unfair, or whether you are the one being unfair.
I wish a whole lot of happiness, for you and for your partner, and I hope you are able to work this out!
You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.
