The one thing that struck me is how much an emotional affair is like teenage love.
By Linda
For the last two months cupid has hit our house, and for the first time in our daughters’ lives they both have acquired steady boyfriends.
This was something that I definitely was not looking forward to knowing full well what the implications were for our family, our relationship and the heartbreak that would eventually fall upon one or both of our daughters.
One of our daughters in particular has been bitten by the love bug and within two months of dating they have become quite inseparable. With much pain and apprehension I am witnessing some of the same behaviors and signs that I saw during Doug’s emotional affair.
There’s the constant texting, phone calls, daydreaming and removal of oneself from the family and wanting to be together every moment of the day. Watching this has been very difficult for me and on more than one occasion I asked Doug if this was the way it was for him and Tanya. As a self-professed romantic, I found myself hating everything about my daughter’s first love experience.
I also found myself worrying constantly about the affect it was having on her. She has been exhausted, as she tries to squeeze time for her boyfriend in between all of her extracurricular activities throughout each day.
She had stopped hanging out with her friends and sister as much which was causing animosity between them. I felt like I never saw her nor had a chance to talk to her. She was always in her room texting or listening to sappy songs. We rarely hung out as a complete family.
I began to question if this was becoming an unhealthy relationship. Is this what being “in love” was all about?
Well everything pretty much came to a head this weekend when my daughter announced that she didn’t want to do dance anymore. She has been dancing for fourteen of her sixteen years of life and obviously appeared to love and enjoy it. This was a complete surprise to Doug and I, and especially her twin sister who has shared the stage with her all of this time.
To say the least, emotions ran high. Her sister was hysterical because she felt abandoned and afraid to go on alone. I felt that I had been in this situation before. This time however, my daughter was Doug and dance was my marriage.
She felt that dance was taking too much of her time. She didn’t enjoy it anymore. She wanted some free time. I felt helpless and unsure if this announcement was because she was really burned out from dancing all of these years and stopped loving it or because of her relationship with her boyfriend. (This was just like I was unsure if Doug didn’t want to be married to me because there was someone else or because he really didn’t love me anymore).
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I really thought I should have been able to handle a situation like this, especially since I have become somewhat of an “expert,” but I was truly at a loss. I was also able to experience firsthand how a typical male handles emotional conflict, as Doug was no help whatsoever.
This episode occurred right in Doug’s little office, and while all three of us girls were crying hysterically, Doug sat at his computer pretending to work – almost as if nothing was happening around him. It was obvious he was paralyzed and didn’t know how to handle this new and unique situation, so he pretended that it didn’t exist and took the “flee and free” approach.
Later on I asked Doug what we should do about this situation. Basically, he said that we should try to reason with her. I looked at him and almost laughed because I learned from experience with his emotional affair that there was no reasoning with a person under the influence of infatuation.
Anything I say to my daughter will fall on deaf ears. It’s impossible for me to tell her she is making a terrible mistake and will eventually regret giving up something she loves – for a silly boy. I cannot tell her that this romance probably will not last and then she will be stuck at home wishing she was still dancing.
I guess the only thing I can do is to let her know that I love her and respect her honesty, but I really want her to think about the real reason why she wants to give up her dancing. She needs to think about the pros and the cons, and how she will feel when she is no longer involved in it. Will it make her happy or will she truly miss it? I hope that she will come to an intelligent decision based on her own true feelings along with a bit of practicality.
I guess the one thing that struck me the most during these last two months is how much an emotional affair is like teenage love – the obsession, the drama and the unhealthiness of it all.
9 replies to "Teenage Love and the Emotional Affair"
Hi Doug, please can you answer a ‘couple’ of things for me? Linda referred to the constant texting and phonecalls which you and my H obviously made. He is adamant that when they met up (which was work related not dates and stuff) they never kissed or even held hands and yet some of the texts I read referred to loving each other, feeling randy and imagining her in lace undies and talked about waiting (for sex) as it made it more exciting. Does it make sense to you that if they were texting such things that they wouldn’t even hold hands or talk that way face to face which is what he wants me to believe? Did you have a simiar experience with Tanya, was it mainly by texting or phoning that you exchanged emotions or did you kiss and hold hands etc. when you met up? Also, did you lead each other to believe sex would eventually occur as it seems that that is what gave my H and her the thrills and how close did you come to having sex? My H insists that he had no intention of actually sleeping with her and that it was all a fantasy game. Thank you.
Hi Mil, I’m pretty sure you asked me this same question back in April. It’s hard for me to tell you one way or the other what might make sense with respect to your husband’s situation. My experiences might not be in anyway similar to your husband’s. To answer your other question…my EA was carried out through text and phone and in person, since we worked together. We were always either at work or at a public place (like a restaurant) and there was no affection or hand holding or anything like that. Tanya expressed her desire to take it to another level (sex) but that was a road I didn’t want to travel. Here is a link to a post that included many comments regarding this. Perhaps it will help you: https://www.emotionalaffair.org/linda-view-ending-an-affair/
Linda, despite the high emotions in all of this developing drama in your household, you really will be able to help your daughter through this time in her life much better because of what you have experienced with the EA. When I was 15, I fell in love with my (now) husband and due to my family’s unhealthy patterns and dysfunction, neither of my parents were at all available to me or tried to help me negotiate this infatuation that rather quickly consumed my every waking moment. My entire life might have been different if my parents, especially my mom, had just talked to me about it all. Now, 40 years down the road of life, I am finally figuring some things out about why our marriage has been so unbalanced and I’m beginning to change me in some ways that are long overdue. I also have two daughters who are now adults and who live with their boyfriends but I think are afraid of marriage because they don’t want to make the same mistakes…
roller coaster rider, yes you are correct, I know that she really doesn’t want advice from an old married woman but I tried to explain to her that often we loose ourselves when we are so involved in a relationship. She is the daughter than knew about our situation, so I tried to tell her in an indirect way that we have so many talents, desires, aspirations that often times we forget those things when we are only focusing on one part of our lives. There has to be a balance and everyday we need to think about how we are achieving that balance in our lives. I hope she understood what I was talking about, time will tell. Linda
Hi Linda,
Our son gave up baseball this season – after 12 straight years. I coached him 10 of those 12 years and I miss teaching the boys and watching him excel, as he was a pretty good player. Part of it was burn-out (I share some of the blame). Part of it was that he is a teenager and social life is now more important to him. It appears that DD (Dear Daughter) is finding out that her social life is beginning to play a bigger part of her being as well. It’s part of those teenage years when they seem to change overnight. One day it’s goodbye dad, I need to do my social thing. However, I will add that I urged my boy to keep busy in other activities that he liked. He is into Soccer and Hockey, so I pressed him to continue participating in these sports. And he has.
Does DD have any other interests ? Maybe suggest she re-direct her free time to other ventures. I truly feel an active teen is a healthy and happier teen.
Best Always.
Melvin, Well she went to her dance camp yesterday and will be going today, so hopefully she will enjoy it and determine that she does indeed still love it. It helps that her boyfriend is out of town this week and she is somewhat back to her old self, though perhaps only temporarily.
I coached my son’s baseball team for 11 years and he also gave it up due to “burn-out.” He could have played in college too which would have been cool. But now he is happy and involved in many other activities. Last night for the first time, he said he somewhat regretted that he isn’t still playing. You’re right about an active teen is a healthy, happy teen. It also keeps them out of trouble. My kids have always been so busy with sports and such that they have no time or energy to get in trouble, and they’re 3 of the fittest kids you will ever meet. Thanks and take care!
I think this is especially true with “lost love” affairs for those in a possible MLC. Easy to think how life could have been, but probably wouldn’t have. This is easily reinforced by our Hollywood stereotypes of love and marriage.
Linda,
I know this is completely off subject but I had to share this with you. My son who is now 29 had played hockey all of his life. In fact he was invited to join the junior Dallas Stars team in Texas when he was 16. He was really good.He could have easily received a college scholarship for his skills. Alas he also had a girlfriend who resented the time he put into hockey and on the morning of his first practice with this team he refused to go because he wanted “to be with her and was burned out” Hockey ended that day. He has told us SEVERAL times “Why did we let him quit?” “We should have made him go” Bottom line we couldn’t carry him to practice but it is a big regret in his life. This girl is LONG gone…ironic enough ended up cheating on him.
You are right teenage love is like an emotional affair. Selfish, immature, controlling, life changing and completly ridiculous.
When I was a teenager I was completely and utterly in love with my then boyfriend. I wasted my time building my life around him and I dropped out od college. Being young and immature I had yet to learn to communicate my wants and needs effectively so I decided that if I cheated on him hit would perk up his attention and make him “value” me and our relationship. Needless to say, he dumped my sorry ass rightly so. That day I learned a hard lesson. I had to learn how to communicate and vowed I would never cheat again. I would voice my concerns and worries no matter how hard it be.
Fast forward 25 years later, my husband and I were going through some majorly bumpy patch and I tried to keep things open. I knew we were on a slippery slope and I tried my hardest to prevent it from getting worse. I voiced we were going end up splitting up if we did not do something proactively about this. I told him I was not happy and what I needed from him sexually for us to start to reconnect. It fell on deaf ears .My husband refused to go to a MC and decided that fooling around on me was a much better way to solve his problems. He made his own hell and made me out to the be the bad guy. I shared with my CS just yesterday that if he just opened up instead of digging his stupid head out of the sand. All this pain and heart ache could have been prevented.