Can we move on from my husband’s emotional affair?

I’m heartbroken after discovering that my husband was having an emotional affair with a woman he works with, which lasted about 18 months.

I found emails and social media messages then I searched his phone, too, and found texts between them.

Many messages were just them sharing opinions on things, but there were also lots of intimate sexual texts about what they’d like to do to each other in bed and they kept referring to each other as a “soulmate”.

Obviously, I confronted him with all this and the colour drained from his face – I’ve never seen him look so shocked and terrified!

He couldn’t deny any of it, but swears nothing physical ever happened between them. I know this is true because their “affair” was over the lockdowns and my husband has been working from home since March 2020.

I feel so hurt by this – it feels like a worse betrayal than if he’d had sex with her a couple of times. He clearly adores this woman and would rather talk to her and share things with her.

He’s ended whatever there was to end and says their relationship now is purely professional. But I can’t bear him being near me at the moment and don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to trust him or have sex with him again.

Coleen says

I think an emotional affair can be harder to get over and move on from than something based purely on physical attraction. It’s worse because they’re emotionally invested in another person – they care about them, admire them, respect them, even love them.

It will take time to trust him – there’s no easy fix. You need to do a lot of talking and he needs to be honest about what he wasn’t getting from your relationship that led him to this other woman. Relationship therapy is probably a good idea to work through things with a professional.

The thing is, you might not be able to move on from it and even if you do, I think you have to accept that it will have changed your relationship.

The key thing to work out is why your marriage was vulnerable to this happening. And it will probably be painful to hear his side of things and difficult for you to talk about, too. But it’s essential.

Affairs are often a symptom of the relationship being in trouble, rather than being the cause of the trouble.

They kept referring to each other as a soulmate