You're listening to That's Not Very Ladylike, the show where every week, we start with one rule, ladies don't, and then we do it anyway. Welcome back to That's Not Very Ladylike. My name is Tracy Willingham, and you may know me as That Hormone Girl. Okay. I need to ask you something, And I need you to be honest with me on this.
Tracey:How many texts is too many? How late at night is too late? How personal is too personal? At what point does your partner's emotional energy stop being theirs to give away freely and start belonging, at least in part, to the relationship you are both supposedly building together? Because here is what I've noticed.
Tracey:We have a very clear, very detailed, very dramatic cultural script for physical affairs. We have the movies, the therapy language, the support groups, the divorce attorneys on speed dial. We know exactly what to call it and exactly how to feel about it when someone gets physical with someone who is not their partner. But we really don't have any type of system that gave us the language for the slow leak. The text that come through at eleven p.
Tracey:M. The coffee meetups that are somehow always just the two of them. The way they send your partner, they're sad. Like that's their person. The way they back their best, most patient, most emotionally available self.
Tracey:The version of them that you've been waiting for at home while you're sitting there in an actual relationship. And we don't call that an affair. We call it friendship. And then we wonder why we start to feel a little crazy. So let's dive in today's topic, which is ladies don't call it an emotional affair.
Tracey:They're just really good friends who text a lot. So let's jump into the story. And this story genuinely surprised me about myself, I have to say. So my spouse, my husband is a really good person. And I don't say that it's like a disclaimer.
Tracey:So you know that you think I'm like also a wonderful wife or that I don't have moments where I get jealous, any of that. But I say it because it's the whole damn point of the story. And I want you to kind of have that to understand he's the kind of person that other people notice. He's not flashy. He's just kind And he can be present when he wants to be.
Tracey:He can be present and he's really good at listening. And women have actually looked me in the eye to my face and said, You have such a good husband. And I believe them because it's true. So I set this up because I think it'll help you understand the story here. So there was a coworker and she began texting my husband and I wasn't worried about it because one I trust my husband And two, I didn't have a reason not to not at least not yet.
Tracey:And I don't want to be in one of those relationships where it's like you can't be friends with the opposite sex because I think you can. There's a lot of boundaries and things that we're going to talk about, but I don't think it's impossible. But one day I happened to be on his phone with his full permission, nothing sneaky about it. And two texts came through while I was holding the phone and I saw the wording and it was just two texts. And something in me kind of went still because it just my stomach instantly tightened which even when your brain doesn't want to acknowledge your body's letting you know.
Tracey:And it wasn't what she was saying about my husband. It wasn't anything like that. It was what she was asking for. And I want to preface this. I don't even know.
Tracey:I didn't go that deep into it to see if she even was aware of it. I don't know. I just saw what I saw. But it was that she the things that she was asking for that kind of bothered me. So she was sending her hard days and wanting to talk them through.
Tracey:Her sad days, wanting to talk about, am I going to be okay? Do you think I'm smart? Do you think I'm strong? And because again, back to the beginning, my husband is a kind man, he was responding. Yes, I think you are.
Tracey:And I don't even want to say that I think anything he was saying back to her was wrong. I think he was being very genuine and he was being the way generally good people do when someone comes to them hurting. But I sat there and I felt something that I was completely unprepared for because nothing physical had happened. Nothing. Zero.
Tracey:But I still felt a little bit of betrayal. And that surprised me that I could feel that level of hurt over some texts. But what I started to realize was is that someone else was getting the part of my husband that I needed, that I wanted, that I enjoyed most in our relationship. She was getting that emotional presence, that patience, that attention while I was right there in the same house, in the same life, doing the unglamorous, unromantic, very real work of being in an actual marriage. And here's the part that really gets me, right?
Tracey:I almost talked myself out of it. I was like, don't be one of those girls. Don't be one of those wives. Because truly nothing had happened, right? Because I'm not that wife, because I trust my spouse, because I didn't have a word for what I was looking at.
Tracey:So I almost decided it wasn't a real thing. But it was a real thing and I knew it and I chose to trust what I was feeling and what I knew. And I'm not going to air out our dirty laundry, any of that, but it led to some very good talks and some very good boundaries. But again, this isn't one of these where I'm like, and my husband's a dirty dog. But you also have to be realistic as a female.
Tracey:There was a moment in my stomach that thought, what would have happened if I hadn't seen those texts? And that's the type of stuff you can't have in a relationship. So here's what really nobody is talking about with emotional affairs. They don't feel like a betrayal at first. You might even be at brunch with your girls and be like, he's texting a girl and they're just talking about their days and your friends are like, girl, come on.
Tracey:But it is and it feels like your problem. You wonder if you're being insecure. Am I controlling? Am I one of those partners who can't handle their partner having friends? And then you start Google searching whether jealousy is a trauma response because if it's a trauma response then maybe it's you and it's not the situation and it's not even that other woman and then you don't have to have the hard conversation.
Tracey:And then while you're busy diagnosing yourself the connection on the other end it keeps building. The texts keep coming. The emotional intimacy keeps deepening but it's not with you. And that's a problem. It's a problem because your partner isn't present in the same way anymore and you cannot fully explain why because they're right there.
Tracey:They're probably home with you. They're probably not doing anything wrong on paper. But something is being redirected. Something that belonged to your relationship is going somewhere else. And you are sitting across from them at dinner wondering why you feel so damn lonely inside a partnership that looks completely fine from the outside.
Tracey:So the cost it isn't just jealousy. You know, that's what everybody wants to focus on. The cost is the self doubt. That's what hurts us is when you start to wonder, am I the one that's crazy? Am I being controlling?
Tracey:Am I making up too much? The cost is the way you talk yourself out of your own instincts because you don't have a word for what you're experiencing. And the cost is the slow erosion of emotional intimacy in your marriage while you're too busy calling yourself dramatic to maybe say what this actually is. And here's what makes it worse. We have no cultural framework for this.
Tracey:You can't go to HR. You can't file a police report. You can't tell your friends without at least one of them saying, Well, did anything actually happen though? Because nothing has happened. But remember my keyword friends because nothing has happened yet.
Tracey:So let's look at the history of this because once I got into this, I started doing some research and was like, I got to know more about this because you know, that was an interesting moment in my life. Don't want to do it again, but it was interesting to go through. So I want to tell you what the research actually says because I think most people have absolutely no idea how common this is or how much damage it's doing because we keep pretending it's not a real category of betrayal. So the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy reports that when you count emotional affairs alongside physical ones, approximately forty five percent of men and thirty five percent of women have engaged in some form of infidelity during their marriage. And let's let that land.
Tracey:Nearly half of married men, More than a third of married women, not physical affairs alone, all forms of infidelity and emotional affairs make up a massive chunk of that number. And it gets even wilder, my friends, because, you know, I went down the rabbit hole. Research shows that ninety one point six percent of women and seventy eight point six of men admit to having an emotional affair at some point in their relationship. Over ninety percent of women and almost eighty percent of men. And we are still out here acting like this isn't a real thing because nothing physical happened because we have no mainstream language for it.
Tracey:No support group, no cultural script. We just have women sitting in their kitchens wondering why they feel so alone and then mostly turning it inward and blaming themselves for it. Sixty four percent of couples say an emotional affair can be just as damaging or even more harmful than a physical one. And yet, in a national survey of 2,000 adults, seventy six percent said they would consider a secret emotional relationship to be a form of infidelity. So we know it's real.
Tracey:We know it hurts just as much. We know it counts, but we just don't talk about it. And that silence, that is costing people their relationships. Now, here's the part that really messed with my head. Okay, because I could have made this whole episode about the woman texting my spouse and made myself the righteous victim in the story, and you all would have cheered and been like, I'm on your side.
Tracey:But frankly, that would be too easy. So let's talk about why she was doing it. Research from Couples Therapy Inc. Found that thirty four percent of women involved in emotional affairs described themselves as happy or very happy in their own marriage when the emotional affair began. So these were not miserable women looking for an exit.
Tracey:They were happy women. Women who stumbled into something that felt like connection and didn't recognize what they were building until it was already built because again, it's about emotional connection. It doesn't announce itself. It slowly grows until one day you look down at those texts or those phone calls and go, Oh my goodness. About sixty percent of affairs emotional and physical begin in the workplace because proximity breeds connection.
Tracey:Repeated contact, shared stress, sometimes shared trauma, someone who sees you at your worst on a deadline and still thinks you're great. All of those things are not an accident. That is neuroscience doing exactly what it's designed to do. So there is a historical context that we need to understand of why this dynamic is so damn persistent today. So women have historically had almost no access to emotional support outside of the men in their lives.
Tracey:No financial autonomy, no independent social standing, no therapy, no structures for getting emotional needs met that didn't run directly through a man. And male emotional approval was not just nice to have, it was currency. And sometimes it was even safety. It was literally how you survived. So if you were unhappy, you told your spouse or you told no one.
Tracey:If you needed someone to tell you that you were going to be okay, you found a man to do it because those were the options on the table. And that wiring does not disappear just because we have like Venmo and therapy apps now, right? So women are still socialized. Some of us in very deep and very subtle ways to seek emotional validation from men. Because for most of recorded history, male emotional approval determined your entire quality of life.
Tracey:The dependency was structural, and structures outlast the conditions that created them generation by generation. So when a woman sends a married person her sad, her hard day, her need to be told she's okay, she may not even fully understand what she is building. She's lonely. She is emotionally under touched in her own life. And then she found someone who listens without judgment and without agenda.
Tracey:And when you've been starving for that listening can slowly start to feel like love regardless if that's what's back on the other end receiving end. And so hear me, I am not excusing it. But I had to go down a little bit of a path and I had to find a way to explain it because understanding why someone does something is not the same as letting them off the hook for the damage it causes. And I want to be honest about the limits of my own lens here. I am speaking from a specific heterosexual experience.
Tracey:So this dynamic plays out differently across different kinds of relationships, cultures, and communities. But the one solid line, the one common denominator, the way emotional need gets outsourced across relationship lines without anyone fully naming what's happening, that is not unique to any one kind of partnership. So what I can tell you is this the conditions that built this pattern were constructed a very long time ago. And unfortunately, we are still living with these conditions. So if it could be said, this is what it would sound like.
Tracey:I feel like I'm competing for my own partner's emotional energy, and I don't know how to say that without sounding completely unhinged. I saw something that bothered me, and my first instinct was to wonder if I was the problem. Nothing physical happened, and I still feel like something was taken from me. And I can't even explain that to myself, let alone to anyone else. I don't know how to ask for what I need without coming across as controlling.
Tracey:I miss being the person my spouse brings their best self to. I miss being the one who gets the patience and the presence. I don't want to blow up my relationship over texts, but I also cannot pretend that I didn't see them. I feel betrayed, and then I felt embarrassed for feeling betrayed because nothing happened except it could. Or even in some situations it did.
Tracey:So we're to my favorite section. This should piss you off because. Okay? This is what should make us genuinely angry. We have an entire cultural vocabulary for physical affairs.
Tracey:Again, movies books therapy modalities built around it legal framework support groups a whole industry in fact devoted to the thing that happens when it gets physical. But we have almost nothing for emotional. No language for the slow redirect of a partner's emotional presence in someone else's hands. No framework for what it means when the most available, most patient, most emotionally generous version of your partner is consistently showing up, but just not for you. No script for how to name that without sounding like a jealous, insecure, controlling spouse who just can't handle their partner having friends and especially if they're friends of the opposite sex.
Tracey:So people suffer in it in silence. They question their own instincts. They Google their own feelings trying to figure out if they're allowed to even be hurt. And they decide that because nothing physical happens, so it doesn't count. And they watch their emotional connection with their partner quietly drain out of the relationship while everything else says, Everything looks great.
Tracey:Everything seems fine. That should piss us off. Not just as a person doing the texting, not just as the partner who didn't see it happening, but at a cultural level that gave us 17 words for physical betrayal and left us completely without language for emotional betrayal. Even though the research tells us it hurts just as much or more. So your emotional intimacy is not a lesser category of connection.
Tracey:It is not the consolation prize version of closeness. It is the foundation of your relationship. And when it starts flowing consistently out of your partnership and into someone else's hands, that is a real thing. It deserves a real name. And you deserve to be able to say it out loud without someone looking at you like you're being dramatic.
Tracey:Because the thing is is if you're feeling it inside your body you're not crazy but we just were never given permission to call it what it is. And that that's the part that should piss us off. So how do you know if this is you? Because believe me, like I said, I went on a soul searching moment during that. Did a lot of work.
Tracey:I did a lot of reflection. So let's look at all three people in this situation, which I'm going to out myself right now as a Swifty. But this is taking me back to the whole three songs she put on her, I think it was Folklore. Loved listening to those. Maybe you want to pull those up as we're reading this section and just have a little background music.
Tracey:Because this episode is not just for the spouse sitting at home with a feeling that they can't name. If we want to do this podcast, right, we got to look at everybody in the room. So if you are the partner at home, you feel vaguely uneasy about a friendship, but you cannot point to anything concrete. And so you've been calling yourself paranoid instead of trusting your gut. You've noticed your partner is less emotionally present.
Tracey:They're home. They're not doing anything wrong, but something is off. And you can feel it even if you can't prove it. You saw something, a text, a tone, an exchange. And your first move was to question yourself rather than the situation.
Tracey:You don't know how to raise it without sounding like you're asking your partner to stop having friends entirely. You've started to feel like a roommate in your relationship, and you don't know exactly when that shift happened. And you felt hurt by something that wasn't physical and then embarrassed for being hurt, like your feelings needed to clear a higher bar before they counted. If you are the partner who has been doing it, someone outside your relationship comes to you consistently with their emotional weight and you respond consistently with your best self. You would be uncomfortable, and I mean genuinely uncomfortable, if your partner read the last 30 messages in that thread.
Tracey:You told yourself it's just friendship, but you've also kept it a little quieter than it probably needed to be. Your partner has said something feels off and you dismissed it or minimized it instead of getting curious about what they are seeing. And you're taking your best communication, your most patient self, your most available energy, and you're giving it to someone outside of your relationship first. And then we got to look at the other side. If you're the person that's doing the reaching out, you know they're in a committed relationship, you've probably met their partner, And yet you keep reaching out anyway because this person makes you feel heard.
Tracey:You've told yourself it's harmless because it's just emotional. It's not physical. But sit with that logic for a second. You would be uncomfortable if their partner or your partner could see exactly what the two of you talk about. You are outsourcing your emotional needs to someone who is meant to be bringing that energy home into their own relationship first.
Tracey:But I also think we need to say you deserve real support, genuine available support from people in your life who can give it to you without it costing someone else their relationship. So in closing, here's what I did. And I want to be really clear about this because I think how I handled it matters as much as the fact that I actually handled it. I didn't blow it up into we're separating, we're divorcing. I didn't go cold and wait for my spouse to figure out why.
Tracey:Now, did take a pause so that I could respond rationally and not emotionally because that was important to me. I did not perform calm on the outside while silently building a case on the inside. I had the conversation, and I'll be honest, there were some tears and there were some hard questions. So it wasn't that I went in completely cool, but I had emotions and I think that was healthy and I think that was okay. I told my spouse what I saw, what I felt, and what I needed without accusing them of something they had not technically done yet because they hadn't.
Tracey:But it made me nervous where it was heading. And I respected myself and my relationship enough to say something before it got there. Now, I'm lucky because my husband heard me. And it wasn't because I yelled, I didn't make threats, but it's because I did name it clearly and specifically enough that he couldn't unhear it. And they changed the frequency of that contact.
Tracey:And notice what I did there. I didn't ask him to end the friendship. For me, I just didn't want to. It hadn't gotten to that level yet where it would have been asked to. But we sure did change that format.
Tracey:We changed the energy that was being sent into that friendship. We set the frequency. We set the boundaries and we chose our marriage. And it's not because I forced him to but because when I said it out loud with actual words, he understood what was actually happening and where it could lead. And that was never his intention.
Tracey:And I gave him the space to correct it. I didn't say you're done, I'm done with you. Now that doesn't mean two days later I was like, how's your friend? There was some phone checking whenever I felt like I just needed to check-in. I was allowed to ask questions and I was allowed to maybe even adjust some boundaries as it moved forward.
Tracey:But that's what a relationship should be negotiation. But it was really important to me that didn't ask him to end the friendship. For now, let's be honest. Because that really was not mine to demand. What was mine was naming my expectations and holding them without apology.
Tracey:What was mine was trusting my instincts instead of talking myself out of them for the hundredth time. And what was mine was finally having the conversation that I had been avoiding because I didn't have the right words for what I was looking at. Now, she didn't stop reaching out, And that's for her to own. I'm not going to even bash her on this. It's not mine to manage, not mine to control, not mine to correct because I cannot run someone else's integrity for them.
Tracey:I've tried. And guess what? It didn't work. It just exhausted me. But my husband stopped.
Tracey:My husband followed my boundaries, and he continues to follow those boundaries to this day. And for me, for me, that was enough. I'm not saying it's going to be enough. I'm not going to say the level it went to is going to be enough for you. So there might be times where therapy is required.
Tracey:There might be time where mediation is required. So here's the reflection I want you to sit with this week. Your emotional intimacy is worth protecting and not just from the obvious stuff, from the slow leaks too, from the friendships that might not quite stay friendships, From the texts that feel like too much, from the coffee meetups that should probably have a wider guest list. And you do not have to blow up your relationship to protect it. You just have to name what you see, trust what you feel, and stop waiting for something physical to happen before you can allow yourself to finally say something is wrong.
Tracey:Know the difference between what is yours to hold, so that's your expectations, your voice, your boundaries, your truth, and what belongs to someone else to manage. She didn't stop. My husband did. And knowing the difference between what you are responsible for and what you are not, choosing your relationship with your words before it becomes a crisis that requires lawyers, but most importantly, trusting yourself enough to name what you see before you can prove it. That's the most unladylike thing of all.
Tracey:Thanks for joining me today for That's Not Very Ladylike. If today's episode lit a fire, pushed your buttons, called a little BS on the stories we've been sold, share it with another woman who's tired of being told to tone it down, smile more, or play nice. And help a girl out by making sure you subscribe, leave a quick review, and catch me on Instagram at that hormone girl. And until next time, keep getting loud, messy, and raising hell because being ladylike is overrated.