Something on the side?

How to avoid emotional attachment while having an affair

Having an affair is tricky. Aside from the trouble inherent in evading detection, it is almost impossible to tell how you and your extramarital affair will work out from an emotional perspective.

A lot, of course, depends on your reasons for embarking on an affair. If you are actively seeking a new partner and a way out of your marriage, emotional attachment is probably exactly what you’re looking for with your new partner. But if you’re having an affair just because you think you need a thrill or a bit on the side, then keeping emotions out of it makes it easier to do and get away with.

Honesty

The first point therefore is to be upfront with the person you’re intending to have an affair with. If all you want is fun, then you’d better be honest with them. Firstly – and most importantly – you must tell them that you are married. They deserve to know where they stand. Like anyone in a relationship, if they discover that they’ve been lied to they’ll be hurt and angry.

Keeping a lid on affair is pretty hard as it is. You hurt someone’s feelings then there is no telling what they will do. It is precisely because of this lack of openness that people go so far as to commit murder in an attempt to hide their activities. If you’re just after some casual fun, then make that clear. Don’t proclaim undying love and buy presents. Stick to sex.

Anonymity

A second strategy is to maintain a degree of anonymity. The more you let someone into your life, the greater the opportunities are for you to become too interested in each other. You don’t have to lie about your job or your relationship, but you don’t have to tell the other person any great detail. They needn’t know where your office is or what you do there. By keeping some of the detail of your life away from their knowledge, there is less basis for feelings to grow.

If you’ve got the opportunity, you could even go so far as to use a false name, a disposable phone number and a one-off email address.

The Amount of Contact

Thirdly, minimise the contact you have with the other person.The more you talk to them, the more you grow to like them. If you start sharing jokes… telling each other what your day at the office was like and so on ever day, then you are putting your affair on a different level. You are also harming your marriage. This is the stuff that you are supposed to share with your spouse. By sharing it with someone else, you are subconsciously putting the new relationship on the same kind of footing as your marriage. That quickly leads to questions forming in your own head about who you truly love.

Be Prepared to Cut it Off

If you’re planning to avoid getting tangled up in someone else’s emotional life, you have to have a certain degree of calculation about you. You can take all the steps you like to stop yourself becoming too attached to the other person, but if they’re investing more in you then you have to be prepared to cut and run. Look for danger signs:

• Proclamations of love.
• An increasing amount of contact between you
• More sharing of day to day troubles
• Starting to dismiss your partner between yourselves in conversation

Once you start to cross these bridges, you are putting yourself in a more emotionally attuned situation. You need to remember that you came into this for sex and thrills. If and when you start to feel emotion creeping into the equation, you have to be prepared to cut things off.

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