A couple of days ago, I read an article in the Washington Post that has been very troubling. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2017/09/21/are-you-having-an-emotional-affair-its-hard-to-define-but-heres-how-to-figure-it-out/?utm_term=.7bb085e24347#comments ) It contradicts what I have come to see as the core of compassion and reminds me painfully of uninformed mistakes I have made for much of my life.
The article by Lisa Bonos raises the question of whether emotional intimacy with someone not your partner is an unfaithful, destructive affair. She even audaciously proposes that same-sex emotional intimacies may be all right, but heterosexual emotional sharing may be questionable.
I have a point of view that is, as close as I can figure, the direct opposite of the presumptions Lisa seems to base her article on. Our culture has doted on one simple kind of relationship, one in which another person is your one-and-only and your life revolves around that person. For most people, that includes both physical intimacies and emotional intimacies.
“He / she is my best friend” is something I had heard too many times as an exclusive relationship and in support of why two people are married. For many reasons, marriage has come to mean exclusivity and all-fulfilling in a person’s human relationships. This is simply wrong, and so is Lisa Bonos.
If Lisa Bonds is correct, then I am having at least a dozen emotional affairs, as well as an affair with anyone who reads this Barry Garden Path site with any interest. I am sharing my deep emotional life with many people, and I think that has become a treasure and gold mine in my life. I have the good fortune to have many special friends with whom I share emotional openness, and that doesn’t seem either profligate or cheating on others with whom I share a similar friendship.
Being “in a relationship” is a wonderful life adventure and I think that a relationship is often built upon and protected by certain boundaries that the two people might agree upon. I don’t think that agreement should ( yes, should ) ever include emotional bondage. No two people who love one another can sustain that love by agreeing to make the love exclusive. It is a mistake to capture the winged compassionate energy of a “love affair”, put it in a cage, and tell it to sing. The energy will either die locked up, or it will burst free if the individual is to survive.
It has become so clear to me that the love I have for other people, the compassionate experience of oneness, grows the more I practice it. I am not being unfaithful or cheating on anyone if I open my heart to the people I meet getting on the bus or the woman I talk with leaving Trader Joe’s.
Intimacy is not exclusive, it is a practice of being able to connect on a deep level with other humans. It means rising to the second level of awareness, which is unity. I think that kind of connection must be spread around by anyone who can achieve it. Actually, I think that happens naturally as a consequence of insight.
The emotional nature of intimacy is not something I will ever make the mistake again of trying to experience with one special person. Each relationship I have is special in its own way and does not detract from other relationships or my ability to be emotionally connected. In fact, I think it improves it. All the people I “fall in love with” as they get on the bus or pass by in the parking lot increase my ability to be deeply in love with others.
In short, the kind of exclusive emotional relationship described by Lisa Bonos is both pathetic and against the innate compassionate nature of humans.