Text, lies and betrayal

Emotional infidelity - as hurtful as a sexual betrayal?

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/texts-lies-and-betrayal-2082590.html



By Susan Daly

Saturday February 27 2010

There is a tacit code when it comes to admiring a person who is not your partner: look but don't touch. It's probably best not to be caught looking either but, overall, the consensus would be that the occasional fantasy is all right -- as long as everyone keeps their clothes on.

When we think of love cheats, we think of secret trysts and illicit sex. However, the psychologists and counsellors who work at the frontline of relationship discord say that being caught in flagrante delicto is not the only way to betray your partner. Emotional infidelity -- becoming mentally intimate with someone other than your better half without taking it to a physical level -- can be just as fatal to a relationship's chance of survival.

The definition of infidelity is now as broad as Bill Clinton's interpretation of what constitutes a sexual act. Look at married radio and TV presenter Vernon Kay, forced to apologise on his BBC Radio 1 show this month for sending texts of an explicit nature to several women.

"Now this week, you may or may not be aware that because of some foolish and stupid decisions I have made, I have disappointed and I have let down a lot of people," said Kay. "To my family and everybody, I am very sorry." Clearly, his wife Tess Daly had been very hurt, even if Kay's spokesperson had stated as news of the first text broke: "Vernon has not cheated. He didn't sleep with this girl."

Kay himself had been a bit blasé initially about whether his sex texts were a form of infidelity or not. As he said: "I suppose it's like fantasy land, just words... I thought it was harmless banter and just larking around." KayGate prompted two interesting discoveries: one, that the emotional depths of bland Kay were even shallower than we had suspected; and two, that there is a real division in opinion over what constitutes cheating.

By rights, Ashley Cole should also be grappling with the definition of infidelity. His wife, Girls Aloud sweetheart Cheryl, was understandably not happy that picture messages of his naked bits had been sent to a model. Of course, as we know from Ashley, he lent the phone to a friend, who lent it to another friend, who found the pictures Ashley took of himself "larking about" in his hotel room and had forgotten to delete, and sent them on to this model as a joke.

So thankfully, there is a perfectly innocent and plausible explanation for the whole thing, but it hasn't stopped Cheryl apparently ending their relationship.

Keira Knightley addresses the same debate in an interview with this month's Elle magazine. Her upcoming film, Last Night, deals with a husband and wife who both find themselves presented with opportunities to cheat while away from each other for a night.

"When we were making it," says Knightley, "the arguments on set were just amazing about whether mental infidelity is better or worse than physical infidelity. There was a huge gender divide on the question. Every single woman said that mental infidelity is 10 times worse than [an emotionless physical fling]. And most men I spoke with said that it's the physical act that would be the ultimate betrayal."

If the genders are divided along these battle lines, it might explain Brad Pitt's reiteration last year that he and Angelina Jolie did not have an affair on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith.

He said their early relationship was "respectful" of Jennifer Aniston, which we are to take as meaning there was no hanky panky. Yet Jolie has made a point of saying that it will be nice for her and Pitt's children to "see a movie where their parents fell in love". There might not have been sex, but there were deep feelings.

"Affairs don't have to be sexual to be destructive," says Allison Keating, relationship psychologist at Dublin's bWell clinic. "A relationship is all about intimacy, sharing your hopes and dreams with someone. I personally would want my husband to come home and tell me about the big things of his day. That is the glue of a relationship -- confiding in each other the important things. If you're talking to someone else about those things, and pushing out your partner, that's not just a friendship."

That echoes the definition given by psychologist Shirley Glass in her seminal 2003 book, Not Just Friends: "The new infidelity," she wrote, "is between people who unwittingly form deep, passionate connections before realising that they've crossed the line from platonic friendship into romantic love. Infidelity is any emotional or sexual intimacy that violates trust."

The key message is that if an attached person feels the need to hide their interaction with someone outside the relationship, then they are aware that they are not being completely faithful.

Former US President Jimmy Carter told Playboy magazine back in the '70s that he had had "lust in my heart" for women other than the First Lady.

"I've looked on a lot of women with lust," he said, "I've committed adultery in my heart many times..."

"I've seen from couples down the years that literally a text was considered unacceptable," says Keating. "Some couples don't mind a degree of flirting; for others, it might mean the end. But the point is that a couple tends to be aware of the values they have set up within their particular relationship, and they know when they are crossing the line, even if they try to justify it by saying, 'It was just a text'."

Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service counsellor David Wheeler agrees that people are well aware when they have betrayed their partner's trust.

"We all have male friends and female friends, but there is a certain line that is drawn about what is appropriate and any reasonably intelligent person knows when it crossed."

He takes issue though with the notion that men take emotional entanglements more lightly than women. "Certainly the clients that I have worked with tend to have the same reaction when they discover that there has been that kind of non-sexual contact, but contact on an emotionally deep level," he says.

"The betrayed person feels cheated and angry, and the perpetrators of the betrayal use all the same justifications -- you weren't meeting my needs, it's non-sexual, I'm not doing anything wrong -- whether they are a man or a woman."

Research seems to suggest there's a lot of emotional infidelity going round. A study last year by the London School of Economics found that a quarter of mobile phone users had sent explicit text messages, and one in six used their phone to flirt with people other than their partners.

The ease of modern communication over the internet has made the e-motional affair more than a virtual reality.

Websites such as Facebook and Friends Reunited -- where England goalkeeper David James rekindled a love affair that started off online but cost him his marriage -- are being used to "live out fantasy lives" says Wheeler. He also cites internet pornography and sex chat lines as another form of betrayal because they create a sense of distance.

"Technology has certainly encouraged and exacerbated the situation," says psychologist Allison Keating. "People can be more inappropriate in text or email because there is one step of removal in it."

Some might say this type of 'virtual' infidelity doesn't cut it as a true form of unfaithfulness. That clearly isn't the opinion of the number of people upset enough about their partner's secret online and mobile phone activities to try their hand at a bit of DIY surveillance.

A Munster-based private investigator told Weekend that he has seen an increase in the number of people asking him to extract data from their partner's phones or laptops because they think they are exchanging inappropriate material with an outsider. "I do try to steer away from that because I don't want to get on the wrong side of the law, and it is difficult to prove when it's not a physical affair."

Another investigator, John Martin, runs the online spystore.ie which sells surveillance gadgets. "We are in a grey area in terms of our investigators doing that [he also runs a detective agency] so we leave it up to people to buy the gadgets -- and they do."

SIM card readers were immediately popular when the site was launched. "People send a text and erase it so their partner won't see it. What they don't realise is that most phones save these messages internally and a reader can fish them out."

Also popular is software that can be downloaded on to a computer and retrieve every move, password-protected or not, made on the internet in the previous days. "Parents use it to keep an eye on their children's safety on the internet," says Martin, "and some employers use it to check that their employees are not surfing the net when they should be working. But it's also used by people who suspect their partner is sending inappropriate emails to another person."

Perhaps we are not used to putting the label 'infidelity' on such subtle betrayal, but we are aware of it. In popular culture, the unconsummated love affair is one of the most powerful -- think Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas exchanging lingering looks in The Horse Whisperer.

"The dangerous thing about emotional affairs," says counsellor David Wheeler, "is that they often lead to sexual affairs. Of the couples I have seen where there was a history of one partner getting close to a third party, there have only been four or five instances where that hasn't proceeded to the physical level."

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/are-you-having-an-emotional-affair-2082591.html
Clinical psychotherapist Ronald T Potter-Efron co-authored The Emotional Affair: How To Recognise Emotional Infidelity and What To Do About It. If you want to examine whether your own behaviour falls into the definition of emotional infidelity, he suggests asking yourself if you agree with the following:

* I would prefer having lunch/dinner with someone other than my partner.
* Sometimes it feels as though my friend can read my mind.
* My friend meets emotional needs my partner doesn't.
* I feel empty, lonely and desperate when I cannot contact my friend.

If you agree with the above, then you must ask, 'Is this friendship adding to and complementing my relationship, or is it taking away from it?'

MILF: Mother-in-law fingerpointing

You can almost hear the crack of mother-in-law jokes from here as Ashley Cole rolls out that old misogynistic chesnut...

http://www.herald.ie/opinion/susan-daly-of-course-the-motherinlaw-got-the-blame-it-couldnt-be-ashley-coles-fault-could-it-2081222.html

JUST when you thought Ashley Cole couldn't get any classier -- he blames the mother-in-law.

Has Ashley resurrected the comedian Les Dawson to do his PR? (Sample Dawson joke: "I can always tell when the mother-in-law's coming to stay: the mice throw themselves on the traps.")

Cheryl's mother Joan moved in with the couple two years ago in the wake of Ashley's first jump from the back page of newspapers to the front. A hairdresser called Aimee insisted she'd scored the England defender and the Cole marriage was thought to be in trouble.

Cheryl stood by her man-child, later telling Vogue magazine that she forgave him because he's "got a young mentality for his age anyway". A very attractive quality in a husband, you'll agree. Nonetheless, they stayed together and part of the reconciliation package was to have Joan fetch up in the spare room to support her daughter.

Now that Ashley finds himself back in hot water, he has lashed out and found an easy target. Like any reliable left-back under pressure, Ashley has decided that attack is the best defence.

Really Ashley, was your nine-bedroom mansion not big enough for the three of you? Could you not get a moment to yourself in any one of the five bathrooms, underground swimming pool area and five-a-side football pitch area? Could you not have avoided the mother-in-law by taking the servants' staircase?

Cheryl got one thing right in her marriage to Mr Cole. He's a little boy trapped in adult-size Premiership pants. How depressingly predictable that he won't take responsibility for the devastation of his marriage.

Then again, isn't that we've been told to expect from some men? Take this other theory being circulated by a 'close friend' of Ashley: Cheryl's successful career had driven a wedge between the couple. She left him to his own devices while she was off filming X Factor or on tour with Girls Aloud. Again, it's not me, it's you.

It all sounds terribly familiar. Remember when David Beckham allegedly nipped to the (Rebecca) Loos while holed up alone in Madrid? Somehow it became Posh's fault for not moving lock, stock and barrel of kids to Spain immediately on her hubby's transfer there.

Ashley's 'friends' imply Cheryl failed her marriage by not being at home 24/7 to keep her husband in line. How very 1950s. I bet she doesn't even own a frilly apron, the slattern.

No doubt they would like it very much if Cheryl made like Posh and joined herself at the hip to her husband as soon as suspicion set in. It's such a bogus accusation to level at poor Cheryl. She was a woman of her own making before she met baby-man Ashley. In fact, it probably did her credibility some temporary damage to stay with him as long as she did.

The problem is that while Cheryl is returning to the rest of us here in the 21st century, the door to the time machine that is being a WAG is still open. After all, the players still want them. A talented boy needs a devoted mummy to come home to (and not someone else's devoted mummy, apparently) and kiss their grazed knees better.

The women are to blame too. By aspiring to the post of WAG as some seem to do, they make themselves accessories to their famous and wealthy boyfriends and husbands.

Luckily for Cheryl she can buy her own diamonds and pay her own bills.

He's not the Messiah, Cheryl; he's a very naughty boy

My op-ed in yesterday's Evening Herald about the idiocy of Ashely Cole...

IN the history of lame excuses, it’s as lame as a one-legged duck. According to footballer Ashley Cole, there is a perfectly innocent explanation for why pictures of his wobbly bits were sent from a mobile phone that he owned to the phone of a blonde model.

He forgot he had taken naked pics of himself before he loaned the mobile to a friend who was ‘between phones’. That friend passed it onto another friend. That friend-of-a-friend found the pics, pretended to be Ashley and forwarded them for a larf, innit?

Bloody hell, but Cole is one unlucky fella. If that’s what happened, that’s what happened. Sometimes dogs really do eat homework.

Still and all: who takes naked pictures of themselves when they are alone in their hotel room and saves them on their phone? Cheryl Cole shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about whether to believe her husband’s three-men-and-a-phone explanation. She should just get down to brass tacks and realise that this guy is just too dumb to stay with any longer.

If you are a high-profile young man who has, in the past, been accused of cheating on your equally famous wife, the best policy would surely be to live your life as blamelessly as possible. Taking pics of yourself in the nip and leaving them lying about in a mobile is not clever. It’s sub-stupidity of epic proportions.

Instead of protecting your lovely wife – Britain’s sweetheart, if we are to believe her good press – from any future hurt, you open her up to deep, public humiliation. Cheryl, sweetheart, you can do without him. Don’t believe the lyrics of your own song. Don’t Fight For This Love.

Much has been made of the fact that Cheryl has flown to LA on her own, with a big piece of costume jewellery where her wedding ring should be. It could just be that Ashley is laid up at home with his broken ankle (and wouldn’t it be awful if Cheryl accidentally banged off it with her suitcase on the way out the door.)

But I hope it’s a sign of her intentions. I hope it means she is through with standing by her man.

There is so much to admire about the former Cheryl Tweedy. She dragged herself out of a tough background on a council estate in Newcastle by sheer talent and ambition. By showing her vulnerability and empathy on the X-Factor, she has made herself one of TV’s most popular personalities. She doesn’t deserve to shed any more tears over her husband.

She doesn’t need to stay with him for status or money (John Terry’s wife, do you hear me?) She has made it on her own. She didn’t need to stay with him in 2008 when hairdresser Aimee Walton sold her story to the newspapers. She didn’t need to stay with him when another buxom young lady came forward claiming to have ‘scored’ with the England footballer. She doesn’t need to do it now.

Ashley Cole might well be an innocent party in all this. Cheryl, however, has more to be getting on with than to wait around to find out.

Ashley suffers from the same syndrome as many young Premier League footballers. All they really have is their two right feet. The silly money they earn, and the fame it brings them, can turn their head. Why was Ashley Cole taking pics of his naked glory? If it wasn’t for someone else, it was so he could admire himself. How arrogant is that.

These lads, being constantly told they are the icons of their generation, develop a God complex. They don’t always have the education or the smarts to temper themselves with a bit of modesty.

But do you know what Cheryl – they are not Messiahs. Mostly, they are just very naughty boys.