“It was just a friendship.” It’s the sentence almost every emotional affair gets defended with — and the sentence that tends to make the betrayed partner feel worse, not better. The affair was never really about what …
You’ve had this conversation before. Maybe a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. You know what sets it off. You know what your partner is going to say. You know exactly how it ends, because it ends the same way every time. You love …
You’ve been doing the work. You show up to therapy. You’ve gained real insight. You understand your patterns better than you ever have. Your therapist is skilled, and the relationship matters to you. And yet—something speci…