The First Rule of Quasi-Affair Club: "Ten Year Affair" by Erin Somers

A friend asked me out of the blue the other day whether I had a lot of "platonic friendships." Depending on how rigorously one reads Plato, that could mean several things, but I had a feeling he meant it in the more generally used sense of being friends with a woman but not romantically involved with her.* 

"You mean," do I have a lot of female friends?" I asked to be sure.

When he said that was, in fact, what he meant, I said that I did have a few, and I was even close with some of them, but that I tried to be careful of those relationships. I always feel at least some level of attraction to female friends, so I have to be honest with myself what my intentions are with some of the interactions I have. 

That doesn't mean that I eschew all female companionship other than Mrs. Heretic just because I feel some level of attraction to these friends. On the contrary, I fully believe in the life-affirming value of a low-key, unspoken-but-felt attraction between two people that is "platonic" on one level but might, in the world of the imagination, be not only non-platonic, but outright filthy. I think a healthy and happy marriage can endure many of these relationships from both spouses over the years, but only if they follow the rules.

"But what rules, Jake?" you say. I'm glad you asked. For I am not only an expert semi-skilled literary critic, but also a six-sigma blackbelt in the art of the quasi-affair. For years, I've kept the rules of conducting these relationships to myself, but today, for the low-low price of nothing, I am giving them away. 

What makes a quasi-affair, or quasi-romance? You've probably had them as far back as middle school. There's someone of the opposite sex (again, please see my disclaimer at the bottom) you interact with, and you feel some attraction, but maybe she's dating someone else or you are or it's just not strong enough to pursue or your mom won't let you date girls yet or whatever. So you more or less flirt. It's fun. Occasionally, it might be more serious than that. Maybe you share some real trouble you're going through, and you have an actual deep discussion. Both of you meet emotional needs for one another, and the fact that it remains uncomplicated makes it easier to keep meeting those needs.

If done right, the quasi-affair or "emotional affair" will never leave you like this person, inexplicably taking the time to button his shirt instead of just leaving quickly and buttoning it outside.

As adults, one of the most common ways to find a quasi-romance partner is through work. There's an opposite sex (read the note at the bottom) co-worker, and you interact a lot, and you get along and find a lot to like about each other. But she's married and so are you, so it never goes beyond being friendly at work. 

Well, it kind of does. There are a million small cues you can give each other to let the other person know there's some level of attraction there. Depending on how strong these signals are, the relationship might become strong enough to be an "emotional affair," or an affair that's got everything in it but the fucking. 

It's not even necessary that both parties are attached otherwise. If one person is married and the other isn't, this is still a good place for a quasi-romance to bloom. What's important is that both parties are getting something emotional out of it. For the married person, they are confirming that they've "still got it" without needing to undo the family unit. They gain confidence. For the unmarried person, they also gain a feeling of satisfaction from being attractive enough that even a married person would be willing to flirt with danger with them. Through a million unspoken and daily interactions, both are confirming for the other that, "Yes, you are an attractive person." 

In a happy marriage, the satisfaction comes from going deep into a relationship. It's very fulfilling, and it's worth the work, but it also frustrates a human impulse in which romance is more about breadth than depth. We want to know that a lot of people find us attractive, even if we don't want to have relationships with them. We want to know we aren't stuck with this person out of necessity, even if we wish to remain stuck with them out of commitment. 

If both parties in a quasi-romance do it right, they can satisfy one another's emotional needs for years, even decades. Because the romance never turns sexual, the fantasies never get old. There is always potential energy in the relationship that never gets turned to kinetic, never wears out or gets used up, and that helps preserve one's energy in general. 

I recently told Mrs. Heretic that the only reason I ever did anything remotely grown-up in my twenties and thirties was because I thought I would get laid for it. As we go deep in our real romances, this motivation wanes, but a quasi-romance can shame us into exercise or motivate us to work hard so we look good at work. There are a lot of plusses to a quasi-romance, but you have to follow the rules.

Okay, I've teased the rules a lot now, so what are they? There aren't a lot.

1. The first rule of Quasi-Affair Club is that you don't talk about the quasi-affair with the quasi-affair partner. 

2. That is also the second rule. 

Yeah, I Fight Clubbed my rules. 

What makes a quasi-romance so great is its endless potential to be anything. It's a very delicate thing, though. Ask too much of it, and it will quickly fall apart. You can't send a drunk text to the quasi-romance partner asking, "Hey, what are we doing here, really?" You can't even say, "I wish we could be romantically involved, even though I realize we can't." That ruins it.

The point of these relationships is to allow each other to live a separate life, one that's full of quotidian, bullshit responsibilities that have nothing to do with the quasi-romance itself. It's a symbiotic relationship in which both parties restore the self-esteem of the other without requiring anything permanent. Through words and gestures, one person tells the other that they are attractive and that maybe, in a different universe, there might have been something there. And that needs to be enough for both.

There are three things that can happen when you bring the latent feelings out in the open. One is that the other party will tell you they don't feel the same way, in which case, you've lost all the good feelings you had. The second option is that the they tell you they do feel the same way and they want to be with you, and now you have to make a choice. Everything just got real in a relationship where the whole value was in its fantasy quality. The third choice is that you both acknowledge your feelings but decide to not do anything about them for family reasons. This preserves the status quo in the real-world relationship, but the fantasy relationship will never be the same. 

Note that the rules of Quasi-Affair Club to do apply to people who are in unhappy relationships and who therefore want to have real affairs. That's a different thing, and we'll look at whether Cora or Sam really should have been in Real Affair Club instead of Quasi-Affair Club below.

Do you see what Cora did wrong, class?

"Ten Year Affair" by Erin Somers understands the value of a quasi-affair. When Sam, the long-term quasi-romance of Cora, finally decides to leave his wife and ask Cora to run off with him, Cora is actually kind of put out. He asks what she is thinking, and she responds, "None of your business." She's right when she thinks, "Really, it had almost nothing to do with him."

The reasons she's right to think this is that in a correctly run quasi-romance, the internal imagination of each party, or what it means to them, isn't the business of the other party. Whatever it's meant to her for the ten years they were together, it's none of Sam's business. He was something she needed to get her though whatever emotional shit she was going through, and she was the same to him. But there's no need to explain what that something was. If she wants to tell another girlfriend about it, that's fine, but Sam can never know. 

The problem, though, is that Cora openly admitted early on what her feelings for Sam were. She kind of harassed him a bit, actually. It's easy to understand why. Cora is used to being told she has a great personality, but she isn't much of a sex symbol. She wants, for once, to be objectified. She wants to get fucked "into the astral plane" and forget about her life for a while. That's all very understandable and valid, but saying it out loud is a violation of the rules of Quasi-Affair Club. 

As I said above, the rules of Quasi-Affair Club only apply to people who are more or less happily married and looking to remain so. The quasi-affair is an outlet meant to prevent a real affair. Cora, although she seems mostly happy in her marriage, also really wants an affair. I think Cora has pursued the wrong thing. If what she wants is to feel desired, then maybe what she wanted was a consensual, no-strings sexual relationship, maybe one she could have told her husband about. If he wasn't okay with that, there are other options, like swinging. Cora wanted more than just to feel attractive, she wanted to feel smolderingly attractive. So she brought the rules from the Real Affair Club into the Quasi-Affair Club, which is why the thing was ultimately doomed. Unfortunately for Sam, it seems like he's the one who's going to suffer for it. 

Why does Sam, who seems to only want an emotional affair, eventually succumb to wanting a real one? And why, when he does, does he take it so much further than Cora wanted to? We can only guess. Maybe it has something to do with how capable his wife, Jules, is. Maybe over time, he's begun to think that Jules doesn't think much of him, because he's the weak half in their relationship. Cora has never wanted anything but to have torrid sex with him, so it may have eventually seemed to him that his emotional needs would have been met better with her.

After Cora has been imagining a real affair with Sam for years while also managing her real life, we get a sneak peak into what Sam's imagination has been doing with the relationship. To Cora's surprise, in Sam's fantasy, she is reading poetry instead of doing mom stuff. She's almost offended by it. This is why the first rule of Quasi-Affair Club is that you don't talk about the quasi-affair with the person you're having the quasi-affair with. You'll likely to find out that you're getting different things out of it and that you're being put into the imaginary life of the other person in a very different way from what you'd hope. Which is fine as long as nobody ever reveals this to the other person.

Sam's feelings for Cora were more "platonic," and therefore, perhaps, a little deeper. The danger of Cora's feelings for Sam was that if her fantasy ever came true, it might end up in a tryst they'd have to keep hidden. The danger of Sam's feelings for Cora was that if his fantasy ever came true, he'd leave his wife and wreck a couple of homes.

There was nothing wrong with the way either Sam or Cora felt. Human psychology is strange and often doesn't make any sense. We need to feel desired sometimes by people we cannot begin to fulfill. A sensitive person will understand this need in others and fill it, having their own needs met in return, and neither couple ever needs to acknowledge it. "Ten Year Affair" is incredibly perceptive in understanding these rules, and the way it shows its understanding is by observing what happens from breaching them.

*Throughout this post, I'm going to be casually talking about male-female relationships in a way that I acknowledge may come across as "heteronormative," meaning it might seem to suggest that heterosexual attraction is the assumed sexual orientation. I don't mean to do that, but it ended up being very cumbersome to keep qualifying everything with "in heterosexual relationships" or a similar caveat. Please read this entire post as though it were in brackets. Around those brackets are all the other sexual ways of being in the world that aren't heterosexual and more or less nuclear-family-centric. These other ways aren't "abnormal," even if they're not in the majority. I'm equating relationships in this post to heterosexual relationships because writing it the other way wasn't pretty.