S3 E1: Before the Affair: When Friendship Becomes Emotional Betrayal

Gabriella Pomare: Welcome back to Before It Breaks with Gabriella Pomari. And welcome to season three. It feels really nice to be back here because, in a lot of ways, this season is gonna take us back to where the podcast began. You know, those more intimate conversations about the things that happen inside relationships before anybody is necessarily left. You know, before there's been an affair or before someone's called a lawyer. Before the relationship has visibly broken. Now, season one was very much about those conversations, and so many of the episodes that resonated most with you were the ones about emotional affairs, DMs, work wives, betrayal, resentment, and emotional distance. Then in season two, I stepped out of the hot seat a little and I brought in some pretty incredible guests. And I loved those conversations too. But coming into season three, I kept thinking about the heart of this show and what I wanted to come back to. So for the first little part of this season, I'm back in the hot seat. Just you and me. And we will absolutely still have guests when another voice really adds something. But I also want this season to become much more of a conversation with you, which is why I'm introducing something called Dear Gabriella. And yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. Your questions, your relationship dilemmas, the thing happening in your marriage that you haven't quite known how to name, or something that happened years ago that you now understand completely differently with hindsight. And I want all sides of the stories. I don't want every episode to be about identifying the villain or the victim, because relationships are rarely that simple. People hurt each other, people avoid things, people lie, people justify things to themselves and While understanding behavior never means excusing it, I do think understanding how people get there matters. So today, we're starting with before the affair. Not really the affair itself, but what happened before it. What happens when silence begins to replace honesty or when somebody outside the relationship starts making you feel more seen or alive than the person at home does or When a friendship begins to move into something else. And then what happens if that boundary is crossed when two people are left trying to work out whether trust can actually be rebuilt? Now, I've pulled together three dear Gabriella messages around those themes. And this is the first one. Dear Gabriella, I've been married for 11 years and we have two kids. Nothing dramatic's happened, but my husband has become incredibly quiet. We used to talk about everything, and now we mainly talk about children, work, groceries, and weekend plans, and if I ask him if something's wrong, he says he's tired or stressed. There's also a woman at work whose name comes up quite a lot. I genuinely don't think they're having a physical affair, but when he talks about her he suddenly has energy. He laughs, he seems interested in something. And last week when I walked into the kitchen while he was messaging someone, he quickly put his phone down and When I asked him who it was, he said it was her. And he became defensive, saying, I'm allowed to have friends. But I kept thinking that whatever's happening between them seems to have excitement, and whatever's happening between us doesn't. Am I insecure? Could things have already started? Now, I think the last question's really interesting. Because yes, I think something can begin long before anybody would be prepared to call it an affair. That doesn't mean every close friendship is dangerous, and it certainly doesn't mean that having chemistry or connection with somebody outside your relationship automatically means you've betrayed your partner. The thing that stands out to me in this message is not actually the woman at work. It's the silence at home. There are quiet seasons in every long-term relationship. Life gets busy and children are exhausting. Work becomes demanding and there will absolutely be periods where you're functioning more like very efficient management team than two wildly romantic people. But silence becomes different when it starts protecting us from honesty. You know, when I'm fine really means I don't know how to tell you I'm lonely, or when I'm tired means I don't feel like myself anymore. Or when somebody stops saying what's actually going on because they're frightened of what the conversation might open up. And I think that's often what people are protecting themselves from when they avoid telling their partner the truth. It's not always the other person that they're afraid of. Sometimes they're afraid of what honesty would require from them. If I admit I'm unhappy, then what happens? Or if I tell you I don't feel connected to you anymore. Does that mean our marriage is in trouble? If I tell you I'm attracted to somebody else, does that change everything? And sometimes avoidance feel safer. But the problem is that those feelings rarely disappear simply because we don't speak about them. And sometimes they find somewhere else to go. Now the thing that matters here is that this husband appears to have a kind of emotional energy somewhere. Else that his wife's no longer experiencing at home. And that doesn't prove an affair, but it is information. And there's something incredibly powerful about being seen by somebody when you haven't felt seen for a long time at home. They laugh at your jokes. They ask what you think. They notice things about you. And suddenly you're not just mum or dad or the person organizing dinner and school and sport and bills. You're yourself again. And I think if we're trying to understand what happens before affairs, we have to be willing to talk about how intoxicating that can feel without pretending that the feeling itself excuses whatever somebody chooses to do next. Now, if I was sitting across from this couple, I'd probably ask them less about this particular woman at work and more about when they stopped really talking to each other. What became too difficult to say? What did they assume instead of asking? What happened between them before somebody else began to matter? Now let's move on to message two. Dear Gabriella, I think I might be the person everybody hates in this story. I've been with my partner for nine years, and over the last eight months I have become very close to someone I work with. At first it genuinely was friendship. We worked together, we started having lunch, and then started messaging outside work and eventually we began talking about our relationships. Nothing physical has happened, but I know something isn't right because I've started deleting some of our messages. I think about him all the time and if something happens during the day, he's often the first person that I want to tell. I feel more like myself when I'm talking to him than I have at home for years. And I keep telling myself this isn't cheating because we've never kissed, but I think I might only be saying that because I don't want it to stop. Have I already had an affair? This is where it becomes much harder because everybody wants a clear line. We like to think there's a moment where friendship ends and cheating begins, and that if nobody's kissed or slept together, then perhaps the line hasn't technically been crossed. But emotional intimacy doesn't work that neatly. I mean, for me, an emotional fare is not simply having a close relationship with someone who is in your partner. We all need friendships, and your partner can't possibly be expected to meet every emotional need that you have. But I think it becomes something different when that emotional connection starts to compete with or replace the intimacy of the primary relationship, particularly when secrecy becomes necessary to maintain it. And that's the part of this message that tells us the most. I've started deleting the messages. Now there's a difference between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is part of being an individual human being, right? Even when you're in a relationship. But secrecy is when you need to control what your partner knows because the full truth would change their understanding of what you're doing. So one question that I think is useful when a friendship starts becoming blurry is simply this. Would I behave Exactly the same way if my partner was sitting beside me. Would I send this message? Would I make this joke? Would I share this much about our relationship? Would I be completely comfortable if my partner had exactly this connection with someone else? Because human beings are incredibly good at constructing explanations around behavior that we don't want to give up. We're just friends. Nothing physical has happened. And sometimes those things are true. But sometimes we're using them to create a technical loophole. And I think this message captures that perfectly when she says, Maybe I keep telling myself it isn't cheating because I don't want it to stop. Now, emotional affairs very often don't begin with some grand intention to betray a partner. They grow. A lunch becomes a message, which becomes a private joke, which becomes sharing something personal, which becomes telling someone things about your relationship that often your partner doesn't even know. And eventually that person becomes the first person that you want to tell things to. And that's when I think it's worth becoming very curious, not just about the other person, but about what you're getting from that relationship that feels so compelling. I mean, this woman says she feels more like herself when she talks to the other guy. That matters. Maybe she feels interesting again, maybe she feels desirable again. Maybe somebody's curious about her in a way that nobody has been for a long time. Now that doesn't justify the emotional affair, but it tells us something about what's missing, either in her primary relationship or her own life, or both. And that's why simply cutting contact may not actually fix everything. You can delete the number, block the person, and never speak again. But if the two people at home still don't understand how one of them ended up needing that connection so badly, then you haven't really addressed the underlying problem. Message three. Last year, I discovered that my husband had been having what he calls an emotional fare for about six months. He says they never slept together, and yeah, I believe him. But there were hundreds of messages. He told her things about our marriage. He told her he felt trapped and he wondered what life would have been like if he had met her first. He deleted messages, and when I asked if something was happening, he looked at me in the face and told me I was imagining it. He ended things with her and says that he wants our marriage. He's apologized a hundred times. But I still ask questions. And recently he said, How many times are we gonna go over this? I've said I'm sorry, I'm still here. What else can I do? Now, I don't want to punish him and I genuinely want us to survive, but the hardest thing is that I don't trust myself anymore. I knew something was wrong and he convinced me I was imagining it. I think that that line about no longer trusting yourself is one of the most painful parts of betrayal. Because sometimes the injury is not simply that your partner wanted someone else. It's that they allowed you to live inside a version of reality that wasn't true. You asked whether something was happening and they said no. You sensed something was wrong and they told you that you were insecure or you were imagining things. And because this was the person you trusted the most, you believe them over your own instincts. And then you discover that your instincts were right. So now you don't only have to work out whether you can trust your partner again. You have to work out whether you can trust yourself again. And that is why saying sorry and repairing are not actually the same thing. An apology says, I know that I hurt you, but repair is much more active. It says, I'm prepared to understand how I hurt you, to look honestly at what I did and to change the conditions that allowed it to happen, and to tolerate the fact that rebuilding trust may take longer than I'd like. And sometimes repair means answering the same question again and again. Sometimes it means transparency. Sometimes it means professional help. Sometimes it means having a very uncomfortable conversation about what was happening in the relationship before the affair. But understanding the problems existed in a relationship doesn't mean blaming the hurt partner for the betrayal. And I think that distinction matters. I mean, you can say we were disconnected or I was lonely. I didn't know how to talk to you anymore. And I responded to that by making choices that hurt you. But that's very different from saying I did this because you neglected me. One is explanation with accountability, and the other is explanation being used as an excuse. And I think the person who was hurt's allowed to understand what happened without being asked to excuse it. They can ask why. They can ask what this other person represented. They can ask what was going on inside the relationship. They can try to reconstruct what happened. Because betrayal has disrupted their understanding of their own life. And at some point, though, more detail can stop bringing clarity and simply create more pain. And that's the line that will be very different for every person and every relationship. Now people ask whether a relationship can become stronger after an affair. And I think some absolutely can, but not because the betrayal itself was somehow a good thing. It's the work afterwards that. can make a relationship stronger. You know, the honesty, the conversations that should have happened years earlier. Sometimes a rupture forces two people to finally look at things they've spent a very long time avoiding. But not every relationship survives and survival is not always the goal. Sometimes the person who caused the harm is not willing to be accountable. Sometimes the person who was hurt simply can't rebuild trust and Sometimes the affair reveals that somebody has already emotionally left the relationship long before anyone knew it. And sometimes people stay and build something very different together. And if that happens, I don't think the goal should necessarily be to get the old relationship back. If the old relationship included years of silence and resentment and avoidance, why would you want that relationship to start again? Maybe you build a new one. But with the same person. And this is really why I wanted to begin the season here. Because the interesting part of before it breaks isn't simply what happens once everything's exploded. It's the point where there may still be time for a different conversation. So instead of just asking each other, are we okay? Because most people will simply answer, Yeah, ask better questions. Do you feel seen by me? Is there something you've stopped telling me because you don't think I'll hear you? Are you lonely in this relationship? Do you still feel like yourself here? Is there resentment between us that we keep avoiding? Is there something you need from me that you don't know how to ask for? And perhaps the hardest one. Is there something outside this relationship where you're starting to feel more alive than you do inside of it? Because that somewhere or something isn't always another person. It could be work or social media or drinking or exercise or parenting or anything that slowly becomes an escape from what's really difficult at home. And so the question's not whether we should remove everything outside the relationship that brings us joy. It's whether somewhere along the way, we've stopped bringing ourselves home. Now. The other part of season three that I want to introduce is don't do what I did. You know, the hindsight story, the thing that somebody understands now that they wish they had understood then. And today's is this. For almost a year, I told myself I wasn't having an affair because we never slept together. That became my loophole. I deleted messages, I hid my phone. I complained about my wife to another woman and I waited until my wife went to bed so I could message that other woman. And every time I felt guilty I told myself nothing had actually happened. And by the time something physically finally did happen, I can see now that the betrayal had already been going on for months. And if I could go back, I wouldn't keep asking myself whether it technically counted as cheating. I'd ask why I needed to hide it from the person I said I loved. And I think that that is probably the question that I want to leave you with today. We become very focused on where the line is, the kiss, the sex, the message, the declaration. But sometimes the more important question comes earlier. Why does this need to be a secret? What am I avoiding? What is this giving me? And what would I have to confront if it stopped? Because the affair is very often not the first moment the relationship's in trouble. It may simply be the first moment the trouble becomes impossible to ignore. So that is where we're starting season three. Before the affair. Before everything breaks. In the much quieter place where there may still be time to tell the truth. And before I go. If something in today's episode made you think I have a story about this, I really want to hear it. This season, Dear Gabriella and Don't Do What I Did are going to be shaped by you and by the things that are actually happening in your relationships, your separations, and your lives. You can submit your story completely anonymously through the link to my website in the show notes. So if there's something you want to share, but you don't want your name attached to it, that's absolutely fine. You can also DM me on Instagram. I'm at the Gabriella Pomari. And that's probably the best place to keep the conversation going between episodes as well. Come and tell me what you thought about today's episode, whether you agreed with me, whether you didn't, and what you want us to talk about next. Or whether there's a question that you think deserves its own, dear Gabriella. And if you haven't already, follow me there because I'll be sharing much more of these conversations, listener questions, and behind the scenes parts of the podcast. Throughout season three. And finally, there's something else I'm very excited to be able to start talking about this season. My new book, Before It Breaks, is coming in early 2027. It takes so many of these conversations further: modern relationships, the things we avoid saying to one another, the patterns that slowly create distance, and the conversations I think we need to be having much earlier. Before we arrive at the point where something feels Irreparable. There will be much more about the book over the coming months, and I can't wait to share it with you. But for now, send me your stories. Send me your dear Gabriella. Send me the thing you wish you had known sooner for Don't Do What I Did. Because someone listening may be standing exactly where you once stood. And your hindsight might be the thing that helps them have a very different conversation. I'm Gabriella Pomari and this is Before It Breaks. And I'll see you next time.