When does a surface level friendship turn into an Emotional Affair?
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Call me crazy, but I dont like my husband to have female friends. However, my husband has a female friend that he shares a lot of interests with (anime, Pokémon, video games, etc.).
This has been difficult for me because he has told me that he feels like we have very little in common and that we don’t relate to eachother because we don’t share those particular interests.
About 2 months ago, I became uncomfortable with how frequently they communicated (daily texting, often initiated by him), and I expressed that I was no longer comfortable with ongoing private conversations between them. We’ve now had 4 serious conversations about this boundary.
*I should note that all their conversations are very surface level, usually about their favorite shows or video games. Never romantic, never emotionally deep*
There have also been a few incidents that added to my discomfort:
- He and his friends were drinking at our friends apartment, (in the same apartment building as ours), He decided to sleep on the floor of their house and she also fell asleep on the floor. When they woke up, their arms were wrapped around each other while sleeping; he said it was accidental and due to being intoxicated and he was really embarrassed.
- I only found out about that incident because his friends mentioned it casually, assuming I already knew... i did not.
- there have been times where he downplayed or was not fully honest about how often they were communicating, last time I directly asked if they had been talking he said no... they had.
- He let her and his other friend to stay overnight in our home while I was out of the country. (Now this one i might just be salty about. I'm still conflicted if this was wrong)
Most recently, we had our biggest sit-down conversation yet. I explained clearly that if private communication with her via texting continued, the next step for us would be marriage counseling. He agreed to that boundary.
Today, I looked and found that they were still communicating, just on a different app. From what I saw, it was mostly short conversations and sending Instagram reels, nothing romantic in content.
I’m trying to be fair and objective here. From an outside perspective: does this sound like an friendship with poor boundaries, or does it sound like something more concerning? At what point does repeated boundary crossing become a larger trust issue?