Many of us spend more hours with our colleagues than our spouses, and our scarce time at home is often spent discussing children and domestic issues.
We end up sharing the more interesting and intimate experiences with friends at work -- our fears, our hopes, our feelings.
Having minutely picked over the lost promotion, the secret idea for writing a book, the terror of hitting 40 with an attractive, flirtatious colleague, there's no need to repeat yourself telling it all over again to your husband or wife.
Slowly, insidiously, you start shutting your partner out. Contrary to popular myth, it's not the big events that build and strengthen a marriage -- birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine's Day and Christmas - but the day-today intimacies: the shared laughter and special confidences.
Remove them from your relationship with your spouse, and what's left?
Conversations about gas bills and whose turn it is to walk the dog.
Add this to the inevitable waning of sexual frisson that takes place in any long-term relationship and it is but a short, dangerous step to seeing your friend as more exciting and desirable than the dull, boring person to whom you are married.
Don't forget, this is how you ended up married in the first place: by what is rather quaintly known as courting.
Remember the thrill of waiting for the phone to ring? The excitement of dressing up for a date? The getting-to-know-you ritual of exchanging personal details?
Why would you want to do this again with someone new? The job is already taken.
When you get married, you are making a choice and a statement: This is the person with whom I wish to share not just my life, bank account and DNA, but the very essence of who I am. It's not a role that requires an understudy.
However much you kid yourself, when you indulge in an emotional affair, you are auditioning someone for more than a walk-on part.
If your spouse doesn't understand you, it's probably because you haven't been explaining yourself to them.
But instead of admitting the truth, you tell yourself you've grown apart.
You want different things from life. You don't make each other happy. It's like living with a stranger.
Your special friend, on the other hand, seems to know you inside out.
Sometimes you don't even need to speak to know what's in each other's minds.
Little wonder, when you've spent months studying each other as if they are your specialist subject on Mastermind.
In and of itself, a close friendship with a member of the opposite sex shouldn't be a threat. But if it tourniquets the lifeblood of your marriage, your relationship will wither and die.
Marriage needs constant and attentive nurturing. By all means, enjoy a drink with friends after work, chat about the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
But if you value the person you've promised to cherish until death parts you, make sure it is into their ear -- and their ear only -- that you whisper those sweet nothings.
Source: Daily Mail (UK). Powered by Yellowbrix.
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