There is a conversation that resurfaces every time a television drama puts an affair at its centre, and it always goes the same way: people insist loudly that it would never happen to them, and then, more quietly, admit that something has at some point flickered. A colleague whose emails you reread. A friend of a friend you were disproportionately pleased to see. The feeling is usually small, inconvenient and deeply embarrassing — and treating it as evidence that your relationship is failing is, in my experience, the single fastest way to make it bigger than it is.
A feeling is not a decision
Attraction is largely involuntary. It responds to novelty, to attention, to someone catching you at a moment when you feel interesting rather than depleted. Being in a committed relationship does not switch off the part of you that notices other people; it asks you to decide what you do about it. Those are two completely different events, and collapsing them into one is where the panic comes from.
What makes a crush feel so loaded in a long partnership is the comparison it invites. You are comparing an edited, two-hour-a-week version of a stranger with the person who has seen you at your worst, who is standing in the kitchen asking about the recycling. That is not a fair contest, and it is not a verdict on your partner. Nobody is charming over the question of whose turn it is to deal with the boiler.
