Christmas parties are usually harmless. Bit of food, a few drinks, everyone pretending the Secret Santa budget wasn’t completely ignored.
But every year here in Swords, Balbrigan, Port Marnock or Malahide you may hear the same kind of story. Not about affairs, but about moments.
Not dramatic moments.
Just small, quiet ones that don’t feel like much at the time and then sit in your head afterwards.
The tiny shift people don’t notice
You’re at the work Christmas do.
Someone you normally talk to about nothing, printers, weather, whatever, someone ends up beside you for longer than usual.
A bit of chat.
A bit more personal than expected.
Nothing physical.
No big “crossing the line” moment.
But something feels different.
You walk away thinking,
“Hmm… that was a bit close.”
And you’re not sure why.
That’s the type of moment if our partner asked us we could say:
“Nothing happened… it was nothing”
Why it’s not “nothing” and not an affair either
Shirley Glass had a simple way of explaining this.
Every relationship has walls and windows.
Your window should face your partner. That’s where the real sharing happens.
Your wall faces everyone else. Friendly, but with limits.
At a Christmas party, that setup can quietly tilt the wrong way.
A tiny emotional window opens somewhere it shouldn’t.
Not because you’re looking for it, but because the conditions make it easy. Soft lighting, relaxed rules, long chats, maybe too much wine.
No alarms go off.
No big choices are made.
It just happens.
And that’s the danger. Not the affair, but the drift.
What “crossing a line” actually looks like in real life
People imagine crossing a line as something dramatic.
But in reality, it’s much smaller.
- Telling someone else something you haven’t told your partner
- Enjoying the attention more than you expected
- Editing stories to look “less taken”
- Feeling seen by someone you never thought twice about
- Thinking about them afterwards when you don’t want to
Nothing here is an affair.
But these are the early shifts that make couples uncomfortable later.
Most couples can fix this long before it becomes anything serious
The thing that actually helps relationships isn’t suspicion or policing who talks to who.
It’s awareness.
Couples who stay close usually:
- Notice when something felt a bit off
- Say it out loud instead of burying it
- Turn the emotional window back toward home
- Repair a moment before it turns into a problem
This isn’t about blame.
It’s about two people getting back on the same page.
If this is still lingering in your mind
You’re not the only one who’s had a moment like this.
It doesn’t make you a bad partner.
It doesn’t mean you’ve had an affair.
It means you’re human.
But if something from the Christmas party is still sitting in your stomach, or things have felt slightly off at home since, counselling can help you slow it down and actually understand what happened underneath the moment.
You don’t have to figure it out on your own.