“An affair that cannot happen”

“An affair that cannot happen” names the paradox at the center of Emmi Rothner and Leo Leike’s email relationship: each can experience it as intimate and consequential, while treating its separation from ordinary life as the condition that makes it possible. The phrase begins as Emmi’s attempt to draw a limit around their growing attachment; it becomes more troubling as their imagined closeness crosses into voices, marriage, and the prospect of meeting.

Naming an impossible affair

Emmi proposes the phrase while asking Leo to stop writing. She describes the correspondence as far removed from real life and contrasts it with a family skiing holiday that, despite its irritations, was peaceful, harmonious, and good enough. She admits that she thought of Leo during the trip, including when the family was having a pleasant time, and finds this preoccupation unsettling. The contrast gives her argument its force: the emails may be pleasurable, but they are taking up space in a life she also values.

Emmi calls herself, from Leo’s perspective, a fantasy assembled out of a few letters, and describes him as a way to experience the early stages of an affair without actually having one. By her account, they have already reached the second or third stage of an affair that cannot happen. The phrase is therefore not a claim that the feelings are unreal. It marks the gap between the emotional experience taking place in writing and the real-world relationship neither has openly undertaken.

A proposed ending and a proposed experiment

Emmi asks whether they should call it a day, warning that continuing could make the situation ridiculous. Leo does not simply accept the proposed ending. He suggests that they first play their recognition game, hoping that meeting might make it easier to break off the relationship afterward. He also acknowledges that even if he stops writing and waiting for her emails, he will still think about her. The exchange leaves the phrase suspended between two possible meanings: a warning to stop, and a description of a bond neither can readily end.

Their correspondence makes that tension more immediate when Leo explains what Emmi has become to him. He calls her a second voice accompanying him through the day, turning his inner monologue into dialogue and helping him through loneliness after his mother’s death. He also imagines that meeting her then would have stripped away their secrets and puzzles, leaving them overwhelmed by the family burdens he might disclose and vulnerable to disenchantment. His fear is not simply that the affair cannot happen, but that making it happen could destroy the form of intimacy he already depends on.

The boundary between email and daily life

Emmi’s household makes the separation concrete. In an email written from her study, she imagines the furniture, piano, bookcase, CD player, wine rack, and bed registering Leo’s intrusion into her domestic world. She insists that he cannot become part of it and that they must remain outside it. At the same time, she describes a marriage with Bernhard Rothner grounded in respect and mutual dependence, shared music and theater, common friends, and their family life with Fiona and Jonas. Her insistence that the household is secure does not erase the correspondence; it shows why she wants the two worlds kept apart.

The format begins to strain that boundary. During an exchange of voice messages, Leo turns their new access to one another’s voices into an invitation to come to his apartment, offering a taxi and suggesting they could remain in darkness. The proposal moves beyond the written fantasy toward a physical meeting, even as he tries to define limits around it. The change in medium makes the relationship feel more immediate without resolving what either person is prepared to do about it.

Exposure and consequence

Bernhard eventually discovers the scale of the hidden relationship. He finds a folder of printed emails in a secret drawer in Emmi’s room, copies them, and later reads them all in one night during a hiking trip. In his message to Leo, he says the correspondence has disrupted his family life and describes Emmi as absorbed in an other world, increasingly distracted from him. After reading the emails, he is unable to get out of bed and is taken to hospital. The affair that was supposed to remain outside everyday life has acquired consequences within the marriage even before Emmi and Leo meet.

The first planned meeting is then canceled at the last minute. Emmi explains that Bernhard, who usually calls her Emma, unexpectedly addresses her as Emmi when she says she is meeting a friend. The single-letter difference unsettles her: she feels exposed, as though Bernhard has recognized the identity and desire she associates with Leo. She cannot send Leo a message explaining that she will not come, and writes that she thinks she loves him and that Bernhard has sensed it. The phrase’s impossibility has thus shifted: what once referred to a romance kept safely in words now describes a relationship that has already altered how Emmi experiences her marriage and herself.

Immediately after Emmi’s explanation, an automatic delivery notice reports that the recipient’s email address has changed and that incoming messages will be deleted. The notice closes the exchange not with a decision jointly explained by either correspondent, but with a technical barrier to contact. That abrupt ending sharpens the phrase’s double meaning: the relationship has proved emotionally real, while the means by which it existed can be cut off without resolving what it meant.