It's one person making a unilateral decision to cultivate nonsexual intimacy with someone other than their primary romantic partner in a way that weakens or undermines the relationship. Many see this type of connection as having an erotic component to it.
What Does It Mean To Mentally Cheat? Mentally cheating is thinking about cheating or being with someone else outside of your marriage or relationship. If you are in a relationship or married and there is someone you cannot stop thinking about who isn't your partner, it could be said that you are cheating.
Signs of emotional cheating
You confide in the other person about the intimate details of your relationship troubles. You've become more detached and emotionally disconnected from your partner. You think about the other person all the time. You are less intimate with your partner.
An emotional affair may not involve physical intimacy. However, it can still be a form of infidelity if one partner undermines the other by over-relying on another person for emotional attachment.
The Effect of Emotional Cheating
If these trust issues remain unsolved, the person cheated on can no longer form healthy relationships with other people. They can become paranoid and feel threatened by their partner's friendships. They can try to restrict these friendships as an effect of their psychological trauma.
You feel attractive/sexy — and interesting.
And it can be especially magnetic if you tend to be insecure about your looks or yourself generally. Emotional cheating can offer validation of you as a person that's hard to resist.
There are two types of cheating – physical and emotional. While the former is self-explanatory, involving an attraction that leads to some kind of physical proximity, intimacy, and contact; the latter, has more to do with finding a connection with someone on a psychological level.
Emotional cheating consist of receiving emotional support or validation from someone outside your relationship and to do it in a way that erode trust, foster secrecy or create feelings of betrayal or jealousy. While flirting doesn't always equate to emotional cheating, it can be an indicator.
Sometimes compulsive behavior stems from mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and OCD. Research shows that antidepressants may help reduce some of the obsessions and compulsions associated with cheating behavior. Keep in mind that medications alone rarely change behavior.
Having open conversations with your partner can help you avoid emotional infidelity, as this allows both of you to feel safe and secure within the relationship. Being honest about any emotional involvement with an outside party helps prevent any future deceitful behaviors.
The Progression of Infidelity
For one person, it may be micro-cheating that turns into emotional infidelity, followed by physical infidelity. For another, digital infidelity may turn into physical infidelity. Someone who habitually cheats may go through different stages with each partner outside of the relationship.
An emotional affair usually starts out as a simple friendship, but this can quickly snowball into an unhealthy dynamic. Someone feels initially drawn to a “friend,” devotes more time to them, and eventually becomes more dependent on them.
Some say physical cheating is the worst offense one can commit in an exclusive relationship, but emotional cheating—where your partner connects with someone else in a “relationship-y” manner without any touching—can be just as damaging.
Sometimes, the unilateral decision by one partner to "emotionally cheat" is consciously and strategically made, but more often than not it's about small, cumulative, perhaps well-intentioned, and unconscious boundary slippages—something that a partner thoughtlessly indulges in when they regularly share thoughts, hopes, ...
If you've been flirting with a coworker or friend for months but it's all been surface-level conversations, you're fine—flirt away. But "when you begin to go to that person for emotional support and connection, rather than your partner, you have crossed the line from flirting to emotional cheating," says Orbuch.
You Talk Trash About Your Partner in an Emotional Affair
If one partner complains about the other to a third party and that third party listens, then this is an emotional cheating example. You may be testing the waters by hinting at your want to terminate the marriage or relationship.
Psychology Today defines it as follows: “Micro-cheating involves actions or behaviours by your partner that make you question their emotional or physical commitment to your relationship. These can include actions like regularly texting someone they find attractive or obsessively liking their social media posts.”
Some even last for a lifetime. The period in which a couple feels “in love” during an affair normally lasts six-18 months, but sometimes spans as long as three years. All types of affairs can be very personal for everyone involved. They usually bring with them many kinds of emotions — both the good and the bad.
Cheating on a spouse or significant other is sure to cause feelings of jealousy and hurt in the spurned partner. But men and women differ on what part of cheating they think is the worst: Men tend to be more bothered by sexual infidelity, while most women are bothered more by emotional infidelity.
Here are the things that are worse than cheating in a relationship. Lying to your partner. Lying to or hiding things from your partner is a sure-shot way to ruin your relationship. Even if you're doing it to protect them, keeping little things from the person you love can grow into huge problems and cause trust issues.
Emotional affairs are often a result of feeling neglected, misunderstood or overlooked in a relationship. If a person believes that their partner does not value them, or does not have time for them, then they might strike up a friendship with a new person who offers more emotional investment and support.
The Reasoning
There are many reasons people cheat, but according to Campbell, they usually fall into three categories: individual, relationship, and situational.