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.
Research from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) reveals the extent of the problem. About 45% of men have reported being drawn into an emotional affair at some point.
In some situations, a spouse may engage in an emotional affair as a way of getting back at their partner or dealing with unaddressed anger or issues. It's a form of acting out, but in a way that might seem less serious than cheating physically.
Over times, these things can go away. With the loss of those elements the affair also dies out. However, emotional affairs can also last years. People even will leave one relationship to begin a new relationship with their affair partner.
Emotional affairs are difficult to end because they help you meet your essential emotional needs more than your primary relationship or marriage. Therefore, you may feel heartbroken when this relationship ends. What is this? In addition, you may feel almost obsessed with the other – it's like an addiction.
Emotional affairs can be much more nebulous than physical affairs. They can be completely one-sided, where one party has romantic feelings for another completely unsuspecting person. Or, both parties can be engaged in an intense emotional affair that just hasn't turned physical yet.
"Emotional cheating" is a particular type of secretive, sustained closeness with someone who isn't your primary partner. 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.
Actual feelings are involved.
As painful as physical affairs may be, they don't require deep romantic feelings. Emotional affairs, however, can feel far more personal because they imply that your S.O. liked someone else because they were more exciting to be around than you.
An emotional affair is very dangerous because it not only takes away time and energy from the marriage, but it can lead to sexual infidelity and possibly divorce. Another way of looking at emotional infidelity is that the betrayal is a symptom of the problems that already exist within a marriage.
Research in the field of infidelity reveals that there are three distinct personality types correlated with a higher likelihood of cheating: sociopaths, narcissists, and lonely hearts.
Low sexual and relationship satisfaction, high sexual desire, and lack of love are the most robust predictors of infidelity.
In plain language: Men often feel most loved by the women in their lives when their partners hug them, kiss them, smile at them, and explicitly offer gratitude, praise, and words of affection. Men also feel loved and connected through sexuality, often to a greater degree than women do.
Emotional cheating is highly common. In fact, the results of one study showed that 78.6 percent of men and 91.6 percent of women had admitted to an emotional affair at some point in their relationship.
Emotional affairs can begin online or in-person as a simple acquaintance or friendship. It can then evolve when boundaries are crossed and rationalized by the unfaithful partner. Over time, more limits are broken creating the opportunity for stronger intimacy to flourish.
An emotional affair is the betrayal of trust and disregard for the relationship's boundaries. Moreso, it's about the emotional connection your partner has with someone else. As a result, it's that connection that can cause even more pain than a physical affair.
Summary. Micro-cheating involves participating in inappropriate intimate connections with others outside your relationship.
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.
You no longer feel like a priority.
Unlike a one-night stand, an emotional affair requires time and energy from the person involved in it, given its intimate nature. So if you begin to feel like an afterthought instead of a priority, it could be that your partner is too preoccupied with someone else.
An emotional affair or involvement is a conscious choice and one needs to own the responsibility of the consequences that follow their actions. Indulging in emotional communication with someone other than your partner drifts you away from your relationship.
Basically, men are more willing to forgive emotional cheating, however, a deeper emotional connection, affection and emotional attention is often the reason they cheat. Comparatively, women are less likely to forgive physical cheating, but they usually go looking outside of their relationship for physical reasons.
Yes. Your marriage can come back from emotional infidelity. “Marriages can not only survive emotional affairs, they can become stronger than they were prior to the affair,” says Dr. Dena DiNardo, a clinical psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist from Philadelphia.
Some may even feel that being emotionally cheated on is worse than a sexual one because it means that the partner having the affair is way more emotionally invested in the extramarital relationship. Many states, like California, legally recognize this and allow for couples to file for divorce after an emotional affair.