When we talk about infidelity, most people associate the term with a hot, steamy, and romantic physical relationship. Rarely do people consider another type of infidelity: an emotional affair. It’s often dismissed as “friendly flirting” or texts between friends but emotional affairs can sometimes be more damaging to a relationship than when a partner physically cheats.
What makes a relationship an emotional affair? First, we need to define what an emotional affair is – and it typically varies between people. But an emotional affair happens when someone in a relationship becomes sentimentally or emotionally involved with someone else who isn’t their partner. It can start from a platonic friendship and evolve into something deeper with an emotional connection that resembles an intimate relationship most often found in marriage or long-term relationship.
An emotional affair is a lot like physical infidelity because it’s maintained in secret. When exposed, it creates a violation of trust often found when a partner physically cheats in the relationship. What sets emotional affairs apart is they can happen over phone conversations, text messages, online via chat, and in-person. They can also act as gateway affairs that lead to both emotional and physical infidelity.
Emotional Affair vs Platonic Friendship
According to Merriam-Webster, platonic love is “a close relationship between two persons in which sexual desire is nonexistant or has been suppressed or sublimated.” In short, it’s two friends that are close and care for each other but not close in a way that crosses lines and boundaries.
While emotional affairs may start due to friendship, that isn’t always the case and it’s not a reason to be alarmed that your partner’s relationship with a friend will become something more. A platonic friendship can share some similarities with that of an emotional affair but it’s still very different. Typically, two people with a close bond can be platonic friends and nothing more. They may feel love for one another but the love is platonic and will never be more than that. Lines get blurred and boundaries are crossed when the emotional investment in a friendship is kept secret or downplayed.
Levels of Emotional Affairs
As humans, we’re not great at forming real emotional connections in a short time span and emotional connections aren’t formed in one day. They take time. As time goes on and a person moves into an emotional affair, there are stages they often go through:
Friendship: This is the start of a connection between two people that starts as a normal friendship. Typically, no one walks away from their first few encounters thinking you’ll get wrapped up into an affair. It starts off innocently but as the connection grows, it becomes something more.
Infatuation: As the friendship evolves, you start thinking about spending more time with your new friend. You enjoy your time together and your brain acknowledges that this connection makes you feel happy. It could be due to your friend paying more attention to you, validating you and your feelings, and providing more empathy than your partner. The connection grows and attraction to this person starts to register in your brain.
Secrecy: Your attraction to your friend increases and you start to hang out with your friend without your partner’s knowledge – it’s just the two of you. Your conversations also become more secretive and you start to hide any acknowledgement of your friend around your social circle and your partner.
Dependency: Things are no longer so innocent and you’ve grown emotionally dependent on this person. There’s likely some unearthed sexual tension between you two but you rely on this person to validate your feelings about work, personal problems, and issues at home. Rather than turning to your partner to vent, you turn to this other person. The longer you are dependent on this person for an emotional connection, the stronger your bond is going to be which makes the bond between you and your partner much weaker. Whether you recognize it or not, you’re in a full emotional affair at this stage and it can quickly turn into physical infidelity.
Common Causes of Emotional Affairs
Emotional infidelity is more common than we realize and there are a few reasons why someone may choose to be in an emotional affair despite knowing how inappropriate it is. It’s part of Cause and Effect. Here are some common causes of emotional affairs:
- The marriage or partnership is already unstable and the emotional affair is a quick way to push it overboard.
- It’s not seen as infidelity or cheating because it wasn’t physically intimate.
- The relationship between partners is already void of emotional intimacy which can cause someone to fill that space with an emotional connection.
- One person in the marriage frequently feels isolated or neglected and needs an emotional connection to feel whole.
- Someone isn’t feeling valued in the relationship and will seek validation elsewhere.
- An attraction to someone feels good and can be addictive.
- One partner has impulse control issues and isn’t easily emotionally regulated which makes it easier for them to become subject and give into temptation.
Take a look at where you are in your relationship and start to evaluate where you are as a couple. If it seems like you or your partner is distant, or things are a little rocky, it’s time to prioritize your relationship and work with a couples therapist to help you learn how to restore and keep your emotional connection.
Working Through an Emotional Affair as a Couple
Let’s face it, an emotional affair is just as hurtful as physically cheating on your partner but that doesn’t mean you can’t work through it and rebuild the relationship. Your marriage can recover from an emotional affair but both partners need to be on board and work towards healing. Rebuilding trust after an affair isn’t easy and both partners will need to work to understand how the affair happened in order for them to work toward healing as a couple. Working with a therapist who specializes in infidelity will make it easier.
Healing Your Partnership After an Emotional Affair
Almost every couple in this situation believes that people fall into two categories:
- The partner who participated in the affair
- The partner hurt by the affair
However, we need to look at how each person contributed to the emotional affair and that can be challenging when you weren’t the obvious participant. It’s easier to blame the person who went outside the marriage but emotional affairs tend to happen due to the dynamic between partners. When you acknowledge that it takes two to tango, you can outline where improvements need to be made.
Sometimes a therapist can help you look at what happened in your partnership in a non-judgemental setting but if you’re not ready for that, try some self-introspection. Take stock of your partnership and how you each contributed to the situation you’re in.
If you were had the emotional affair, your therapist will likely tell you the following:
- End your emotional affair and cut ties with that person. Given the intense emotional connection shared, it’s crucial that your affair conclude and you cut off all communication.
- Be open and honest with your partner about the affair. Your partner needs transparency and not an abridged version of what happened.
- Don’t just say “I’m sorry” – express genuine remorse which means digging deep and allowing your spouse or partner to see your emotional pain. Expressing an empathetic apology can help ease the isolation your partner is feeling.
- Seek an individual therapist who can help you learn and grow from the experience so you can communicate effectively with your partner in the future.
Infidelity of any kind can create strain and nearly kill communication between partners but communicating your wants and needs to your partner is vital when you want to heal your partnership after the affair. If you skipped the therapy-route to discover your role in the situation, now is the time to enlist the help of a therapist for affair counseling. They can help you both understand boundaries while helping you assess the expectations of your relationship.
Work Through an Emotional Affair
If both of you want to move foward and heal from an emotional affair, make it less stressful by working with me in Texas.
