Over the past few years, emotional infidelity has emerged as an increasingly popular and commonly misunderstood concept in the world of partnerships. Given the focus of our culture’s conversations around infidelity on physical encounters, it’s easy to overlook the other dimensions of an increase in sexual infidelity. But emotional infidelity the experience of sharing your deepest and most private feelings with someone other than your partner, can have a similarly, if not more, corrosive effect on distrust and desire between two partners. In this blog, we will explore the experience of emotional infidelity, the catalysts behind it, and the ways in which couples can decide how to approach it. Hopefully, this exploration will lead to greater insight and prompt couples to take productive steps that could prevent infidelity from wreaking havoc on their relationship. Essentially, this blog is all about learning how to avoid emotional infidelity.
In conversations about infidelity, much attention focuses on physical betrayals (eg, sexual intercourse with someone else; affairs) while the exploration of emotional betrayals (ie, intimate forms of emotional connection with someone else) is disregarded despite the fragile impact on an intimate relationship. Emotional infidelity refers to forms of emotional bonding experienced by one or both partners outside of a primary relationship. These include a deep emotional connection; sharing personal thoughts, emotional intimacy, and support; and engaging in a level of emotional closeness that is reserved for, and ideally exclusive to, the primary relationship.
In this blog post, we will explore this notion to dispel several common myths about emotional infidelity, while also providing a clearer understanding of its contours. In other words, by illuminating what emotional infidelity generally is, we may also distinguish the factors that motivate someone to have an emotional affair. Understanding friends-with-benefits relationships is easier than understanding why a romantic partner would seek another romantic partner. However, understanding emotional infidelity is even easier, and perhaps even more important.
Emotional affairs require open communication, reflection and a readiness to examine what’s going on. In this post, we’ll provide practical tips and strategies to help couples identify and take preventive actions for emotional infidelity, rebuilding trust and their hearts.
By understanding the full gamut of emotional infidelity, including the core features, early signs, impacts and outcomes, couples can catch it in the early stages, begin frank conversations, and recover from emotional infidelity to make their relationship stronger. Our goal is to help couples gain emotional literacy to navigate emotional infidelity to the best possible outcome: a more trustful, intimate and loving relationship together.
Defining Emotional Infidelity
Emotional infidelity is often described as a breach of trust in a committed relationship, where one or both members of a two-person partnership share intimate emotional connections with someone outside of the relationship. While not physical, these connections usually entail oversharing, deep feelings, private information and forms of emotional support that should be reserved for the primary partner.
Recognizing the Signs
Since emotional infidelity often differs from sexual infidelity, being able to detect the warning signs freely allows a couple to deal with the situation and more easily resolve it. These might include increased password restrictions, disproportionate and excessive communication with one person, a sudden shift in behaviour or exhibition of emotional withdrawal with the primary partner, or the appearance and emergence of secrecy.
Understanding the Root Causes
In many instances, emotional infidelity is the result of unmet needs in the relationship. This is especially true if there is a lack of emotional connection, communication in the relationship, ways to resolve issues or neglect. If a couple can pinpoint what may be lacking, they can take steps to restore a stronger connection, which will also reduce the incidence of emotional affairs.
Open Communication and Trust-Building
Clear and open channels of communication can help nip emotional infidelity in the bud. If your partner feels comfortable and safe expressing his true needs, then it is much less likely that he’ll begin looking elsewhere. Some couples develop special codes and rituals that communicate unspoken longings and implicitly invite intimacy. You can also make the communication channels easier. Try assigning each other fun tasks, like remembering a semi-obscure holiday or delivering an unusual touch. Show your willingness and ability to be a trustworthy source of support. Except for during sex, never shut off your perceptual sense. Contemplating how each act can initiate intimacy, even the smallest, can help. The more that your partner knows how that little squeeze is capable of touching your heart, the less likely he or she might feel the urge to find that touch somewhere else.
Seeking Professional Help
Sometimes this needs to be professional in the form of couples therapy or counselling. Giving each of you a space to explore your emotional infidelity can help you through the process. You can be a place for the other to work through their hurt, and also establish healthy boundaries for your own shared relationship.
Conclusion
When it comes to emotional infidelity, this understanding will help to ensure that it remains only one aspect of a healthy, happy and intimate longterm relationship, rather than a catalyst for its destruction. Marriage experts wishing to download his full research paper can contact him directly via email.
Identifying the signs of emotional infidelity is often a good way to address the problem early on. Being more secretive, texting or calling with one other person more than anyone else, a sudden change of behaviour or distance, and lowered emotional attunement to the primary partner are telltale signs. Finally and importantly, couples report feeling much better dentifying, talking through and owning to these problems or feelings as they arise, rather than waiting for them to boil over or be shocked by a big reveal.
Comprehending the causes of emotional infidelity should be equally explored. Its sources are most often improperly addressed needs within the marriage such as an emotional disconnect, a lack of communication, or festering relationship conflicts. By recognising where the core issues lie, couples can work together to remedy them, foster a more substantial emotional connection, and ward off the risk of EA.
Open communication and activities that build trust are therefore important. When there is a secure space for admitting needs, desires and concerns, it leads to emotional intimacy. When the couple has had shared experiences, actively listens to each other, and is reliable, the partnership is built on trust. This can provide emotional stability and so there will be fewer tendencies to seek emotional fulfilment outside the relationship.
In some cases, such as chronically fractured affair bonds or when valuable differences or needs seem to disappear in the wake of conflict, support from a professional such as registered couples therapist or counsellor might be required; a compassionate therapeutic relationship can provide a safe place in which each partner can explore his or her turmoil, find the strength to trust and forgive, and learn new, more effective ways of speaking to each other. Within the framework of professional support, couples can ease their pain and move toward deeper understanding of themselves and each other.
Any partner who hears of such an act will feel their trust rocked, and can be traumatised and shaken by the experience. But if they can focus on the causes of emotional infidelity, express their feelings in a healthy way to their partner and make a good attempt at sorting out their underlying issues, then they will eventually heal, the relationship will become even stronger than before, and the couple can go on to develop a more meaningful and intimate relationship.