Emotional affairs can be different for everyone, but there are some common stages. An emotional affair often starts as a friendship or other innocuous relationship, but can quickly snowball by crossing the line of what should stay within the primary romantic or committed relationship. Not addressing one of these stages early on can result in infidelity and severe relational repercussions.
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What Is An Emotional Affair?
An emotional affair is different from other affairs as it occurs when someone turns to someone outside of their romantic relationship for emotional support. Everybody needs support in their lives, but emotional affairs are an example of how looking outside the bounds of consensually monogamous relationships to meet certain needs can take an ugly turn.
Some examples of emotional infidelity include:
- The work spouse: A special, initially platonic relationship that comes along with privileges, such as flattery and validation. Increased attention and dependence on work spouses are commonplace and may even be well known throughout the office and in their respective marriages.
- The gaming buddy: Typically part of a larger group at first, the gaming buddies would become increasingly demanding of each other’s time and emotional attention. They become the priority over time and may begin to outweigh their spouse in terms of attention and time.
- The best friend: The best friend may have been around longer than the primary relationship, but it has been mostly platonic. However, this best friend is a consistent challenge to the prioritizing of the spouse, especially if their partner feels like the best friend knows more about their significant other.
- The reconnection: The reconnection may look like bumping into a childhood friend or reconnecting through a Facebook friend request with an old classmate. This starts as innocent nostalgia, but can quickly progress to flirting that deepens into emotional intimacy that overshadows the primary relationship.1
Signs of Emotional Affairs
We tend to tie the idea of having an affair to physically cheating. When physical cheating is absent, it can be difficult to recognize that you are having an emotional affair. In their book, The Emotional Affair: How to Recognize Emotional Infidelity and What to Do About It, Ronald and Patricia Potter-Effron provide an inventory of 20 items to help recognize if your partner is having an affair.2 Some of these can be adapted into a list of eight signs that can help you understand if you are the one having an emotional affair.
Signs you are having an emotional affair include:
- Thinking about them frequently: You often catch yourself daydreaming or thinking about someone other than your partner.
- Secrecy and defensiveness: You feel secretive about your connection with this person or get defensive when asked about it.
- Frequent contact: You regularly text, call, or share personal experiences with them instead of with your partner.
- “Not dates”: You find yourself having frequent lunches, dinners, or outings with them—situations that may not technically be “dates” but feel significant.
- Fantasizing about the future: You imagine a life with this person or consider leaving your partner to make that a reality.
- Putting them on a pedestal: You idealize this person, believing they have no faults and that they are a perfect match for you.
- Feeling guilty: You feel guilty about the relationship, even if you can’t pinpoint exactly why.
- Physical attraction: While attraction alone doesn’t mean you’re having an affair, strong physical attraction—paired with these other signs—can indicate deeper emotional involvement.
7 Possible Stages of Emotional Affairs
Emotional affairs may look different depending on the relationship, and there are some common signs of emotional affairs and their progression. For instance, one person’s work-wife may not seem the same as an online gaming buddy, but the different contexts do not change that these relationships are meeting emotional needs that would otherwise be fulfilled by their significant other. Both may start out innocently but develop into a dynamic that crosses the line into infidelity.
The seven possible stages of emotional affairs are:
1. Just Friends
The ‘Just Friends’ stage of emotional infidelity looks just like any other friendship. You may click with a coworker or gaming buddy, reconnect with an old classmate through a Facebook friend request,1 or find yourself being more attentive to one of your long-standing friendships. This can tap into your self-worth and you may find yourself thinking, “It really is nice how they just get me and pay attention to me.”3 Most friendships do not lead to affairs, but some people do go from being just friends to engaging in an affair.
2. Crossing the Boundaries
At this stage, you begin engaging in behaviors that cross the boundaries of your primary relationship.3 This is often when the connection starts to resemble infidelity. You may experience emotional attraction and your friend may begin sharing emotional experiences—conversations and feelings—that you would typically reserve for your partner or spouse. This can create a sense of being deeply understood by your friend and may start fulfilling emotional needs that feel neglected in your relationship.3
3. Commiserating
A common step from moving from “just friends” to affair partners is commiserating about marital or partnership problems with a friend.4 Complaining or venting to each other about your partners becomes commonplace as the emotional affair continues to become a relationship that fulfills one’s unmet needs. At this stage of emotional infidelity, it isn’t enough that this relationship feels nice; it becomes about what you are not getting at home.
4. Fixation & Flirting
Flirting and attraction may become more of a driving factor as you fixate more on your friend and less on your spouse or partner. You may begin to notice parts of your friend’s personality that you feel your partner is missing or you may find yourself more physically attracted to your friend. You may also notice you are thinking about them more.2 You could spend more time thinking about your friend, dressing up more, or making sure your profile picture looks a certain way as you wonder how your friend perceives you.
5. Valuing The Affair Partner More Than Your Primary Partner
In this stage of emotional infidelity, you have likely put your emotional affair partner on a pedestal.2 The emotional affair and the opinion of the emotional affair partner becomes more important to you than your primary relationship and your primary partner’s opinion. You may find that your affair plays into most of the decisions you make in everyday life. Even something as simple as mealtime with a spouse can be interrupted to spend time with the affair partner instead.
6. Disillusionment With Home Life
Life at home in the primary relationship becomes particularly depressing. Nothing is as good or as important as it is with the emotional affair partner, and it seems like everyone can tell. In this stage, the emotional affair is consuming most of your energy, and your ability to care about other relationships feels limited. You may even develop resentment in marriage or relationship burnout.
7. Separation
The desire to leave has overtaken your desire to stay with your primary partner and you may find yourself fantasizing about a future with your affair partner.2 You may also find yourself emphasizing all of the reasons you can think of to justify leaving your primary relationship. Without help, there isn’t much hope for the relationship at this point, because you feel like you could be happier elsewhere. Unfortunately for you, without outside intervention, these patterns are likely to repeat in your new relationship.5
Recovering from Infidelity or a Betrayal of Trust?
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How to Recover From Emotional Infidelity
There are many ways to recover from an emotional affair, individually and as a couple. Direct and honest communication, setting healthy boundaries in the relationship, and reaffirming your commitment to one another can help if you want to save your relationship or marriage after an affair.
Some ways to recover from an emotional affair on your own include:
Remember Your Commitments
Your relationship did not begin like this. At some point, your partner was a great fit for you, enough so that you committed to being their partner. Why was that? Separately and together, reflect on those times and factors that brought you together, and remember the commitments that brought you closer. Are you and your partner still willing to uphold and prioritize those commitments? Do these commitments need to change?
Identify Needs
What did you or your partner gain from this emotional affair? It may be hard to think about the positives, but this is important. Your affair met emotional needs that weren’t fulfilled in your relationship–what are those? Was the attention flattering? Conversely, your partner may have new needs based on the breach of trust from the affair. The first step to building a blueprint for your relationship is to meet those needs and name them. Try asking your partner questions to increase intimacy and build a better understanding of each other’s needs.
Find Resolution for the Needs
Once both partners have identified their needs, it is important to make a plan to resolve those needs. How can your spouse meet these needs? This is not about comparing your spouse to the affair, but about repairing the relationship’s trust and addressing the root cause of the emotional affair.
Emphasize Communication
The way we talk about our needs and boundaries can be just as important. Try to avoid using “you” statements, such as “You ignore me,” and opt for “I” sentences, such as “I feel ignored by you, which makes me feel alone.” Start by reminding yourself and your spouse about the goal of meeting needs. Assume that they want to meet them. In turn, they may identify needs of their own you could be meeting more effectively as well. Healthy communication enhances your romantic relationship, so it is essential to establish good communication habits for the sake of your relationship.
Be Open
This process will be difficult, and you or your partner may notice how the option to close down keeps coming back into your mind. Push past it, even if you’re worried it will make things harder. Remember that closing off and separating yourself from your partner led to this situation, so being open is a good way to behave differently and work through any issues openly.
Grieve Together
It’s okay if you or your partner feel a sense of grief over the relationship damage and loss of trust that may occur after an affair. Cry together and mark the damage, but recognize even though this breach pulled you apart before, it doesn’t have to keep doing that now. Grieving together can make you closer, as it shows the care you still have for your partner and relationship.
Take on New Challenges Together
Find situations where you and your partner can work as teammates. Start a project together, do something productive, plan a trip–anything that allows both of you to work together towards a shared, positive goal. From there, recognize how being on the same team in those projects can translate to everyday aspects of your relationship.
When to Seek Therapy
Couples and marriage counseling can help after infidelity by providing a safe, neutral space for couples to discuss their grievances with one another. If it feels impossible to talk about anything, including emotional infidelity, it can be a big help to find a therapist who serves as a coach to come alongside the couple and show them how to take care of each other.
There are lots of services offering online couples counseling that make getting started easy and convenient. Remember to ask whether you’ll be able to use insurance (in-network or out-of-network) or if your sessions will need to be paid for out of pocket. You also have the option of using a couples therapy app, like Our Relationship or Our Ritual.
In My Experience
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do Emotional Affairs Start?
An emotional affair starts when potentially healthy support becomes an unhealthy one when someone starts to depend on these outside relationships to satisfy the emotional needs they should look for within their primary relationship. While it is natural for us to make friends and talk to other people, allowing them to become the people we trust most often and deeply can overstep relational boundaries.
For example, an emotional affair can begin when someone who you get along with at work turns into a person you are unusually excited to see every day. Or, a person in an online group of friends may become focused very heavily on just one member of the group.
Is an Emotional Affair Cheating?
Though there is some debate on whether or not emotional affairs are actually cheating, the fallout from emotional affairs greatly mimics that from any other sort of affair. This includes reduced intimacy levels, the development of emotional extramarital connections that lessen the emotional connection to the primary partner, and even an increase in the likelihood of breaking up.6, 7 This happens because, just like with physical infidelity, emotional affairs can lead to breaks in trust and feelings of betrayal, along with fostering other emotional responses relating to hostility, insecurity, and even depression.8
How Do I Know if My Spouse Is Having an Emotional Affair?
It can be difficult to know if your partner is having an emotional affair. Unlike with a physical affair, the signs may be more subtle. In their book, The Emotional Affair: How to Recognize Emotional Infidelity and What to Do About It, Ronald and Patricia Potter-Effron have an inventory of 20 items about recognizing if your partner is having an affair.2 These items can be condensed into a list of ten signs that may mean your partner is having an emotional affair.
Some signs your spouse may be having an affair include:
- Emotional sharing: Your partner confides in another person about personal issues instead of discussing them with you.
- Prioritizing time: Your partner chooses to spend time or have meals with this person rather than with you.
- Secrecy of communication: Important conversations happen with this person, and your partner becomes defensive when you ask about it.
- Emotional intimacy: Your partner claims this person understands them better and expresses a deep emotional connection with them.
- Idealizing the other person: Your partner puts this person on a pedestal, believing they meet emotional needs you cannot fulfill.
- Attraction or sexual denial: Your partner shows signs of physical attraction to this person but insists there is no sexual interest or activity.
- Emotional withdrawal: Your partner appears happier around this person and becomes lonely or upset when they can’t contact them.
- Feeling guilty: Your partner seems to feel guilty or directly expresses remorse about their relationship with this person.
- Always thinking about them: Your partner seems distracted, as if this person is constantly on their mind.
- Contemplating leaving: Your partner talks about leaving you or appears to be considering it since becoming involved with this person.
How Do Emotional Affairs Affect Marriage?
Emotional affairs can cause feelings like betrayal, hostility, and insecurity to foster within a marriage or couple.8 When one partner in a monogamous relationships seeks or finds emotional connections outside the marriage that interfere with the emotional intimacy of the marriage, it can and will directly affect the levels of trust and intimacy inside the relationship. Research shows that emotional involvement with someone outside a consensually monogamous relationship is connected to dissatisfaction with intimacy within the marriage and can ultimately lead to the marriage breaking up.7
What Role Does Technology Have in Emotional Affairs?
Technology can play a significant role in emotional affairs by providing easy and near-constant access to communication with someone from outside the primary relationship. With over two trillion texts sent annually in the United States,9 texting and social media can make it easier to accidentally or intentionally cross the line between friendship and infidelity.
To complicate matters further, there is debate about whether technology-based actions like sexting are considered cheating at all.10 If sexting is considered cheating, the next question is whether it is considered emotional or physical cheating. As a result, technology not only plays a role in the ease of access to having emotional affairs, but creates additional confusion around what counts as an emotional affair.
Choosing Therapy strives to provide our readers with mental health content that is accurate and actionable. We have high standards for what can be cited within our articles. Acceptable sources include government agencies, universities and colleges, scholarly journals, industry and professional associations, and other high-integrity sources of mental health journalism. Learn more by reviewing our full editorial policy.
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Abbasi, I. S., & Alghamdi, N. G. (2017). When flirting turns into infidelity: The Facebook dilemma. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 45(1), 1-14.
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Potter-Efron, R. T. and Potter-Efron, P. S. (2008). The emotional affair: How to recognize emotional infidelity and what to do about it. New Harbinger Publications.
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Varma, P., Barman, J. D., & Maheshwari, S. (2023). Why Did I Cheat on My Partner? Mapping the Motives of Infidelity in Dating Relationships Through the Perpetrators. The Family Journal, 10664807231201629.
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Brown, E. M. (2013). Patterns of infidelity and their treatment. Routledge.
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Anderson, E. (2012). The monogamy gap: Men, love, and the reality of cheating. Oxford University Press.
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Nelson, O., & Salawu, A. (2017). Can my wife be virtual-adulterous? An experiential study on Facebook, emotional infidelity and self-disclosure. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 18(2), 166-179. https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol18/iss2/12
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Allen, E. S., & Rhoades, G. K. (2007). Not all affairs are created equal: Emotional involvement with an extradyadic partner. Journal of sex & marital therapy, 34(1), 51-65. https://doi.org/10.1080/00926230701620878
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Shackelford, T. K., LeBlanc, G. J., & Drass, E. (2000). Emotional reactions to infidelity. Cognition & Emotion, 14(5), 643-659. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930050117657
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Taylor, P. (2024). Total number of SMS and MMS messages sent in the United States from 2005 to 2021. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/185879/number-of-text-messages-in-the-united-states-since-2005/
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Falconer, T., & Humphreys, T. P. (2019). Sexting outside the primary relationship: Prevalence, relationship influences, physical engagement, and perceptions of “cheating”. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 28(2), 134-142. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhs.2019-0011
We regularly update the articles on ChoosingTherapy.com to ensure we continue to reflect scientific consensus on the topics we cover, to incorporate new research into our articles, and to better answer our audience’s questions. When our content undergoes a significant revision, we summarize the changes that were made and the date on which they occurred. We also record the authors and medical reviewers who contributed to previous versions of the article. Read more about our editorial policies here.
Author: No Change
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Primary Changes: Edited for readability and clarity. Added “Signs of Emotional Affairs”, “Is an Emotional Affair Cheating?”, “How Do I Know if My Spouse Is Having an Emotional Affair?”, “How Do Emotional Affairs Affect Marriage?”, “What Role Does Technology Have in Emotional Affairs?” New material written by Kalen Zeiger, PhD, LMFT, CCTP, CFTP, and reviewed by Kristen Fuller, MD. Added worksheets for healing from unhealthy relationships.
Author:Kevin Mimms, LMFT
Reviewer:Kristen Fuller, MD
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- Communication problems / too many arguments
- Emotional distance or lack of love
- Lack of trust or infidelity/cheating