Are you worried that your partner is having an emotional affair?
Perhaps you’ve seen signs that he is texting another woman and you’re wondering how to deal with it?
Emotional cheating is a difficult topic to address because it means different things to different people.
However, the guide below will help you to define and deal with it.
First though, it’s really important that you carefully read the next few sentences.
It’s difficult to call a partner out for emotionally cheating.
In most cases, they’ll hide their text conversations from you and deny any wrongdoing when confronted.
That’s why I would like to tell you about a powerful yet discreet background checker I found online.
This tool only needs a few of your partner’s basic online details to get started. Once it has these, it can generate a detailed report of their recent communications history.
You can discover who they have been contacting, what smartphone apps they have been using and whether they have any alternate contact details.
What’s more, there’s no way for your partner to tell they are being tracked.
In most cases, if your partner is up to dodgy business with another woman, this tool will present clear evidence of it.
With this information to hand, you’ll be in a better position to address your partner.
Read on for more information about how to deal with emotional cheating.
What Is An Emotional Affair?
Contents
An emotional affair is a grey area of relationships, but by and large, it can be defined as a person having a romantic connection with someone else outside of the marriage or long term relationship.
They can manifest themselves in many different ways. For example, a person may simply just have a crush on someone else and start to have feelings for them. While they may not act on them physically, those feelings can be pretty strong and be strong enough to hurt their long term partner should they find out about them.
An emotional affair can develop into more than that too by two people strengthening a connection. While it may not include any physical signs of attraction – like kissing or sex – it can most definitely be a case that the connection is far more than a platonic friendship.
A common way for an emotional affair to take place is through texting. Texting can include communicating feelings of love or lust and describe sex and sexual desires. This is often a way that people end up getting very hurt in relationships where emotionally charged infidelities take place.
The problem with an affair starting with texting is that they often start out innocent enough. Often it begins just as a friendship that starts slowly to turn more flirty. This can be hard for all parties involved because the two people who are part of the affair, may not realize that they have serious feelings for each other before it is too late and they are too emotionally involved to want to stop it. This then, obviously, can hurt the partner who is being cheated on.
Plus, the practical side of an affair that is exposed through texting is that there is such a large back catalog of evidence that can be incredibly hurtful for a partner to read or see. Both the content of the texts can be harmful but also the sheer amount of them sometimes can be damaging to a person’s feelings too.
Is An Emotionally Based Infidelity Cheating?
If you are questioning whether you have had an emotionally charged affair or not, the likelihood is that you probably have – simply because you are asking the question in the first place. When no physical side of a relationship has taken place, many people try to reassure themselves with the fact that they have not technically cheated on their partner.
However, when emotions that go far beyond one of friendship, it is hard to view the connection as anything other than an affair – even if nothing sexual has transpired. If you need more solid evidence as to whether an affair has started emotionally – either on behalf of yourself or you feel your partner has strayed emotionally to someone else, then you could check the messages you have been texting and ask yourself whether they are flirtatious.
If you fear your partner has been unfaithful emotionally, then you can ask them to show you any texting that has occurred between them and the person you think they are having an affair with. The reason that texting so often plays a big part in affairs that are purely on an emotional basis is that they are easy ways to keep our behavior secret from our partner.
What To Do If You Find Your Partner Is Emotionally Cheating Through Texting
If you have found out that your partner has been having an affair, though purely an emotionally based one, you will most likely be very confused as to what to do. Firstly, you need to question whether it is forgivable in your eyes if they have not actually slept together yet. If it is, you still have work to do to stay together. If it’s not, you can still work through the issues that you have, but it can be exceptionally hard going for you both.
Below, we have some constructive actions that could help you and your spouse be happy again.
Ask Them Directly About It.
Before you make any decisions about the future of your marriage or partnership, you need to talk to your partner directly about their actions. If you find that they have no intention of taking the affair further and they will stop all contact with the other person immediately, then you may find that you are able to work things out. If they admit that they are in love with someone else, then that may spell the end of your relationship, or it could be that they still want to stay with you anyway.
Either way, you need to both talk at length about your feelings and where you stand on the situation. You both need to be incredibly open and honest about what you believe needs to happen for you to be happy once more. Both of you will need to address things that will need to be resolved so that the issue is sorted once and for all and won’t cause you problems further down the line.
Look At Your Own Behavior.
One of the hardest things about moving past any form of infidelity is admitting when you have some culpability in the situation. More often than not when a partner is unfaithful it is more a symptom of something that is wrong between them and their long term partner.
Bearing that in mind, you need to look at your actions and be honest with yourself about ways that you could improve your intimacy with your partner. That does not just have to be on a sexual level – that can also mean the levels of support you give him or her and how you offer that support. It could also mean addressing any behavior on your part that could have been deemed selfish – or any other host of issues that have made your relationship swerve to the level of infidelity.
Try Going To Therapy.
If you have tried talking to your partner and be open and honest with each other as well as yourselves about the problems between you, and this still hasn’t made things better, then it may be a good idea to seek the help of a counselor.
A counselor can really help any marriage or couple as it offers a means of a safe space to talk through problems. Counselors don’t take sides – they simply act as an intermediary between two people and can help point them towards constructive or proactive ways to resolve issues.
Think About Your Options.
It could be that after talking through your problems and doing work with a counselor that you are still not happy – either because you have been emotionally unfaithful or your partner has. If that is the case, you need to think about your future options and what your future may hold should you break the partnership off. Sometimes, in doing so, we realize that we do want to work things out with our partner.
FAQs
Emotional affairs can last if a relationship is given the ability to do so. This means that the emotional affair will need to be given the chance to grow into a fully-fledged relationship – whether it is a person’s sole relationship or not.
Texting a person in a romantic or sexual sense may mean cheating to some, whereas it may not for others. By and large, though, it has the ability to hurt someone in the relationship. Bearing that in mind, a lot of people will consider texting someone in a romantic or sexual manner as cheating, even if the physical side wasn’t there.
Emotional affairs start in a variety of ways. For some, an emotional affair can begin because a person is unhappy in their marriage so they look elsewhere for that emotional support. For others, it can start as a friendship and grow from there.
An emotional affair can end when the emotional infidelity is exposed or a person admits that they have a connection with someone else outside of their relationship. They can then either grow into something else, or the original relationship will work through the problems the emotional infidelity created.
Emotional affairs definitely can turn physical. Whether they do or not depends entirely on the people within the situation and whether they get caught, or whether they won’t take the emotional connection to a physical one.
The Bottom Line
In the main, no one sets out to start an affair that could hurt their partner. Whilst some people don’t mind carrying out acts of betrayal, most of us do which is why they can be so hurtful to a partner.
It has often been sex or physical acts of romance like kissing that characterize infidelities, however increasingly people further their connections emotionally only – not just physically. Texting has allowed many a relationship that is not physical to grow emotionally. Yet, they still have the ability to hurt people.
If you have found out that your partner has cheated on you through texting, or you are texting someone else outside of your marriage, then it can be a very difficult time for you and your family life. Couples therapy can be a good idea as is simply talking through issues and feelings with your partner. You need to tackle the affair – however, it manifests itself – with a proactive approach that opens up lines of communication so you both know where each other stands.
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