EMOTIONAL INFIDELITY: WHY IT HURTS SO MUCH.

Infidelity of any kind is painful. It shatters your trust in your spouse as well as your heart.

And it’s not just sexual infidelity. Many spouses become victims of emotional infidelity—and feel the pain just as keenly as if their spouse had had sexual relations with the other person.

In this blog, we’ll look at why emotional infidelity hurts so much, and 3 tips for healing if you have been the victim of emotional infidelity. Please keep reading…

The Emotional Affair: What It Steals from Your relationship

When you discover that your spouse has been giving attention to someone of the opposite sex outside of your relationship or marriage, it can cause a red flag to immediately go up. You want to know:

• ·         How did they meet?
• ·         Why did they hit it off so well?
• ·         Is there sexual attraction?
• ·         What do they talk about?
• ·         How much contact do they have? Is it occasional or frequent?
• ·         What isn’t my spouse telling me?
• ·         Is it possible my spouse will sleep with this person?

As you can see, having contact with a person outside of your relationship or marriage creates questions. And what creates suspicion is when the frequency and intensity of the contact with this other person is in some way hidden.

And when a spouse hides this information, it’s usually a case of where there’s smoke, there’s fire: there is some level of emotional commitment to this other person, and they want to protect that relationship.

This is why an emotional affair hurts: your spouse is sharing their innermost thoughts and emotions with someone other than you. That other person is acquiring that deep emotional connection that rightfully belongs in your marriage. It hurts because you want your spouse to need you, to need to share with you what those personal thoughts and feelings are. You want your spouse to think of you as his or her confidante—not some stranger who just arrived on the scene.

Emotional infidelity acts as a hole in your relationship, leaching away the vitality that makes a relationship great. Those confidences that are shared within a relationship help to fuel the spark between two people, so when a partner takes those confidences to someone outside of the marriage—they are in essence feeding a spark between themselves and someone else. That’s infidelity, no matter how often cheaters may say “But… I never touched him/her… we were just friends… it was only friendship, nothing more…”

If it was only friendship and nothing more, than why is it hidden, and why is it when the other spouse finds out about it, they feel betrayed?

If your spouse has been involved in emotional infidelity, you will go through some degree of pain—just like the victim of sexual infidelity goes through. For some victims, emotional infidelity is worse than sexual infidelity because sex is just an act, while sharing thoughts and feelings is considered a relationship.

Next, I’ll share with you some tips for healing from the pain of an emotional affair.