Emotional affairs

What is an emotional affair?

An emotional affair is a relationship with someone outside your partnership that becomes emotionally intimate in ways that are kept secret and that take something away from your partner: attention, confiding, closeness or romantic energy. There may be no physical contact at all. What makes it an affair rather than a friendship is usually the secrecy and the way it displaces the primary relationship.

The Gottman Institute's therapists describe emotional infidelity as starting when a person gets too close to someone other than their partner, often in a way that begins innocently and grows. They list the signs as confiding in the other person, flirting, keeping the relationship secret from your partner, and sharing personal details with them, especially negative details about your partner and the relationship.

How is it different from a close friendship?

Close friendships outside a relationship are healthy, including with people of any gender. The difference is not how much you like someone. It is what the friendship is doing to your partnership. A few questions tend to separate the two.

• Would you be comfortable if your partner read your messages or overheard your conversations?
• Do you tell this person things about your life, or your feelings, that you do not tell your partner?
• Do you complain about your partner to them, and do they take your side?
• Do you downplay or hide how often you talk, or where you meet?
• Is there romantic or sexual tension that both of you are aware of but do not name?
• Do you find yourself comparing your partner unfavorably to them?

How emotional affairs develop

Very few people set out to have an emotional affair. The psychologist Shirley Glass, whose book Not Just Friends drew on her clinical work and research, observed that many affairs begin as friendships, frequently with colleagues, that slowly become more intimate. She described the shift with an image of walls and windows: in a healthy relationship there is a window of openness between partners and a wall of privacy toward others. In an affair, that reverses. The window opens to the other person, and a wall goes up at home.

A Gottman Institute article describes the same slide as a cascade that John Gottman developed with Glass and the researcher Caryl Rusbult. It often starts with small moments when a partner is not available, then turning toward someone else to fill the gap, then secrets beginning with omission, and later inconsistencies and lies. Secrecy is the thread that runs through it.

Why can an emotional affair hurt as much as a physical one?

Many people are surprised by how devastated they feel when there was no sex involved. But for a lot of people the core injury of infidelity is not the physical act. It is discovering that the person you trusted with your inner life was giving that closeness to someone else, and hiding it. Emotional affairs often involve months of daily contact, private jokes and confiding, which can feel like a parallel relationship.

Research reflects how differently people draw the lines. A study by the psychologists Ashley Thompson and Lucia O'Sullivan, developing a questionnaire on what people consider infidelity, found that sexual behaviors were most widely agreed to be cheating, while emotional and online behaviors were judged as cheating by some people and not by others. A qualitative study of experienced couples counselors in the UK found a similar web of conflicting definitions among the couples they saw.

That disagreement is part of why emotional affairs are so painful to work through. One partner may feel betrayed, and the other may insist nothing happened. What usually matters is not a general definition but the understanding the two of you had, spoken or assumed.

Is it still an emotional affair if nothing happened?

This question comes up often, usually from the partner who had the relationship. It is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. If the relationship involved secrecy, emotional intimacy and the kind of closeness your partner reasonably expected to be theirs, it has broken trust, even if nothing physical happened and even if you did not think of it as an affair at the time.

Arguing about the label rarely helps. The more useful conversation is about what happened, what it meant, what was hidden, and what your partner needs now. Emotional affairs also sometimes become physical, and some people are more comfortable calling a relationship an emotional affair than admitting how far it went. Honesty about the full picture matters.

Recovering from an emotional affair

Recovery tends to follow the same broad path as recovery from any affair. The emotional relationship needs to end, which can be hard when the person is a coworker or part of a shared social circle; that often requires clear boundaries, and sometimes practical changes. The partner who had the affair needs to be honest and transparent, including about the parts that are embarrassing. And the couple eventually needs to understand what the outside relationship was providing that was missing, without that becoming an excuse.

For more on the path, see the stages of affair recovery and what the partner who had the affair can do. Smaller boundary crossings are covered in micro-cheating, and relationships that live mostly in messages and apps in online and digital infidelity. If the emotional distance at home came before the affair, emotional distance in a relationship may be useful.

Laura Bass offers infidelity counseling for emotional as well as sexual affairs, for individuals and couples. The infidelity recovery guide has the full set of articles. If the discovery has left you in crisis, call or text 988, and if you are in immediate danger, call 911.

Common questions