How to Handle an Emotional Affair

If you’re wondering how to handle an emotional affair as a couple, you’re not alone. Emotional affairs can be difficult to define, can make you feel like you’re overreacting and leave you struggling with major trust issues.

Has an emotional affair possibly taken place in your relationship? If so, here are some thoughts to help you work through the challenging process of healing.

First, What is an Emotional Affair?

Although this term gets increasingly more attention these days, it still may be helpful to provide a basic definition.

An emotional affair, also known as emotional infidelity, is the process where someone in a committed relationship looks to someone outside that relationship to meet their intimate emotional needs. In this case, the offended mate feels threatened by someone outside the relationship who could potentially take their place in the relationship.

Left unchecked, emotional affairs can lead to physical affairs although they don’t always.

Emotional Infidelity: So, What’s the Big Deal?

That’s what many on the offending side tend to ask.

For instance, if you confront your partner about an emotional affair, you may hear, “You’re overreacting. It’s not like we’ve been physical or anything.”

The reality is that emotional affairs can be more painful than a physical affair. After all, it’s possible for a person to have a physical affair with someone they have little to no attachment with.

That isn’t the case with an emotional affair, however. Emotional infidelity is, ironically, a deeper and more personal breach of trust. The offending person gives a deeper part of who they are away in the process: their emotions or “soul.”

These sorts of affairs are easy to downplay or minimize by the offending party. The offender may feel guilty and defensive because, deep down, he or she knows what’s going on.

The offended person in the relationship may jump back and forth between fearing they are overreacting to feeling badly betrayed, filled with grief, bitter and angry.

How to Handle an Emotional Affair: Some Steps You Can Take

Define what Constitutes an Emotional Affair as a Couple

Preferably beforehand, define as a couple what would be considered an emotional affair. Where is that “invisible” line? If it’s too late to come up with boundaries beforehand, it’s all the more important that they’re discussed now.

It may be best to work through these boundaries with a counselor especially if talking about the emotional affair alone tends to cause a heated exchange between the two of you.

As already shared, how to handle an emotional affair can be a major challenge. It can sometimes be difficult to know if you have one or not. One accuses the other of an emotional affair. The other says it’s not an inappropriate “friendship” and accuses their partner of overreacting.

Neither partner feels validated in this case, leading to deeper problems in the near future if things aren’t resolved.

How to Handle an Emotional Affair: Practice Relational Transparency

Is it possible that your spouse is just overreacting to your perfectly appropriate friendship? Sure, that’s possible but it’s also possible that your spouse is actually right and that you’re deceived to think your “friendship” is harmless.

As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Regardless if your spouse’s objections to your friendship are grounded or not, if you don’t listen to them, there will be trouble in your relationship.

The tell-tale sign that your relationship has crossed over from a simple friendship to something more is secrecy.

If you’re attempting to hide conversations or feelings you have for your “friend,” you likely have crossed into dangerous territory.

The remedy here is transparency. Both of you need to be honest and upfront with each other about interactions with others that make one of you feel uncomfortable. Technology has only added to the potential secrecy with email, texting, social media and more.

Find Out What Led to Your Emotional Affair

Often, when an emotional affair has its strongest hold, the offender is trying to fulfill a need outside of their committed relationship. Stating this fact certainly is not an attempt to justify such behavior. Instead, it can help us to understand what’s going on and, as a result, potential ways to fix it.

On the other hand, the hurt partner may feel like they’re being made out to be the villain who’s too insecure to allow their partner to have “perfectly appropriate friendships.”

This can lead to a “crazy-making” scenario. The offender makes the other person feel like they’re crazy after the offended one calls their partner out on their inappropriate behavior.

Emotional affairs, as already discussed, can be way more powerful than mere physical affairs where the emotional aspect is mainly missing (and for that reason, more hurtful).

Wendy Lustbader M.S.W shares this fact in her Psychology Today article entitled, “Emotional Affairs: Why They Hurt So Much.”

“It turns out that feeling understood on the level of the soul is far more sexy than sex itself. Restoring such excitement to the marriage is the best recourse for those who want to go on enjoying the privilege of having a partner throughout life.”

Until the complexities of the affair can be adequately discussed and the “friendship” ended, no progress will be made in your relationship as a couple.

Consider Couples Counseling

Couples counseling can go a long way in helping to address the complexities that go with an emotional affair. Your therapist will help you work through these struggles as a couple so you can heal your relationship and make it strong again.

Need help with how to handle an emotional affair? You can schedule an appointment with Therapy With Compassion today.