When most people think of affairs they imagine some sordid set-up involving secretive meetings and lots of sex. However, an affair does not have to involve sleeping with somebody else. If you are meeting up with someone else, growing attached to them, and keeping it all a bug secret from your partner, then you are still having an affair, whether or not you decide to sleep with the other person or not. This is known as an emotional affair, where you are secretively seeing someone with whom you have a strong emotional relationship.

Despite many people’s interpretation of an affair, this activity is more about deception than sex. An emotional affair has all the traits that most people attribute to an affair, but does not involve sleeping with someone. An emotional affair can be looked at as the period that leads up to a full-blown sex-based affair. It has been shown in studies that those people whose partners have had an affair have been more upset about the deception of it all than the fact that their partner had sex with someone else, and an emotional affair is all about deception.

Consider these questions:

§         Are you spending a lot of time with another person, but keeping it all a secret from your partner?

§         Are you saying things to this other person that you wouldn’t dream of doing with your partner present?

§         Are you telling this other person things that you wouldn’t tell your partner?

§         Do you really look forward to spending time with this other person, and have started making up reasons or putting in a lot of effort to get to see them?

If you answered yes to the above questions, you could be classed as having an emotional affair. You are basically deceiving your partner in order to spend time with another person to whom you have become attached.  

If you suspect that your partner is having an emotional affair, it is important that this is the time when everything is brought into the open before things get out of hand and it turns into a sexual relationship. With an emotional affair, there is an equal chance of it either coming to an end or turning into a ‘real’ affair. However, if you leave it to fester and hope that it simply fizzles out, you may find that instead it turns into a ‘real’ affair, which may be far harder to deal with and more difficult to stop.