Emotional Adultery
Cheating can happen even without sex

Marcia Kaye

Lipstick on the collar may tell a tale of infidelity. Same with nightclub receipts, revealing email messages or hotel charges on a credit card. But what if there’s an extramarital relationship going on that’s strictly platonic? Can it still be an affair without sex?

“My husband swore up and down that he wasn’t having sex with her,” says a 42-year-old woman from Mississauga, Ont., now divorced, whose ex-husband spent many overtime hours at the office with a female colleague. “I believed him, but I still felt betrayed. Emotionally, he just wasn’t there anymore.”

Emotional infidelity, or emotional adultery, gets into murky waters because there’s no strict semantic, moral or legal definition. It’s more a matter of interpretation: if the emotional needs of one partner are not being met and the other partner is busy fulfilling someone else’s, then the first may feel a victim of unfaithfulness. Instead of feeling safe and cozy within the nucleus of the relationship, the partner may feel abandoned, threatened or betrayed.

Photo by Digital Vision Ltd./SuperStock

A key component of this type of infidelity is the potential for sexual attachment, even if there is none — so making your wife a golf widow does not qualify.

Still, extramarital emotional involvement has far less to do with sex, or even love, than with connection, say Carolyn and William Chernenkoff, a husband-and-wife team of co-therapists in marital and sexual counselling based in Saskatoon. “People always need somebody they’re emotionally close to, who they can trust with intimate secrets, share emotions with, feel approval and acceptance,” says Carolyn Chernenkoff.

If one partner is emotionally close to someone else, even when there’s no sex, it’s just as destructive to the relationship. “They may be having sex with their partner, so their physical body is there, but their emotional body is elsewhere.”

And it’s not just something men do. Increasingly, women have the opportunity to go outside a primary relationship to find emotional gratification, whether at work, at the gym or on Internet chat lines. The Chernenkoffs say they’re receiving more and more calls from men who feel betrayed. As Carolyn recalls, “One fellow told me, ‘My wife would get up from the dinner table, lock me out of the computer room and talk to her male friend online for five hours every night.’” The woman even planned to travel across the country to meet him, and although she swore the man was just a friend, her husband felt excluded.

Interestingly, the phenomenon is touching increasing numbers of rural men, whose wives — once socially isolated — can now engage in online relationships that leave the men feeling left out.

The most obvious sign of this type of infidelity occurs when one partner devotes more energy to nurturing the other relationship. That may involve heartfelt conversations, gifts, extra efforts to spend time with the other person and less interest in the spouse. As William Chernenkoff notes, “There are attractions everywhere — that’s normal. But it’s not normal to form a bond with someone else that’s stronger than the one with your partner.”

How to tell if you’ve crossed the line? Ask yourself three questions.

• If your partner did what you’re doing, would it bother you?

• Are you keeping this liaison a secret from your spouse?

• When something newsworthy happens in your life, whether celebratory or tragic, do you tell the other person first?

If the answer to any of these is yes, your primary relationship could be in trouble. Of the 4,500 couples the Chernenkoffs have counselled over the past three decades, affairs have been an issue for 25%, and half of these have entailed emotional involvement without sex. When they counsel such couples, these therapists always ask each partner privately, “Who do you feel more emotionally close to?” If the answer is the other person, they say, “Can you commit to rebuilding your primary relationship? If so, you have to give up the other person.” It can be done. In fact, the chances of success in rebuilding the original relationship are often higher than those of sustaining the new one.