Emotional Infidelity - How Is This Different?

Emotional infidelity is a term you may come across sometimes to describe an extra marital relationship that is based not on sexual attraction but on some emotional issues. It is more like a friendship. Since the friendship between a man and a woman becomes suspect if either or both are married, the cover of emotional infidelity is brought in to paint the friendship as purely emotional, free from lust. This is the difference between an emotional relationship and what is normally termed an affair. The word affair is pejorative implying sexual infidelity and the prefix 'emotional' is invoked to differentiate a relationship with no sexual overtones.

But this differentiation is only at the surface level. When there is an emotional attachment between a man and a woman, the possibility for the relationship developing into a sexual relationship is very high. That one or both of them are married to others cannot stop this development because ironically, sexual drive has an emotional component built into it.

We meet a lot of people and with some we develop social relationships. Social relationship has several layers. Friendship is a term loosely used to describe most of this relationships. But in a civilized society, a man is allowed to have marital relationship only with one woman and a similar rule applies to a woman. While in today's world, it is possible that a man or a woman has sex with one or more members of the other sex before marriage, the sanctity of the marital relationship is carefully preserved by proscribing extra marital sexual relationships. In fact, a strong word 'adultery' is used to describe the infidelity of a married person.

If you analyze how an emotional relationship develops, you will find that it is not different from the way love develops between a man a woman. There is an emotional element in many of our actions. In fact, it may be difficult to describe any action as being free from emotions. Even routine actions like eating or taking a shower affect our emotions. A good shower makes you happy and enthusiastic. If the food you eat is delicious, you find that your spirits are lifted. If the food is unpalatable, you become irritated. Therefore emotional attachment cannot be used an excuse to justify an affair.

Labeling an affair as an emotional infidelity carries the danger of sustaining the relationship instead of nipping it in the bud. A rose is a rose by whatever name you call it. Extending this logic to an affair, an act of infidelity cannot be made acceptable by attaching an 'emotional' tag to it.