Shirley Glass, the late psychologist, identified a new trend in infidelity in her 2003 book: Not Just Friends:
The new infidelity is between people who unwittingly form deep, passionate connections before realizing they’ve crossed the line from platonic friendship into romantic love.
Of the people she’d counseled, 82% of the unfaithful partners had affairs with a person who was just a friend. What’s more, she recounted that 55 to 65% participatid in relationships that Glass herself found to be emotionally unfaithful. That is to say that their relationships with their special friend is secret, charged and more emotionally open than their spousal relationship.
Therein Lies the Danger
The internet is a dangerous place for developing such liasons – every bit as much as the workplace. Cheating and infidelity are as old as man – yet reaching beyond the relationship for emotional succor is a dangerous path because it does not look dangerous.
We all need friends. In fact, it’s important for healthy relationships to have friends outside the marriage. But having relationships outside the marriage that are more important to you than your marriage – where confidences are exchanged that exclude the spouse – where the comfort and joy come from a place that is not in the marriage and eclipses the joy found in that relationship – that’s a huge problem.
Shifting the Bubble
Very few of us just conciously flip a switch and decide we are going to lean on someone else for our emotional comfort. We don’t conciously go looking for someone else to confide our secret hopes and dreams in. We don’t plan to leave our spouse in the dark or out in the cold. But when we shift our relationships and the bubble around them in such away that we have created an exclusive, secret bond with a person who is not our spouse – whether the relationship ever becomes sexual or not – infidelity has occurred. We have shifted our allegiance. We are not loyal to our partner any longer.
Many times, when a cheating spouse is confronted with their infidelity – the defense they offer is a weak: it meant nothing. But emotionally infidelity can’t mean nothing – by it’s very nature – it means everything. Recovering from emotional infidelity can be far more difficult than any one individual realizes because emotional infidelity whittles away and destroys trust.
Have you ever found yourself verging on emotional infidelity? Have you seen the damage it can do to a marriage?
Related Articles:
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Ten Signs That Your Spouse May Be Cheating