Reasons Why people have emotional affairs?
Why would someone who is married or in a committed relationship need to seek out another person with whom to share intimate and personal information and feelings?
Since most people recognize these emotional connections are inappropriate, what compels them to step over the edge into such harmful and hurtful territory?
It’s not an uncommon situation, as about 35 percent of wives and 45 percent of husbands report having emotional affairs, according to the American Association Of Marriage and Family Therapy. Here are a few reasons emotional infidelity occurs:
- There is little emotional intimacy in the marriage, and the new person fills the void for an emotionally-starved partner.
- The emotional cheater may be frequently physically isolated and alone and needs human connection.
- The attraction with a new person feels so good it becomes like an addiction. It becomes increasingly hard to give up the longer it goes on.
- The cheating partner doesn’t have firm boundaries with co-workers (or other possible romantic interests) that provide a deterrent to inappropriate words or behaviors.
- The marriage is already rocky, and the emotional affair is a passive way of rushing it to a demise. The cheating spouse may even want to get caught.
- The spouse having the emotional affair doesn’t believe it’s really “cheating” since sex isn’t involved (yet). So they easily justify their attachment and inappropriate connection as no big deal.
