Some cheaters will exasperate you by drawing their distinction between physical affairs and emotional affairs. They think that because they didn’t sleep with the lover that ‘all is well’.
They refuse seeing or acknowledging the danger of the emotional affair.
When your spouse develops an emotional attachment to others, and puts those others ahead of you, there are problems. By claiming that it is not an affair until sex happens, they are lying to themselves and you about the dangers.
Once an emotional attachment develops, the lover resides in your spouse’s heart and head. They have space in each of them them and doesn’t even pay rent. The lover becomes an internalized item you face from then on.
Once the emotional attachment develops, an affair starts in their brain. This virtual affair consists of the cheater fantasizing and interacting with the lover in various scenarios.
When the virtual affair gets a firm foothold in your spouse, they spread their influence. The lover eventual takes up space in your head and heart as well.The lover is no longer limited to just the cheater.
In most cases, your fantasies are more negative oriented. Some cheaters are even so brazen as to discuss their fantasies with you. At that point, you become entangled in a weird virtual menage-a-trios.
This weird menage-a-trios is both real and imaginary. That is part of the crazy making aspect of emotional affairs. Nothing happened, yet you feel all the anger, guilt, resentment, etc. often associated with a physical affair.
This means that all the consequences are there, and they are real, yet no physical affair happened. All the damage without any evidence.
Another damaging aspect of emotional affairs is that they often linger long after any physical affair is over. The cheater may have ended the physical affair, yet they continues in their heart and head.
You can tell that they’re still not with you, yet feel crazy since the lover is no longer in the picture. The reality is that the lover is still in the picture, since they live in your spouse’s heart and head.
One of the long-term damages of emotional affairs is that they make the cheater vulnerable to similar lovers in the future. Any member of the opposite sex that happens to trigger the old ’emotional affair’ neurons will have them “off to the races”.
Those triggers often lay dormant like an unexploded bomb that can suddenly blow up, even years after the emotional affair. Bear in mind that the fantasies are not about the ‘real lover’, they are about the imagined lover.
The imagined lover is what the cheater wants the real lover to be. All their interacting is with this virtual lover. Once the real lover (who was a projection of the virtual lover) is gone, the damage remains behind. The real lover was merely the catalyst for the cheater to activate the fantasies.
Given the way the mind works, when someone comes along that looks like, sounds like, or even moves like the virtual lover, the old neurons are triggered. The cheater will have to learn how to ignore the triggered messages.
They’ll have to resist urges and fantasies. They may want to do right as suggested by them fantasizing rather than impulsively acting on their impulses, but they are still giving into the urge.
The bottom line is that emotional affairs are dangerous. Like a poisonous snake, they have venom and can strike without much warning.
Your spouse may say that those old fantasies are locked away in their mind. Like a snake put into a cage, the danger is still there, even though it is in the cage. The poison is still a threat.
In moving past the affair, the best way of making sure things end well is with an affair relapse plan. The video “Overcoming Affair Relapse” guides you through this part of the recovery journey.
Best Regards,
Jeff
