Is Your Relationship Suffering From Emotional Infidelity?

Emotional infidelity occurs when you or your partner become emotionally connected with someone outside your relationship, either in person or on the Internet.

How dangerous to a marriage or committed relationship is emotional infidelity?

One way of looking at emotional infidelity is that it is very dangerous, because it not only takes away time and energy from the marriage, but it can lead to sexual infidelity and possibly to the end of marriage.

Another way of looking at it is that it is a symptom of problems that already exist within a marriage. My experience with the couples that I work with is that, when the primary relationship is not emotionally and physically intimate, each person may be vulnerable to a form infidelity - either emotional and/or physical. Rather than blaming the affair for the problems, why not address the real problem?

Emotional affairs are compelling because it is so easy to be close to someone you do not have a shared responsibility - no money problems, no children, no work. It's easy to share your deepest feelings with someone you do not have conflict. It's easy to get the good feelings you get when someone not living with you and not see all the questions you think are wonderful. But it is a cop out - an easy way to tackle the real issues at hand. And if this case does not lead to a breakdown of their marriage and a new permanent relationship, you will most likely end with the same problems! So why waste your time? Why not tackle the problems now?

The main problem that leads to emotional infidelity is emotional distance between partners. While emotional infidelity is a symptom of emotional distance in the primary relationship, the emotional distance is also a symptom of deeper problems in the relationship. These issues could be more profound:

* One or both partners trying to have control through anger, guilt, and criticism - which manifests itself in forms of control.

* One or both partners trying to have control through care, ie, giving themselves and take responsibility for the feelings of another person - which is a form of control.

* One of the two partners of the withdrawal and resistance are controlled by the other partner.

* Neither partner taking emotional responsibility for their own feelings of grief and joy. Each partner abandoning themselves - with self-assessment, and ignoring their feelings through addictions, and / or making others responsible for their feelings.

* The fights that stem from the dynamics of control and resistance and the inability to resolve conflicts.

The relationship that develops the system, where neither partner is responsible for their own feelings, and when each country to have control in overt or covert ways, grinds love until each person feels disconnected from his partner and only in the relationship. This is when they are susceptible to emotional infidelity.

However, these patterns do not disappear just because you move to another relationship. You take your overt and covert forms of control you in any relationship, as well as their underlying fear of rejection and engulfment of the fears that underlie these forms of control. These patterns do not usually appear early in a relationship or an emotional or physical issue, but that does not mean they are gone. If your new relationship has become their main relationship of these patterns, once again surface.

Why waste what might turn out to be a wonderful relationship, not to deal with your fears, controlling patterns, and self-abandonment now, in your current relationship? Instead of addictively looking for someone else to fill your emptiness and take away your aloneness and loneliness, why not learn to do this for yourself so you can break your dysfunctional patterns and become the lover of human beings can it be? Imagine the wonderful relationship you and your partner may have if both of you were to learn to take responsibility for their own feelings and their own capacity to love!

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• Make Your Relationships Stronger In The Midst Of Conflict
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• Is Your Relationship Suffering From Emotional Infidelity?