This is a touchy subject I know, so this could turn into a GD, but for now lets just keep it to the facts:
What is worse to go through in your opinion? An emotional affair where one spouse has feelings of love or affection beyond a crush, with another person other than their spouse. This could go on for a prolonged period or just a short period.
Or a physical affair where one spouse has sex with someone outside of their marriage with or without an emotional attachement.
How much do emotions play into the depth of an affair? Like to hear from both sides if possible.
I think an emotional affair would be more hurtful. I’ve had sex with plenty of people that I had no particular emotional attachment to. Sharing your thoughts and feelings, the “real” you is a much bigger deal, IMO.
That can be a complicated situation. I started having a platonic affair a few months before I got married and it lasted for about two years after that. I basically had two wives during that time in almost every sense of the word except one. I spent more time with my platonic wife than my real one because we worked together and managed to arrange some crazy schemes to spend more and more time together as time went on and they usually worked. She was also married so we just kept the sex part out of it to maintain plausible deniability which was needed a few times. My wife knew about her existence as a friend and accepted it for what I told her but her husband wasn’t so easily tricked. There were a few some close confrontations from some unexpected people during that time but we were both good actors and just played it off. She had to get a new job and cut off contact from me and they took a very hard hit from all of it.
I don’t know which would be worse because I never got truly busted for it personally. I would immediately dump any female that slept with another man but I would get increasingly hurt over time if my woman was moving closer and closer to another man rather than me.
On the one hand, I’d be much more hurt if my spouse fell in love with someone else than if he just had sex with someone else. On the other, we can’t always control our feelings, but we *can * always control our actions, so I’d be much more *pissed *if he slept with someone else.
An “emotional affair” that you cut off when you recognize that it’s an issue is forgivable. An “emotional affair” that goes on for *years *is not only a betrayal of your spouse, but a ridiculous, childish charade for everyone involved. You’re not being virtuous by not actually interlocking dirty bits, so why not just be grownups about it and fuck.
I agree even though I have been through it. I have kids now so there is no way in hell that I would let something like that happen again but it did seem like a lot of fun at the time for a thrillseeker types. That was back in the free-wheeling 90’s though. We both knew what we were doing. It was just a technicality game to avoid provable consequences.
This could be a good slogan somewhere or maybe a sig line.
