. Many have gone their opposite ways after an affair was discovered. If this kind of relationship is allowed to occur in a marriage, the results are inevitably devastating.
If a person habitually confides intimate emotional matters to a not his or her spouse, that is an affair of the heart. Everybody could use a friend. Everyone needs another person to talk to intimately.
But when one gets extra close to another person of the opposite gender who is not his or her spouse, it is considered an affair of this kind. It has become a full-blown emotional affair. This affair can make the transition from being almost purely emotional to being sexual.
There have been findings that men are more affected by sexual infidelity and women by emotional infidelity. A spouse can be hurt and feel a trust has been violated after discovering about details being shared. It is said that an affair of the heart starts out as being physical or sexual but is covered up by the friendship.
Or it could really start out as purely emotional. Questions are asked why someone would share emotional matters with a person of the opposite sex. Why not share it with his or her spouse instead?
There could really be an initial motive. It is a way to start a physical or sexual affair. The most vulnerable to an affair of the heart are individuals who cannot get emotional intimacy with their spouses.
There might be a lot of hostility, a lot of fighting between the couples at the moment. The outsider can feel the lure of getting into an affair of the emotions as it is intense but also safe and comforting. Those in an emotional affair could be casual colleagues, coworkers, or chat-room friends who start sharing private emotional matters with each other, that the other spouse would consider infidelity.