By ignoring this recipe for emptiness and not taking any corrective action, sedentary lives, boredom, and complacency settle into a marriage. Partners may react to emptiness and substitute over-involvement in outside activities, or simply tolerate a life without closeness and partner connection.
Over-focus on kids, jobs, extended family, and friends are typical compensations to fulfill their unmet marital needs. Emptiness weakens marriages. Even if couples have settled, their marriages still remain vulnerable to emotional cheating, but emotional cheating is not inevitable for them.
Solution-oriented couples directly address marital emptiness and engage in self-help activities or seek professional marriage counseling (or ultimately divorce) in order to achieve a more fulfilling relationship. Too frequently, however, tempting emotional cheating opportunities interfere beforehand with a couple’s motivation to strengthen their marriages.
Emotional cheating negatively distorts the view of marriage by filling in lives with promises of excitement, ego boosts, newness, intimacy, and connection. Then it no longer feels necessary to rebuild those qualities in marriage. An almost irresistible temptation to emotional cheating is often disguised as serious flirting or passively accepting friendly moves toward private emotional exchanges with an opposite sex co-worker or acquaintance.
Is Emotional Cheating Really Cheating?
Yes, emotional cheating is cheating. Emotional cheating secretly strips the left behind partner of the time, attention, and connection they expect and deserve in their marriages, but was directed to the emotional affair partner instead.
Both partners share equal responsibility for tolerating marital neglect and lack of connection. Cheating is a choice only certain individuals make in response to marital neglect. Simply put, cheaters choose cheating. Marital dissatisfaction does not cause cheating. Emotional cheating sabotages marital satisfaction.
How Do We Know If Our Marriage Has Enough Intimacy and Connection?
Easy. Your marriage has enough intimacy and connection if both you and your spouse say so. Likewise, your marriage is being neglected if either you or your spouse says so. Period.
Feelings of intimacy, connection, and neglect are very personal. You and your partner may not feel those emotions in an identical way or have matched needs for intimacy and connection or share equal sensitivity to neglect. But also remember that if the needs of one are not satisfied, then there is either not enough or too much intimacy and connection. Enough for one may be too much (or too little) for the other.
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