Emotional cheating

Emotional cheating is a close bond outside your relationship that is hidden from your partner or takes their place. Nothing physical is required; emotional affair and emotional infidelity are older names. A 2026 UK survey found 52% and a 2013 US poll 60% calling a deep emotional connection cheating; in a 2019 US survey that said secret, 76% did.

Updated October 6, 2026

Means

A hidden bond that takes a partner's place

First seen

'Emotional infidelity' in research by 1992 (Buss et al., Psychological Science, July 1992); 'emotional affair' on Urban Dictionary by March 9, 2007, popularized in our reading by psychologist Shirley Glass's 2003 book; 'emotional cheating' on Urban Dictionary by May 25, 2010; no entry for 'emotional cheating' in Merriam-Webster or Collins as of October 5, 2026

Related terms

Micro-cheating, DTR (define the relationship), Orbiting, Monkey branching, Red flags

In Swedish

Emotionell otrohet

Emotional cheating, by our working definition, is a close bond with someone else that is kept from a partner or takes the partner’s place. Little of it would show up in a photo. “Emotional cheating” had no entry in Merriam-Webster or Collins when we checked on October 5, 2026 (Merriam-Webster; Collins). In one 2019 survey of 2,000 US adults, 76% called a secret emotional relationship unfaithful; in a 2026 UK survey of 1,882 Britons (July 9 to 10, 2026) whose question did not say secret, 52% counted a deep emotional attachment as cheating, a figure our micro-cheating page carries (YouGov, 2026).

Signs of emotional cheating, with examples

Two questions came up in the threads quoted below: is it hidden, and does this person now get what the partner used to get? Three examples we wrote:

• A colleague hears about the promotion first, and the partner has never heard the colleague’s name. Hidden and replacing.
• A school friend gets a long Sunday call; the partner knows and still hears the news first. A friendship.
• A gym friend gets the first voice note every morning. The partner knows the friend, not the habit. We found no figure for this case.

On Mumsnet, a British parenting forum, a thread started November 20, 2024 (about 279 replies) was about a husband’s one-to-one lunches and walks with a colleague, which the poster had not known about. “Either you trust your husband or you don’t,” one reply said; “I think there is always an imbalance though,” said another (Mumsnet, November 2024). In a 3-reply thread started September 29, 2023, one reply made telling the test: “If you’ve not told your DH about how you’ve bonded with this other person then yes” (Mumsnet, September 2023). DH is forum shorthand for husband. A thread started June 10, 2025 (about 136 replies) asked what separates an emotional affair from a crush, and one reply answered that an affair takes two: “An emotional affair is both people participating in it” (Mumsnet, June 2025). Mumsnet threads like these are about marriages; many readers here have not agreed to anything yet.

The surveys that wrote secrecy into the question drew the higher numbers, which shows how people judge a hidden bond, not that hiding is what decides it. For a 2019 report from the National Marriage Project, a marriage-research project at the University of Virginia, and the Wheatley Institution, a Brigham Young University institute, YouGov asked 2,000 US adults about behaviors “if your spouse/partner engaged” in them “without your knowledge or consent.” Of them, 76% called a secret emotional relationship in real life unfaithful, and 72% one online (National Marriage Project, 2019; Dew, 2024). A HuffPost/YouGov poll of 2,000 US adults on YouGov’s opt-in panel, run March 8 to 10, 2013 with 1,000 per question set, left secrecy out: 60% would consider it cheating if a partner developed a deep emotional connection with someone else, and 18% would not (HuffPost, 2013). Different surveys and wordings: a pattern, not a trend.

Emotional cheating vs an emotional affair vs micro-cheating

Emotional affair and emotional infidelity are older names for the same idea. “Emotional infidelity” is in the abstract of a July 1992 Psychological Science paper by Buss and colleagues, the earliest dated use we opened (Buss et al., 1992). “Emotional affair” is on Urban Dictionary by March 9, 2007, and “emotional cheating” by May 25, 2010 (Urban Dictionary, 2007; Urban Dictionary, 2010). Our reading: psychologist Shirley Glass’s 2003 book NOT “Just Friends” and its coverage spread “emotional affair”; Fresh Air interviewed her on February 17, 2003, and that October the Christian Science Monitor quoted her on “the new infidelity” (Fresh Air, 2003; Christian Science Monitor, 2003). We found no source saying she coined it, and none measuring its spread.

The neighbors on this site:

• Micro-cheating is the smaller hidden acts before any of this, such as a contact saved under a code.
• Monkey branching is about the next partner; emotional cheating is about a bond with someone who may never become one.

Before you have agreed anything, there is no agreement to hide a friendship from. In a situationship, the DTR is the talk that comes first.

Is texting, flirting or sexting cheating?

Texting. On The Student Room, a UK student forum, a thread started March 15, 2014 (about 19 replies on the first page) asked about a girlfriend texting her ex and lying about it. One reply called still texting an ex “a big warning sign”; another said “It is weird that she lied though” (The Student Room, March 2014). We did not count replies by theme; the two quoted went different ways. Our view: texting someone is not the breach in itself, and hiding it is what the threads react to. In a 2005 Queen’s University Belfast study, most of 234 participants who completed a story about an online affair saw it as “real infidelity” (Whitty, 2005).

Flirting. About 42% in the survey for the 2019 report called a partner’s flirting in real life unfaithful, read from the report’s chart (National Marriage Project, 2019). On The Student Room, a thread started September 6, 2019 (about 9 replies) set “flirting is not cheating. that doesn’t mean it’s okay” against “Yes, it is a mild form of cheating” (The Student Room, September 2019). A reply in one started March 4, 2026 (5 replies) said “it’s not cheating, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong” (The Student Room, March 2026).

Sexting. The highest of the nine behaviors: about 82% in the same survey called it unfaithful (National Marriage Project, 2019). In a Mumsnet thread started October 17, 2021 (about 29 replies), about a married friend swapping explicit images and messages, replies treated it as cheating and split on whether to tell his wife (Mumsnet, October 2021).

Can a relationship survive emotional cheating?

We found no study we could open that measures it. In a Mumsnet thread started March 25, 2015 (about 45 replies), a married poster had ended an emotional affair with a colleague before anything physical and asked whether to tell (Mumsnet, March 2015).

Our reading, with no study behind it: the two things couples argue about afterwards are whether the contact ends and whether the hiding stops. Some couples see a counselor; we found no figure on how that goes. If fear, threats or control come into it, the talk can wait: the US and UK helplines are in the last step on our red flags page.

What the research says, and what it argues about

These studies mostly measured reactions to imagined betrayals, often among students, and we found none on unmarried daters.

In 1992, Buss and colleagues at the University of Michigan had 202 undergraduates choose between imagining a partner “forming a deep emotional attachment to that other person” and “enjoying passionate sexual intercourse with that other person.” Two follow-up studies in the paper used 55 and 309 students, the first with physiological measures (Buss et al., 1992). The emotional option is nearly the 2026 UK survey’s wording. The paper reports its results by sex; we do not repeat them, because they describe samples, not partners.

Since then the argument has been about method. A 2003 review by Harris found that “only one hypothetical measure” fit the evolutionary theory, reported that data on actual infidelity did not fit it, and argued for a social-cognitive view (Harris, 2003). A 2012 meta-analysis pooled 209 effect sizes from 47 samples to compare forced-choice with continuous measures (Sagarin et al., 2012). Among 63,894 US adults surveyed online, Frederick and Fales limited any difference to one group: “only among heterosexuals” (Frederick & Fales, 2016). A 2015 study asked 1,074 heterosexual students in Trondheim, Norway, in both question formats (Bendixen et al., 2015).

We read several only in abstract, and none of it can say what one partner meant.