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Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,054,732 times
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You're in a long term relationship or a marriage. Imagine two scenarios:
Your partner tells you he/she has cheated on you, maybe a few times, but purely for sex, no feelings involved. They still love you though.
Your partner tells you he/she has fallen for someone he/she has known for awhile, and is unsure they love you anymore.
I.e. is 'emotional' cheating worse than physical cheating? Of course both would be worse, but if it's an either/or thing. It would seem that 'emotional cheating' is worse, even though we can't really control how we feel about someone or if we fall for someone out of the blue. Society believes that adults can control who they have sex with, but is it really much different? Actually I think we can control how emotionally attached we get to someone to an extent; like deciding how much time we spend with them, the nature of our bonding so to speak.
Anyway, which would hurt you more? It seems that in this society people get so riled up about physical cheating but falling in love with someone else...that seems complex. While this often does involve having sex with that person, what if it didn't? To me the idea of say a husband having sex with a prostitute without feeling anything almost doesn't seem like 'cheating'; I mean it still is, but to me the emotional component seems more important in a relationship and I'd care more if my woman was in love with someone else, than just had a meaningless fling.
I think both are equally offensive. One indicates that the marital relationship solely lacked physical intimacy and the other implies that the marital relationship lacked both emotional and physical connection.
I wouldn't feel comfortable with anything indicating that a relationship with me lacked something, in which case he had to find someone else to fill in the missing pieces. I think a married man finding sex elsewhere is especially offensive to a woman.
Location: Everybody is going to hurt you, you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for-B Marley
9,516 posts, read 20,004,411 times
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Both are bad. I heard someone say recently--it might have been Steve Harvey, I'm not sure--that if a man is cheats on you, you weren't 'the one'. It's probably the same for women.
Treating anyone like the are nothing is wrong even if its the other woman. I would rather they fell in love and cared for another than to be a total scumbag who treats people like kleenex.
Each is bad in its own way. If a partner has fallen out of love with you, it's nearly impossible in most cases to recover from that. It's a negation of everything you are, not just sex. Cheating is a violation of trust, but depending on circumstances and beliefs, many DO recover from that.
I would be very hurt in either situation, but in my case, would be more shocked by the first scenario, as there is no excuse to cheat - we have a carefully constrained open relationship. In that situation, cheating would imply an emotional connection as well.
I don't think falling for someone else is a negation of anything. I think once you have been with someone awhile people can change as can life goals. If they want to have a life that is different than your life goals...that is just a mismatch. Neither goals is actually bad but they are different in a way that doesn't work well together as a team. I have broken up with people over that kind of thing. They are fine as a person but wouldn't work out for the long run with things beyond the bedroom or basic friendship.
I think the emotional cheating would hurt me the most, but I would hope we could overcome it....as for the sex just for the sex....there'd be NO forgiveness....HIT the road!!!
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