8 Women Reveal What Happened When They Had Emotional Affairs

Emotional affairs are often considered just as damaging as physical cheating. Whether you hook up with someone outside of your monogamous relationship or not, if you have feelings for another person it can cause all sorts of hurt for your partner.

Here, eight women who had what they describe as emotional affairs explain what happened, whether they told their partner, and how they feel about it now.

"I imagined a relationship with a fake person"

"In a nutshell, it happened because I was unhappy about a few things in my relationship of three years. Instead of being mature and communicating to my partner the things that were bothering me, I started getting close to a former male coworker through texting. I started imagining a relationship with them where everything was perfect. All the things that bothered me about my partner didn't exist with this new guy. I was basically creating and imagining a fake person. I barely knew them. Spoiler alert: it wasn't all perfect, and I realised how much about my partner I was taking for granted. My former coworker was really just a fuckboy.

"My partner took me back and forgave me, and we are still together. I fucked up pretty bad and I'm thankful everyday he took me back. Im sure people will say he shouldn't have though. We are happy now and have moved past it. I grew a lot through this experience. I realized no one is perfect and I also realized you don't just throw away a relationship when issues come up. You have to talk about them and try to work through it." [via]

"My stomach tingles when I hear the other guy"

"I recently got a crush on a coworker, like big hard crush with the desire to pursue it. At the same time, my partner had talked about opening our relationship. So since the crush wasn’t going away like others did before, I told my partner about it, and he did a full 180 on opening the relationship. He freaked out and realized how much being monogamous with me meant to him. While for me, having feelings for someone else didn’t remove anything from the feelings I already had for him, and I felt like we could have tried it. I told him I wouldn’t pursue anything more than a work friendship with the other guy. But I’m still a bit frustrated and definitely need to work on my feelings. I hate that tingling in my stomach when I hear the other guy laughing." [via]