Emotional Cheating Quiz: See Whether an Outside Connection Has Become an Emotional Affair

Emotional cheating, or an emotional affair, is a close connection with someone outside your relationship that takes on the intimacy, secrecy and priority that belong to your partner, without anything physical happening. The definition that researchers and couples therapists use rests on three features rather than on any single act. The connection is hidden or minimized. Emotional intimacy, the sharing of feelings, worries and the daily news of your life, moves away from your partner and toward this person. And there is a pull, an attraction or a wish for more, that you may not have acted on but that shapes how you behave. Shirley Glass, whose research on infidelity in the 1980s and 1990s showed how often affairs begin as friendships, summarized it in one image: in a healthy relationship there is a window between partners and a wall around the relationship; in an emotional affair the wall goes up between partners and the window opens to someone else.

Emotional cheating is not having close friends, including close friends of whichever gender you are attracted to. It is not confiding in a colleague about a hard week, finding someone attractive, or enjoying attention. Every committed person does these things, and a relationship that forbids them tends to be more fragile, not less. The difference is in the three features above. A friendship your partner knows about, that you would happily have them read, that adds to your life without subtracting from your relationship, is a friendship. The same friendship, hidden, carrying the intimacy your partner no longer receives, and kept going because of how it makes you feel about this person, is something else, even if nothing has happened and even if you are sure nothing will.

People often ask whether emotional cheating is real cheating, usually hoping the answer is no. Shackelford, LeBlanc and Drass's 2000 study of emotional reactions to infidelity found that a partner's emotional infidelity reliably produced feelings of being undesirable and insecure, while physical infidelity more often produced disgust; both were experienced as betrayal. Buss and colleagues' 1992 work found that many people rate emotional infidelity as the more distressing of the two. Whether or not the word cheating fits for you, the research is clear that the harm is real, and that it is felt most sharply by the partner who was not told.

You answer eighteen statements about one specific outside connection, rating each from not at all true (0) to very true (4), for a total from 0 to 72. The total places you in one of three ranges: a friendship with clear walls (0 to 24), blurring lines (25 to 48) and an emotional affair pattern (49 to 72). These are educational thirds we chose so the result is readable; emotional cheating has no clinical cutoff, because it is not a disorder. It is a pattern of choices, which is the hopeful part, since choices can change.

Beneath the total, the breakdown shows three scores of up to 24 each. Secrecy covers six statements on hidden messages, played-down contact, things shared about your relationship, and how you would feel if your partner read the thread. Intimacy transfer covers six on who you tell first, who gets your private feelings, comparison, feeling more understood elsewhere, and pulling back at home. Intent covers six on looking forward to contact, a pull beyond friendship, imagining a relationship, planning around this person, and continuing despite knowing your partner would be hurt. The three groupings are our own, built from the infidelity literature; they are not validated subscales.

The breakdown changes what the result means. High secrecy with low intimacy transfer and low intent often describes someone who is hiding a friendship because their partner is jealous or controlling, which is a relationship problem but not an affair. High intimacy transfer with low secrecy and low intent often describes a relationship where the connection at home has thinned and a friend has filled the gap in plain sight, which is a warning about the relationship more than about the friend. High intent with the other two low is a crush that has not yet been acted on, which is the easiest point at which to turn around. Your breakdown shows which of the three ran highest, and the result text gives the next step for each, so it fits your actual situation rather than a generic one.

The earliest sign is usually a change in your phone. You start angling the screen away, deleting threads that contain nothing explicit, or feeling a jolt when your partner picks it up. Secrecy about something innocent is the most reliable signal that part of you does not believe it is innocent. The second sign is the shift in who comes first: a promotion, a bad day, a funny thing in the street, and the person you want to tell is not the person you live with. Couples researchers describe emotional intimacy as built from exactly these small bids for attention, and when they are redirected, the relationship at home begins running on empty without anyone naming it.

The third sign is comparison. You notice how easily this person laughs at your jokes, how well they listen, how little you argue, and you hold that against your partner without noticing that you are comparing a relationship that carries bills, children, illness and years with one that carries none of them. Related to comparison is the feeling of being understood: emotional affairs almost always involve the sense that this person sees you in a way your partner has stopped seeing you. That feeling is real. It is also, very often, a product of novelty and of the fact that this person has only ever met your best self.

The fourth sign is the pull. You plan your day around when you might cross paths, you dress with this person in mind, you feel a drop when they do not reply, and you would be unreasonably upset if they started something serious with someone else. If you have found yourself imagining what a relationship with them would look like, that is not a crime, but it is information. The last and clearest sign is that you already know your partner would be hurt, and you keep going anyway, perhaps telling yourself that what they do not know cannot hurt them. People in an emotional affair are usually the last to call it one, and the fact that you are reading this page suggests part of you already has.

If your result landed in the lower range, the useful work is maintenance: keep the friendship in the open, keep your partner as the first person you tell things, and notice whether anything on the secrecy items made you pause. If one bar ran higher than the others, treat it as a quiet early warning rather than a verdict. Friendships that are talked about at home rarely turn into anything else.

If your result landed in the middle or upper range, the first step is honesty with yourself, which you have already begun. The second is to change the conditions rather than relying on willpower: reduce contact, move it into the open, stop confiding about your relationship to this person, and bring the intimacy you have been spending elsewhere back home, even when home feels harder. Glass's advice to couples recovering from emotional affairs was to rebuild the wall and reopen the window, and the order matters; closing the outside connection is what makes rebuilding at home possible. Many people find that once the secrecy ends, the outside connection loses much of its charge, because secrecy was part of what made it feel alive.

The third step is to look at what the connection was telling you. Emotional affairs usually point at something missing: attention, admiration, being heard, playfulness, feeling chosen. That is not an excuse, and it is also not nothing. The Relationship Satisfaction Test page can help you see which needs have gone quiet, and a couples therapist can help you ask for them from your partner, which is harder and far more rewarding than getting them from someone who does not share your life. Whether to tell your partner is a decision best made with care and often with a therapist's help; honesty generally builds trust, but how, when and in how much detail matters, and a therapist can help you do it in a way that repairs rather than wounds. Whatever you decide, the goal is the same: a relationship where the window is open to your partner, and you are no longer carrying a secret.