Washington, December 10 (ANI): An expert has come up with a 60-second reality check quiz to make sure whether people who what you're doing is really innocent and harmless online friendship, or if they're slipping down the slippery slope toward emotional sex.
The new kind of infidelity that's destroying marriages and wreaking havoc among committed couples is emotional sex, which is a more insidious kind of infidelity that was born out of the digital era of the 21st century, the Huffington Post reported.
The key to taking the quiz by Sheri Meyers, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Los Angeles and author of 'Chatting or Cheating: How to Detect Infidelity, Rebuild Love, and Affair-Proof Your Relationship', is whether the 3 S's are present - Shared intimacy, Secrecy and exclusion, or Sexual chemistry.
Shared Intimacy - exchanging personal, intimate, and confidential information with an online "friend" that your partner doesn't know about, giving more and more time, attention and emotional support to your "friend" and less to your partner at home, beginning to emotionally or physically withdraw from your partner, preferring to spend time away, online, talking or texting with your "friend", constantly checking to see if your "friend" has made contact or continually trying to come up with ways to connect and have contact, and feeling high and happy when connected with your "friend" and low and lonely when you've been disconnected for too long.
Secrecy and Exclusion - hiding your correspondence with your "friend" from your partner, becoming secretive or evasive about your activities, changing your passwords, getting new anonymous email addresses, setting up fake profiles, joining a dating or cheating hook-up site, avoiding getting into serious conversations with your partner, pretending to be single when you're not, and spending a large amount of time talking, sharing, confiding with your friend and not telling your partner about it or worse lying about who you are with.
Sexual Chemistry - findings yourself sexually and emotionally aroused when you think about or have contact with your "friend", sending or receiving flirtatious or sexy emails, texts, photos or videos, doing anything sexual using your webcam, having sexy chats, sharing your sexual fantasies, masturbating or mutually masturbating, imagining you are in bed with your "friend" while making love with your partner, feeling cold when it comes to having sex with your partner, and more interested in reading a book, Facebooking, watching TV, or talking to your "friend" than making love with your partner.
If the answer to any of these points is "yes", blaring alarms should be ringing in your head because you have definitely slid down the slippery slope of emotional sex and into cheating.
Whether you believe it or not, this puts your primary relationship at risk, and if you care about saving it, it's time to put on the brakes on the cyber friendship and start pouring the energy, time, and focus you've been giving to your "friend" back into your primary relationship, as the cost of an affair - be it cyber, emotional or physical - can be devastating to a relationship. (ANI)
