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Saturday, May 19, 2012

Marriage Counselor - Guarding Against Emotional Infidelity

By Robert Newtons


When we begin to look at the challenges faced by marriages in our current society, we would discover a disturbing trend. We unfortunately don't appear to know that these things are dangerous. These things we take for granted slowly eat into the fabric of our marriages. Our goal here is to examine one such issue so we can guard against it.

It is no news that marriages encounter problems often. One thing that we however may not want to admit is that we invite a lot of these problems on ourselves. One of the problems we would be looking at is emotional infidelity. A lot of us might wonder why this is serious. Many of us may claim not to fully understand what emotional infidelity is so we shall try to explain what it is.

When you're emotionally close to an individual different from your spouse without extending to physical intimacy, you are guilty of emotional infidelity. Emotional infidelity is fed mostly by words. It is for this reason that physical intimacy doesn't have to be involved. This now leads us to something I consider to be very critical.

Many of us may claim not to be guilty of emotional infidelity so we would look at the matter from a different perspective. I would ask certain questions. Truthfully providing answers to these questions would help you determine if you truly are guilty or not.

Do you operate a Facebook account? If you are not on Facebook, are you on some other social network? This is the first question. I'm assuming your response to the above was yes. Let's then proceed to the next question.

How much time do you spend on these networks?

You might want to know that a staggering 700 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every month. I find this shocking. The same research went further to note that these minutes are really minutes taken from our normal life and in lot's of instances face to face relationship. Put this in context and you would understand why it is troubling. Now let us ask the next question.

You spend your times on the networks with somebody or some people. Who are these people?

It's almost unthinkable to say that it is your spouse you spend all that time with. Unless of course your partner lives in a different city. However, the more common thing is that we have other folks we spend time with online.

It's bad enough that we stay hours chatting online, it's however worse that we now use video chats that encourage further intimacy with persons you have yet to meet. It's not unusual for you to see folks going nude for the benefit of their online friend. Would you say a married individual who participates in such an act with a person different from his or her spouse is guilty or not? It is only because there is no physical intimacy that it's called emotional infidelity.

There truly is work to be done to correct this, which work may fall to you alone. If you desire to know how to save your marriage alone, then start by doing the following:

- Ensure that you have ample time for your partner

- Strictly regulate your time on social media

- Be careful about how you communicate on social networks

- Offer your spouse something interesting enough to draw them away from the social media networks

- Give your partner full attention

I see this as a fight and only those ready to save their marriages would be willing to fight it.




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