Which is worse, emotional cheating or physical cheating?

I personally think emotional cheating is far worse than physical cheating. Sex is just sex and it doesn't have to be intimate. Intimacy is what I crave, the closeness, the bond, the connection--when that's there, the sex is usually fantastic too.

I have been cheated on, many times actually, and the ones that hurt the most weren't the ones that were one-night-stands, but rather the ones where the other built a relationship with someone else, a friendship, an intimacy that should have been reserved just for me. When my ex Mike spent the night with a woman he got drunk with at the bar and had sex with her, it hurt a lot less than when another ex of mine spent months talking to a girl online and on the phone behind my back. The first one was Mike making a stupid mistake, one time, regretting it and trying to make up for it.

He was honest about it the minute it happened and that made a difference. The other one though... that was months of hiding, lying, denying, scheming. Months of going behind my back and making me feel like a fool.

When the truth came out, even though they had never slept together, I felt violated. It was as though my perceptions of the previous six months to a year or perhaps even the entire relationship had to realign. I didn't know what was true anymore, what was lies to cover the 'emotional affair', what was real and what was all making a fool of me.

I was angry and hurt for a long, long time over this, and of course, the relationship ended. So an emotional affair is, in my mind, significantly more damaging and hurtful than a physical one ever could be. The breaking of trust simply destroys faith in another person.

Trust is the foundation upon which successful relationships are built.

Both. For me cheating a person emotionally and physically can be considered worst. Cheating is cheating no matter what forms it takes.

Just like when you sin, you can commit sin just by thinking ill-thoughts to another person without causing him any physical harm. There is no grey here just black or white. Although, we sometimes would think one is far worse than the other but that the truth is all are worse.

Cheating in any form is being dishonest to another person and to yourself and can equally hurt the other who is being cheated.

I've heard it said that men cheat for sex and women cheat for attention. Also, men use love to get sex, and women use sex to get love. So in the case of a man, especially, if he cheated and got very emotionally involved with the woman, it would hurt his wife and himself more than if it was just a sexual fling.

Anytime emotions are involved, there is more potential for pain than when they aren't. Men are more sexual than women, and are more prone to have a purely sexual fling. When they say it meant nothing, they mean it.It was just sex to them.

But to the wife, it was a sexual rejection of her. It was like her husband saying that she was lousy in bed, and that he needed to find someone else to please him. Women just internalize and emotionalize sex more than men do.

They equate sex with love and commitment, where men can compartmentalize the act of sex as nothing more than a physical exercise. Men will leave a women much faster for not giving them sex than they will for not talking to them. What is that old joke?

If you want to keep a man happy, feed him, f* him, and leave him alone.

Tough one....cheating is wrong any which way. However, given a choice between emotional and physical, I would say emotional cheating is worse. Physical can happen unintentionally, accidentally, but healing can occur if the emotional connect is strong.

Of course, if emotional bonding has gone haywire, there is no hope, whether a physical infidelity has happened, or not.

Physical cheating leaves you open to physical consequences... namely STD's. Emotional cheating leaves you open, potentially, to alienation of affections. Generally speaking, men tend to be more bothered by a mate's physical infidelity, while women tend to be more offended by emotional infidelity.(1^ Christine R.

Harris and Nicholas Christenfeld "GENDER, JEALOUSY, AND REASON" Psychological Science Volume 7 Issue 6, Pages 364 - 366 Published Online: 7 Apr 2006) I guess, in my opinion, the worst case scenario for the faithful spouse in a traditional marriage relationship would be a long-term clandestine physical affair with emotional intimacy. In that case, some portion of both physical and emotional needs are being met by a third party. In my opinion, a series of short-term clandestine physical affairs would be far more devastating than a long-term emotional affair.

But any affair would signal to me that there was something wrong in my relationship which needed communication and repair.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.