It’s a relationship with a member of the opposite gender where you wouldn’t feel comfortable with your spouse knowing all the details. It’s a term we might use to describe extra-marital (or extra-committed-relationship) relationship that has not escalated to physical intimacy. I strongly suspect it’s so vague and worrisome a term that it creates more strife than it can actually help dissolve.
But if the married person is simply grabbing lunch with an opposite gender friend, chatting about innocuous subjects, and now and then catches a movie with the friend — basically acts exactly the same with this friend as with same gender friends — then he or she can still be committing emotional affairs if his or her spouse just doesn’t like men and women hanging out together. That radically changes the dynamic and renders the term emotional affair very problematic to us.
