What Is Emotional Infidelity? Emotional Affair Signs, Examples, and Relationship Boundaries

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Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 27, 2026 · Editorial Policy

Emotional infidelity is an emotionally or romantically significant involvement with someone outside a primary relationship that crosses the relationship’s understood boundaries of exclusivity, loyalty, or intimate involvement. It may be entirely nonsexual. The defining issue is not the existence of a close connection with another person; it is whether the outside connection has acquired a meaning, pattern, or level of concealment that violates the couple’s agreements or reasonably established expectations.

Research does not provide one universally accepted behavioral threshold for emotional infidelity. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of 305 infidelity studies found substantial variation in how infidelity is operationalized and concluded that nonsexual forms remain comparatively underexplored. Warach and colleagues also identified widespread ambiguity in the field’s definitions. That matters because the same behavior—frequent texting, confiding, spending time together, or expressing affection—can have very different relationship meanings depending on context, mutual agreements, romantic intent, and concealment.

For the broader umbrella concept, see What Is Infidelity? Meaning, Types, Examples, and What Research Shows. This article owns the narrower definition, signs, examples, and relationship-boundary questions specific to emotional infidelity.

What Is Emotional Infidelity?

Emotional infidelity, often called emotional cheating or an emotional affair, refers to an outside relationship that has crossed an emotional or romantic boundary of the primary partnership. Common descriptions include romantic feelings, emotionally intimate disclosure, a sense of specialness or exclusivity, concealment from the primary partner, and behavior that protects or intensifies the outside bond. These features are best treated as dimensions of a relationship pattern rather than a checklist that automatically proves an affair.

The scientific literature reflects that complexity. In a mixed-method study of how people define emotional and sexual infidelity, Guitar and colleagues found greater agreement about sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. Participants often referred to feelings and deception when describing emotional infidelity, and the authors characterized emotional infidelity as the more vague and complex construct. A separate measurement study by Thompson and O’Sullivan identified emotional or affectionate behavior as one distinct domain in people’s judgments of infidelity, alongside sexual or explicit behavior, technology or online behavior, and solitary behavior.

A large factorial-vignette study provides especially useful evidence for the nonphysical boundary. Bozoyan and Schmiedeberg asked 9,104 respondents to evaluate 26,633 scenarios that varied explicit behavior, emotional involvement, duration, and erotic online contact. Emotional involvement affected judgments of infidelity, and scenarios with no physical contact could still be judged unfaithful when emotional involvement and erotic messaging were present. The study does not create a universal rule for couples; it demonstrates empirically that people’s judgments of infidelity extend beyond intercourse or physical contact.

The term “emotional affair” usually implies a sustained pattern rather than a single moment of attraction or disclosure. “Emotional infidelity” can describe the broader category of emotional boundary violation. In ordinary usage the terms overlap, and search behavior often treats them as synonyms. The most accurate description of a real situation still comes from specifying what happened rather than relying on the label alone.

What Makes Emotional Closeness Cross Into Emotional Infidelity?

A close friendship and an emotional affair can both contain warmth, trust, frequent communication, and personal disclosure. The boundary becomes clearer when the outside connection is evaluated in relation to the primary relationship’s agreements, the emotional or romantic meaning of the bond, and how the connection is managed. None of these features should be interpreted in isolation.

The relationship has an understood boundary that the outside connection crosses

Emotional infidelity requires a relational boundary to be violated. Some couples explicitly discuss what kinds of emotional or romantic intimacy with other people are acceptable. Other couples rely on established expectations of exclusivity that have developed through prior conversations and shared practice. The broader infidelity literature commonly defines infidelity in terms of violating stated or assumed agreements about emotional and/or sexual exclusivity; a systematic review by Haseli and colleagues also shows how heterogeneous infidelity definitions and measures are across studies.

This agreement-sensitive definition prevents a universal rule from being imposed on every couple. A partner in a consensually non-monogamous relationship may have emotionally or romantically significant connections outside the primary partnership without violating the relationship structure. Hangen, Crasta, and Rogge found that mutual consent, communication, and comfort were important dimensions distinguishing consensual nonmonogamy from one-sided or low-consent extradyadic arrangements. Outside intimacy and infidelity therefore cannot be treated as synonyms.

The outside bond has emotional or romantic significance beyond ordinary social closeness

Emotional significance can appear as romantic longing, an emerging sense of couple-like specialness, persistent preoccupation, emotionally charged anticipation of contact, or a wish to preserve the bond even when it conflicts with the primary relationship. Deep friendship can also be highly important, so intensity alone does not classify the connection. The relevant question is whether the bond has become romantic, quasi-romantic, or relationship-exclusive in a way that crosses an existing agreement.

Research on actual extradyadic involvement supports the importance of emotional involvement as a meaningful dimension. In two samples of people reporting extradyadic involvement, Allen and Rhoades found that greater recalled emotional involvement with the outside partner was associated with several features of the affair experience, including a more gradual onset of attraction and, in the community sample, marital dissolution. These are associations within specific samples, not deterministic causes or a rule that emotionally intense outside relationships inevitably end primary relationships.

Secrecy or deception protects the outside bond from the primary partner’s awareness

Concealment often matters because it can reveal that the person expects the connection to violate a known boundary. Examples include hiding the existence of the relationship, deleting only the messages with one person, using a false explanation for time spent together, minimizing romantic content, or presenting the relationship to the primary partner in a materially misleading way.

Secrecy is relevant without being a stand-alone diagnostic test for cheating. People keep conversations private for many reasons, and privacy is part of ordinary adult life. A hidden conversation becomes more informative when concealment is selective, persistent, tied to romantic or emotionally exclusive content, or designed to prevent a partner from learning something the person knows would matter under the couple’s agreements.

The connection begins to compete with agreed forms of intimacy or loyalty

Another possible feature is a shift in relational priority: repeatedly turning first to the outside person for forms of intimacy the couple has agreed to keep exclusive, protecting that person from reasonable relationship boundaries, or repeatedly sacrificing the primary relationship in order to preserve the outside bond. This does not mean partners must be one another’s only source of emotional support. Healthy relationships commonly depend on friends, family, colleagues, communities, and professionals. The question is whether a specifically agreed intimate or romantic boundary is being displaced or violated.

Common Signs of an Emotional Affair—and What They Do Not Prove

People often search for “signs of emotional cheating” because emotional infidelity has no single observable act equivalent to intercourse. Signs are therefore best understood as patterns that justify clarification. They are not evidence that cheating has occurred, and they should not be used to convert ordinary behavior changes into accusations.

Selective secrecy around one relationship

A person may become unusually protective of communications with one specific person, conceal meetings, change the story about how close they are, or omit information that would normally be relevant under the couple’s agreements. Selective secrecy is more meaningful than ordinary password use or general privacy. It raises a boundary question when the concealed material concerns the emotional or romantic nature of the relationship.

Romantic feelings that are being cultivated rather than merely noticed

Attraction can occur in committed relationships without becoming infidelity. The boundary changes when romantic feelings are actively cultivated through flirtation, reciprocal declarations, fantasy-driven contact, repeated private meetings intended to intensify the bond, or deliberate maintenance of a romantic possibility that conflicts with the primary relationship’s agreements.

Intense attraction may sometimes be described as limerence, but limerence and infidelity are different concepts. A person can experience limerence without crossing a relationship boundary, and an emotional affair does not require limerence. For the separate construct, see Limerence While in a Relationship: Attraction, Fantasy, Boundaries, and What It Can Mean.

A growing sense of emotional exclusivity or couple-like specialness

The outside relationship may begin to carry expectations usually associated with a romantic bond: a private language, declarations of special emotional priority, resentment when the other person focuses on their own partner, imagined future couplehood, or a sense that the relationship must be protected from the primary partner. None of these elements creates a universal threshold. Their significance comes from the pattern and the couple’s boundary structure.

Repeated intimate disclosure that is knowingly outside the couple’s boundary

Confiding in another person is not automatically emotional infidelity. Friends, relatives, therapists, support groups, and mentors often provide essential emotional support. The issue is narrower: disclosure can become part of emotional infidelity when it is embedded in a romantic or quasi-romantic bond, when the person deliberately creates a private intimacy that violates an understood agreement, or when disclosure is used to deepen an outside attachment while concealing that relational meaning from the primary partner.

Protecting the outside relationship at the expense of agreed relationship boundaries

A repeated pattern of defending the outside bond while dismissing previously shared boundaries can be relevant. Examples include refusing a mutually agreed limit solely to preserve romantic access to the other person, continuing concealed contact after acknowledging that the contact violates a clear agreement, or reorganizing routines around the outside relationship while misrepresenting why. Conflict about a friendship by itself does not prove an affair; the evidence lies in what the relationship actually contains and what the couple has agreed.

Escalation from ordinary contact into emotionally or romantically charged contact

Many emotional affairs are described retrospectively as gradual rather than sudden. Contact may move from situational interaction to frequent private messaging, then to personal disclosure, romantic anticipation, concealment, and increasing emotional investment. Allen and Rhoades found that greater emotional involvement was associated with reports of more gradual onset of attraction in their samples. That study supports gradual development as one observed pattern; it does not mean every close friendship is on a path toward infidelity.

The person recognizes the relationship would need a different description if the partner saw it clearly

A useful self-check is whether the person describes the outside bond one way to the primary partner and another way in private with the outside person. The discrepancy may involve minimizing romantic language, pretending contact is rare when it is frequent, or calling a relationship “just friendship” while privately planning a romantic future. A discrepancy is not proof on its own, but it can identify the point at which ordinary privacy has become relational deception.

Emotional Infidelity Examples: Clearer Cases and Gray Areas

Examples are useful because emotional infidelity is context-sensitive. The same surface behavior can be classified differently when the relationship agreement, romantic meaning, or degree of concealment changes. The examples below illustrate how those variables interact.

Example: a concealed romantic bond with no physical contact

A married person develops mutual romantic feelings with a coworker. They exchange messages about wanting to be together, describe themselves as emotionally closer to each other than to their partners, and hide the messages because both know their spouses expect romantic exclusivity. They never kiss or have sex. This can reasonably be described as emotional infidelity because the emotional and romantic involvement itself crosses the relationship’s understood boundary. The absence of physical contact does not erase the relational violation.

Bozoyan and Schmiedeberg’s vignette study is directly relevant here: nonphysical emotional involvement contributed to judgments of infidelity, especially when combined with erotic online communication.

Example: emotionally exclusive intimacy that is deliberately concealed

A person begins speaking to an ex every night, shares intimate hopes and relationship frustrations, tells the ex that the connection must remain secret, and deletes the conversation before coming home. There is no sexual content. If the couple has an established boundary around romantic or emotionally intimate contact with former partners, the pattern can fit emotional infidelity. If no such boundary exists, the couple still has a real conflict to clarify, but the label should follow the facts and the relationship agreement rather than being assumed from the word “ex.”

Example: a close coworker friendship with no romantic or concealed component

Two coworkers become close friends, discuss family stress, sometimes have lunch together, and their partners know about the friendship. Neither person expresses romantic interest, their contact is not deliberately hidden, and the friendship does not violate the couple’s agreements. Emotional closeness alone does not make this an emotional affair. A relationship can be important without becoming romantic or unfaithful.

Example: a crush that remains an internal experience

A person notices a strong attraction to someone else and chooses not to cultivate it. They do not create a secret intimate relationship, make romantic promises, or cross the couple’s agreed boundaries. Attraction or fantasy alone is not equivalent to emotional infidelity. The distinction matters because treating every involuntary feeling as cheating can turn relationship boundaries into an impossible standard of thought control.

Example: frequent private texting in a relationship that permits close friendships

One partner texts a friend every day. The messages are personal, sometimes vulnerable, and private, but the relationship is clearly platonic and consistent with the couple’s shared expectations. Frequent communication does not become infidelity merely because it happens on a phone. If the messages develop romantic content, sexual content, or deliberate concealment that violates a known agreement, the classification may change.

Example: consensually permitted outside emotional intimacy

Partners in a consensually non-monogamous relationship explicitly permit other romantic relationships and maintain the communication and consent their relationship structure requires. An emotionally meaningful outside relationship within those agreements is not automatically infidelity. If a partner breaks the agreed conditions or conceals a relationship that was required to be disclosed, the issue becomes the broken agreement rather than the mere existence of multiple attachments.

Can Emotional Infidelity Happen Without Sex or Physical Contact?

Yes. Emotional infidelity is specifically useful as a concept because a relationship boundary can be crossed through emotional or romantic involvement without sexual contact. The strongest evidence for that point comes from studies showing that people distinguish emotional or affectionate behavior from sexual behavior and that nonphysical scenarios can still be judged unfaithful. Thompson and O’Sullivan identified emotional or affectionate behavior as its own judgment domain, while Bozoyan and Schmiedeberg found that emotional involvement changed evaluations even when explicit physical behavior was absent.

Real-world affairs can contain both emotional and sexual dimensions. When both occur, it is more accurate to describe both rather than forcing the entire episode into one category. Emotional infidelity and physical or sexual infidelity remain distinct dimensions for conceptual purposes, and the separate comparison between them belongs to a different canonical question.

Does Secrecy Make Something Emotional Cheating?

Secrecy can be highly relevant, especially when it is used to hide romantic meaning or a known boundary violation. It is still insufficient by itself. People have legitimate private conversations, confidential friendships, professional obligations, medical discussions, surprise plans, and personal spaces that do not constitute betrayal.

The practical distinction is between privacy and deceptive concealment. Privacy preserves an individual space without materially misleading a partner about a relationship that falls under shared agreements. Deceptive concealment changes or withholds information specifically so the partner cannot accurately understand a relationship that the person knows may violate those agreements. This distinction remains contextual: couples can negotiate different disclosure expectations, and a demand for total access to another person’s communications is not required in order to have relationship boundaries.

Research definitions support treating deception as one recurring feature rather than the entire construct. Guitar and colleagues found that participants commonly invoked deception while defining emotional and sexual infidelity, while the broader research literature remains heterogeneous about exact thresholds. Their findings help explain why secrecy often feels important without turning every secret into an affair.

When Does a Friendship Become an Emotional Affair?

There is no point at which friendship automatically converts into emotional infidelity because it becomes close, frequent, or emotionally supportive. The useful questions concern relationship meaning and agreed boundaries: Has the friendship become romantic or quasi-romantic? Is the person cultivating mutual romantic possibility? Is important information being concealed because the person expects the partner to view the bond differently if they knew the facts? Has an explicit or established emotional-exclusivity boundary been crossed?

A friendship can remain a friendship even when it is deep. Emotional support outside a couple is often healthy, and partners do not need to become one another’s sole confidants. A friendship becomes a stronger candidate for the emotional-infidelity label when romantic significance, deliberate deception, or a known boundary violation is part of the pattern.

This article does not treat friendship itself as suspicious behavior. That distinction is especially important because “signs of an affair” can easily become a framework for monitoring ordinary relationships. Suspicion is a psychological state; evidence requires facts about what the outside relationship actually contains.

Emotional Infidelity in Texting, Social Media, and Digital Relationships

Emotional infidelity can be mediated by texting, social media, private messaging, gaming communities, video calls, or other digital channels. The technology does not define the infidelity. The emotional or romantic meaning, agreement violation, erotic content where relevant, and concealment determine whether a digital interaction is part of emotional cheating. Broad phone checking, social-media use, screen habits, and digital attention are separate topics and should not be treated as evidence of infidelity.

Digital communication can make ambiguous relationships easier to maintain because contact can be frequent, private, and woven into daily life. Research on infidelity judgments has long identified technology or online behavior as a distinct domain, and Bozoyan and Schmiedeberg found that erotic online contact interacted with other features of a scenario when people judged unfaithfulness. Those findings support careful attention to content and meaning rather than a rule that “private messaging equals cheating.”

AI companions create a separate canonical question because an AI-mediated bond is not simply another human-to-human online affair. For that cross-cluster issue, see Is an AI Companion Emotional Cheating? Intimacy and Couple Boundaries in the Artificial Era.

What Emotional Infidelity Is Not

It is not a mental-health diagnosis

Emotional infidelity describes relationship behavior and relational meaning. It is not a psychiatric disorder, and infidelity itself is not a mental disorder. The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR diagnostic classification and the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 clinical diagnostic framework define and classify mental disorders; emotional infidelity is a relationship term rather than a listed mental disorder. A person can experience intense distress after discovering an emotional affair, but distress does not transform the affair into a diagnosis.

It is not proof of PTSD, OCD, or another disorder

Intrusive thoughts, anxiety, hypervigilance, sadness, anger, or repeated mental replay can occur after betrayal. Those experiences may be painful and clinically important, yet their presence alone does not establish PTSD, OCD, depression, or another diagnosis. DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 use disorder-specific diagnostic requirements rather than a single symptom or relationship event. Ordinary intrusive thoughts after infidelity should not be relabeled as OCD solely because they are repetitive or unwanted.

It is not every emotionally close friendship

Close friendship, mentorship, family support, therapy, peer support, and community relationships can all involve emotional intimacy. Emotional infidelity requires a relationship-specific boundary violation or comparable breach of romantic or emotionally exclusive expectations; intimacy outside the couple is not inherently disloyal.

It is not automatically emotional abuse, gaslighting, or coercive control

Infidelity can coexist with lying, manipulation, coercion, stalking, threats, or violence, but one does not establish the others. Terms such as gaslighting and coercive control require their own behavioral criteria. When threats, coercion, stalking, or violence are present, safety takes priority over reconciliation, disclosure rituals, or preserving the relationship.

It is not consensual nonmonogamy conducted within agreed rules

A consensually negotiated relationship structure can include more than one romantic or emotionally intimate relationship. The defining issue is consent and agreement. Hangen and colleagues’ work on consensual nonmonogamy highlights the role of mutual consent and communication; violating the rules of a consensually nonmonogamous relationship can still constitute infidelity, while following those rules is not automatically cheating.

How Couples Can Define Emotional Boundaries Before There Is a Crisis

Emotional boundaries become easier to understand when they are discussed before either partner is trying to classify a specific friendship or defend a specific incident. A useful conversation names behaviors and meanings rather than relying on a single word such as “loyalty.” Partners can discuss what kinds of romantic declarations, flirting, one-to-one intimacy, contact with former partners, disclosure, private messaging, or outside dating fall inside or outside their relationship agreement.

The goal is shared clarity. An effective boundary is mutual enough to be understood by both partners, concrete enough to guide behavior, and flexible enough to distinguish ordinary friendships from romantic involvement. Rules that attempt to eliminate every friendship, every private thought, every attraction, or every independent source of support create a different relationship problem rather than a clearer definition of fidelity.

Partners can also distinguish boundaries from surveillance. A boundary states what a person will participate in or what the relationship agreement permits. Surveillance attempts to establish certainty by monitoring another person’s devices, movements, or communications. General privacy and surveillance are separate trust questions; an emotional-infidelity concern should remain focused on the actual relationship behavior and the relevant agreement.

Because couples often discover that they assumed different rules, boundary conversations can include explicit questions: What do we consider romantic exclusivity? What kinds of emotional intimacy with other people feel compatible with our relationship? Which behaviors would we want disclosed? How do we handle former partners, flirtation, digital contact, or developing feelings? What changes if we notice mutual romantic interest? These questions create an agreement that can later be evaluated against behavior.

What to Do If You Think an Emotional Boundary Has Been Crossed

Start with the most concrete information available. Describe the behavior you observed or learned about, identify the relationship agreement you believe it conflicts with, and separate facts from interpretations. “You told this person you were in love and asked them to hide the conversation from me” is a different claim from “You are on your phone more, so you must be having an affair.” Behavioral changes can justify a conversation; they do not prove infidelity.

Ask directly about the nature of the relationship, what has been communicated between the two people, whether romantic feelings are mutual, what has been concealed, and how each partner understood the relevant boundary. The purpose of those questions is clarity. Repeated interrogation, coercive access to devices, stalking, threats, or violence are not healthy substitutes for evidence or communication.

If the facts establish emotional infidelity, the next questions concern impact, accountability, decisions, and possible recovery. Those are separate intents within the Infidelity & Betrayal Recovery cluster. No fixed sequence, timeline, forgiveness requirement, or reconciliation outcome applies to every couple. A person can choose to repair the relationship, pause decision-making, seek individual or couples support, or leave. When abuse, coercion, or safety threats are present, safety takes priority over couple-repair goals.

Frequently Asked Questions About Emotional Infidelity

What is emotional infidelity in simple terms?

Emotional infidelity is an emotionally or romantically significant outside relationship that crosses the primary relationship’s understood boundaries. It can involve romantic feelings, special emotional intimacy, concealment, or relationship-like commitment without sex. The exact boundary depends partly on the couple’s agreements.

What are the most common signs of an emotional affair?

Common patterns include selective secrecy around one person, cultivating mutual romantic feelings, emotionally exclusive or couple-like specialness, concealing the nature of the bond, repeated intimate contact that violates an agreement, and protecting the outside relationship despite a recognized boundary conflict. These are cues for clarification, not proof of cheating.

Can emotional cheating happen without physical contact?

Yes. Research on infidelity judgments shows that emotional involvement can contribute to judgments of unfaithfulness even without physical contact. Emotional infidelity is therefore conceptually distinct from the requirement that sex or touching must occur.

Is confiding in someone else emotional cheating?

Usually not by itself. Friends, relatives, therapists, and other trusted people can be important sources of support. Confiding becomes relevant to emotional infidelity when it forms part of a romantic or quasi-romantic bond, violates a known agreement, or is deliberately used to create a concealed intimacy that the person knows crosses the relationship’s boundary.

Does deleting messages prove an emotional affair?

No. Deleting messages is a behavior that may raise a question about concealment, but it does not prove why the messages were deleted or what they contained. Classification requires the underlying facts: the relationship’s content, romantic meaning, concealment, and the couple’s agreement.

Is emotional cheating worse than physical cheating?

There is no universal psychological ranking that applies to every person or relationship. People differ in which aspects of infidelity they experience as most threatening or painful, and emotional and sexual infidelity are defined and studied in different ways. The more precise question is what occurred, what boundary was violated, and what the event means to the people involved.

Can emotional infidelity happen online?

Yes. An emotionally or romantically significant outside relationship can be maintained primarily or entirely through digital communication. Online infidelity is a broader digital construct with its own boundaries; private messaging, social-media use, or screen time alone should not be classified as cheating.

Can a relationship recover after emotional infidelity?

Some relationships continue and rebuild after emotional infidelity, while others end. Recovery is not guaranteed, does not follow one mandatory sequence, and cannot be assigned a universal timeline. Decisions about reconciliation, separation, trust repair, and therapy depend on the people involved, the nature of the breach, accountability, safety, and what both partners want.

Is emotional infidelity a diagnosis?

No. Emotional infidelity is a relationship term, not a DSM or ICD diagnosis. Distress after betrayal can still deserve clinical attention when symptoms are severe, persistent, impairing, or raise safety concerns, but the relationship event and any mental-health diagnosis remain separate questions.

A Practical Definition to Use

The most defensible working definition is: emotional infidelity is an emotionally or romantically significant outside involvement that violates the primary relationship’s stated or reasonably established boundaries of exclusivity, loyalty, or intimate involvement. Romantic meaning, concealment, and emotional priority can strengthen the classification, while none functions as an infallible test by itself.

This definition fits the current evidence better than a universal list of forbidden behaviors. Research consistently shows definitional ambiguity, meaningful nonphysical dimensions, and variation in how people judge emotional or affectionate behavior. It also preserves the distinction between an emotional affair and ordinary friendship, private emotional life, consensual nonmonogamy, digital behavior in general, and psychiatric diagnosis.

References

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American Psychiatric Association. (2022, updated through current DSM-5-TR revisions). About DSM-5-TR. https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/about-dsm

Bozoyan, C., & Schmiedeberg, C. (2023). What is infidelity? A vignette study on norms and attitudes toward infidelity. The Journal of Sex Research, 60(8), 1090–1099. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2022.2104194

Guitar, A. E., Geher, G., Kruger, D. J., Garcia, J. R., Fisher, M. L., & Fitzgerald, C. J. (2017). Defining and distinguishing sexual and emotional infidelity. Current Psychology, 36(3), 434–446. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-016-9432-4

Hangen, F., Crasta, D., & Rogge, R. D. (2020). Delineating the boundaries between nonmonogamy and infidelity: Bringing consent back into definitions of consensual nonmonogamy with latent profile analysis. The Journal of Sex Research, 57(4), 438–457. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2019.1669133

Haseli, A., Shariati, M., Nazari, A. M., Keramat, A., & Emamian, M. H. (2019). Infidelity and its associated factors: A systematic review. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 16(8), 1155–1169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2019.04.011

Thompson, A. E., & O’Sullivan, L. F. (2016). Drawing the line: The development of a comprehensive assessment of infidelity judgments. The Journal of Sex Research, 53(8), 910–926. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2015.1062840

Warach, B., Bornstein, R. F., Gorman, B. S., & Moyer, A. (2024). The current state of affairs in infidelity research: A systematic review and meta-analysis of romantic infidelity prevalence and its moderators. Personal Relationships, 31(4), 1001–1026. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12571

World Health Organization. (2024). Clinical descriptions and diagnostic requirements for ICD-11 mental, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders. https://www.who.int/publications/b/68103

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