A dating app surveyed their users on emotional cheating. Here’s what Singaporeans said.

Disclosure: The author is the Head of Marketing at LunchClick.

Photo credit: Howstuffworks Tech

Technology is amazing, there’s no doubt about it. We have 3D printers. We have Google Glass. We have bionic plants that can replicate a plant’s natural ability to photosynthesize. But as with everything else, technology is very much a double-edged sword. In this specific case, what we’re referring to is — having an emotional affair.

For the uninformed, let’s refer to Wikipedia’s official definition of the term.

 An emotional affair is an affair between two people that mimics the closeness and emotional intimacy of an affair while never being physically consummated.

Emotional cheating is often characterized by excessive and/or inappropriate emotional intimacy, deception and secrecy, and discounting of their primary partner. Some people fall into emotional affairs without realizing what they’re doing, or the severity of their actions – and it’s so easy to delete an incriminating WhatsApp text, or to download an app that enables you to hide a secret folder of pictures of yourself and your “friend” from your primary partner. For others, it might be a more deliberate choice to cheat emotionally – when people are unhappy with their current relationships, but lack the courage or impetus to actually do something about it, many choose to instead download a dating app or to join an online dating site and start chatting with singles in their area.

The people who do this justify it to themselves as  being harmless, because they have no intention of being physically intimate with their new partner(s). However, this by no means detracts from the fact that by sharing more intimate emotions with their new partner than they do with their primary partner, they are jeopardizing or undermining their relationship with their primary partner.

The tricky thing about emotional cheating, or having an emotional affair, is that it’s hard to pinpoint the factors that definitively constitute the affair. Dating app LunchClick surveyed 217 of its users in Singapore on emotional cheating, and here are some of the results.