The reality is that while we don't care with whom you shop, talk, eat, or text, we do care deeply about who looks at you, smells your hair, holds your hand, and takes you to bed. For men, the act of learning about our partner's infidelity is, simply put, emasculating — and the rejection that comes with this realization is painful. This pain, in turn, is only magnified by how much we care for our partners.
In the end, the reason that physical cheating is so painful is that we can envision it. We can play back the rendezvous in our mind over and over and relive our partner seeking comfort or escape in the arms of another. When you compare this to emotional cheating, it is clear why physical cheating is more painful to deal with, and why physical cheating leads to the end of so many relationships.
She Said: Without a doubt, when it comes to cheating, sexual indiscretions are the lesser of the two evils — not because it's necessarily easier to forgive a partner's one-night stand, but because an emotional affair generally means the cheater has already thrown in the towel on your relationship.
Take a recent political cheating scandal, for example. When Governor Mark Sanford revealed that he had been cheating on his wife, I was surprised to find that some people had sympathy for him on the grounds that he was in love with his mistress. Now, he says he's going to try falling back in love with his wife (how noble!). I won't be holding my breath.
Here's my issue with this claim, whoever makes it — there is no such thing as accidentally getting a little too drunk and carrying on a passionate love affair. There's no emotional cheating equivalent to a one-night stand. It's generally quite a calculated and elaborate production to hide one.
That's not to say that physical cheating happens only under those one-night-only inebriated conditions, but purely physically cheating generally does — if you're having a long-term sexual affair or hooking up with a friend who isn't your significant other, chances are that it's either a result of or has resulted in emotional infidelity as well. So the problem isn't that one kind of cheating is more or less forgivable than the other — it's that forgiving and forgetting isn't an option when your partner has emotionally cheated. Your partner doesn't want to be forgiven — they want out. They want out but can't or won't pull the trigger, consciously or subconsciously forcing their partner to be the one who calls it quits.
In Governor Sanford's case, neither he nor is wife is doing that — instead she'll try to forgive him for his infidelity while he tries to fall in love with her. I can fathom forgiving and moving past a boyfriend's one-night stand, but I don't know a single couple who has been able to continue dating after an emotional infidelity — especially when, as in the governor's case, the cheater needs to make a concerted effort to fall back in love with his significant other.