Are you having an emotional affair?

When you check your phone in the morning, what's the first thing you see? Is it another depressing breaking news story or a devastatingly funny picture of an animal in unusual circumstances that’s been forwarded thousands of times?

Or maybe it’s a message from that kind of hot dad you’ve been talking to at the school gates for a while? Does this make you excited, but then make you wonder to yourself, 'Am I being emotionally unfaithful to my partner?’

A recent article in The Times UK told of how a woman was having an emotional affair with a dad on the school run. They’ve never kissed, but they exchange secret messages.

So, Drivetime wondered, are these people crossing a line or are they just friends? Sarah asked dating and Relationship Expert Frances Kelleher how she differentiates between an emotional affair and a platonic friendship and Frances really doesn’t beat around the bush:

"The very first thing is, is it a secret? If you’re keeping something secret from your significant other, that’s shady. That is not good. That is the first red flag warning signal that you’re, you know, we call it micro-cheating, in the industry that’s known as micro-cheating.

"So, you know, you’re not having a full blown out affair, you’re not cheating physically and going over and, you know, spending time with that person and doing all the, everything else in between. But it’s cheating in a form. And you can dress it up anyway you want to, it is, it’s emotional cheating and it’s wrong."

Bumping into someone on the street and going for coffee is one – pretty innocuous – thing, but the example in The Times story is, according to Frances, "consistent emotional cheating in micro-bouts." Here are a few more warning signs from Frances:

"If you’re constantly onto somebody, you’re secretive about it and you’re sharing things and time and energy with that person that should be, you know, put towards your significant other, or your partner."

The woman in The Times article says that the dad texts her in the morning and Frances holds that up as exhibit A for the prosecution:

"If your feet are hitting the floor when you get up in the morning, and the first person you’re thinking about, or you know, fifteen minutes after you get up, or even within that hour – that's kept for special people. Your family, you know, your kids, your significant other."

The woman having this emotional affair admits that she’s thought about having intimate relations with the school run dad and she says that their interactions give her the sort of dopamine hit that she used to get in the early days with her partner. This, Frances says, is a classic example of seeing the grass as being greener on the other side:

"You know, the grass stays green where you water it. I always say love is like a flower. If you do not water it, if you do not nurture the emotional connection – I don’t care how fantastic the fireworks were at the start – the love dies. It’s just a fact."

Wow. And that’s not all because then the Harry Burns rule (from When Harry Met Sally) makes an unscheduled appearance. In the classic romcom, Harry tells Sally Albright that, "men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way." Frances reckons that men and women can be friends in theory, but isn’t at all sure that it works in real life:

"I think they can be friends, but I’ve not once seen it yet. Maybe if the guy or girl is 80 years of age, yeah. But not – I've never seen it."

You can hear Sarah and Cormac’s full conversation with Frances by clicking above.