You may have recently met someone, or perhaps you're in a long-time relationship, but maybe you've found yourself seeking attention from other sources.

You got a new message from a hot guy friend in your inbox on Facebook, or perhaps a text from an ex-boyfriend, singing your praises after he just had to deal with the latest (psycho) ex-girlfriend. You strike up a conversation, and soon get to speaking fairly regularly.

Everything's perfectly innocent, right? It feels good to know you're appreciated, or maybe that someone finds you beautiful and smart. So why do you feel so guilty? It's not like you're planning to cheat or have a physical relationship with anyone.

For some reason, you're terrified that your boyfriend will discover the conversation you've been having with the new "friend." Maybe you even convince yourself that deleting those messages is protecting your partner's feelings. There's no harm in making sure they don't think you're cheating on them, right?

What you're doing is playing a dangerous game that might just end up costing you the relationship you're already in. You're entering into the world of emotional cheating, and that will ruin everything you've worked so hard to create with your current partner, without fail.

When you reach out to someone else for validation or affection, it means you're already on the way to seeking approval from a person you're not in a relationship with. You might find yourself subtly flirting, but hey, everyone does it, right?

Maybe it's the cute bartender who sends an extra drink or two. Or the guy at the ticket counter who can upgrade those seats for free, no problem. There's a hot new co-worker you meet at the coffeemaker every day at 11, and sure, you haven't told him you have a boyfriend, but so what? It's just casual flirting.

Maybe you can pretend that your behavior is entirely above-board, and initially, it might even start that way. But when you start to explore the boundaries of the connection you made to someone other than your spouse or partner, you're crossing into emotional infidelity, whether you meant to or not.

One of the easiest ways to determine where the boundaries of your relationship lie is simply in discovering if you have any sexual desire toward the person in question. In a strictly platonic relationship, there may be love and adoration, but there will be absolutely no desire.

You're not going to imagine your best friend — whom you think of as a sister — in bed with you. You're not going to find yourself wanting to share things with them that you couldn't share with your significant other, and most importantly, you're not going to want to hide conversations, meetings, or text and chat dialogue you had with them from your partner.

When you're trying to form a true relationship with someone, you typically don't jump into bed and create a physical bond with them. In order to progress a relationship, you're going to talk to them. Bond with them. Learn about their likes and dislikes, and maybe their favorite foods.

You start to think about them all the time, maybe even find ways to see them as frequently as possibly, or craft inside jokes together. That would be a beautiful start to a relationship — if you weren't already in one.

You have to ask yourself, are you willing to lose your partner for the new relationship? Because emotional affairs are often incredibly difficult to recover from. Maybe everything started innocently enough, and maybe it was just something that happened by accident, but now you're stuck, on the verge of taking the other relationship to the next level.

If you find yourself looking for validation, love, and approval outside of your current relationship, there's a reason your conscience is wracked with guilt and you can't meet your partner's eyes when they kiss you.

You're in inappropriate territory, and that's why it feels like cheating or betrayal. Because it is.

Think about how you'd feel if your loved one came home and told you that they'd fallen out of love with you. The scenario would likely leave you agonizing over why you couldn't see what was happening right in front of your face. If you're unhappy in your relationship, you owe it to your S.O. to talk to them about it and give them a chance to work with you and fix it.

If you just pursue a new relationship without even giving a chance to the old one, you're only creating a severely detrimental breakup farther down the road, and stopping yourself from making a real, lasting bond with the person you loved enough to begin a monogamous relationship with from the get-go.