My husband became emotionally entangled with a co-worker. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to scale back and then completely cut it off they ended up having one physical encounter and then another couple of months of trying to cut it off completely followed before it finally came to an end. They started as just friends, and it sounds to me like she was doing the "complimenter" type of "pimping tenderness" towards him and he was doing the "rescuer" and "protector" types of towards her. Our marriage was very smooth but had grown extremely emotionally distant. He says the feelings she evoked in him were overwhelmingly addictive, but at the point he felt like his feelings for her would hurt me, he started trying to scale the relationship back and to eventually try to completely end it. The physical encounter is what caused my husband to label what happened as an affair. Before that he feels like it couldn't be called that because he was not freely indulging in it, felt bad after times when he told her too much, was trying to scale back or end the relationship, and was being very open with me. He didn't want to hurt me so he didn't give me all of the details and he sugar coated a few things, but there were no blatant lies and only a few omissions. My pain started extremely early on when they were just close friends. Where's the line for a relationship to become an affair?