What you call “emotional cheating“ was called courtly love in the middle ages, and it was considered to be a noble experience. It was described in 1184 by Capellanus in De amore libri tres:
“It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted for those who wish to love purely…. That is called mixed love which gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.[35]
Within the corpus of troubadour poems there is a wide range of attitudes, even across the works of individual poets. Some poems are physically sensual, even bawdily imagining nude embraces, while others are highly spiritual and border on the platonic.[36]”
source: Wikipedia
