If your spouse virtually cheated, would you feel as bad as if he or she physically cheated?

I did both, but my wife actually said she felt worse about the virtual cheating because I claimed to be in love. I know I felt like I was in love at the time, but now I feel like I was deluding myself due to unhappiness with my relationship with my wife, and due to being in a frame of mind unduly influenced by mania and depression (I was bouncing around with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, at the time).

I am asking this about your (imagined, or from experience) personal feelings, not about how you would judge others who do this. I’m not asking for any judgments about this kind of behavior, at all. Believe me, I’ve done an awful lot of destructively harsh judging of myself, and I’m pretty sure anyone else who experienced this has done the same.

If you can, can you try to trace the causes of why you would or do feel the way you do? What experiences lead you to believe that this is how you would (or have) responded this way?