Emotional chastity is creating unhealthy connections with something that isn’t real, not the exact reality, or causes you to lose a grip on your own life. Let me give three examples:
It is commendable that you are thinking of these things and striving for holiness in your life, and I believe you are on the right track! Just a couple of comments, though:
Some of what you describe is not unchastity but rather emotional immaturity. Your scenarios of overanalyzing the conversation with the girl at your college and building a fantasy around an actor or fictional character would fall into that category, for example.
Daydreaming about a future spouse and what it might be like to be married is not unchaste unless you start to stray into sexual fantasies and so forth. Like anything, though, if it becomes excessive or obsessive, then it is not a good idea. But I doubt any of us would ever get married if we didn’t sometimes think and dream about it in advance.
Someone can cheat on their spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend physically but also emotionally and therefore being chaste in the sexual, physical, and emotional sense is very critical.
It is certainly possible to be unfaithful to one’s spouse in an emotional sense, and there could be many ways to do it, such as developing an inappropriately close relationship with a co-worker of the opposite sex, flirtatious texting, fantasizing, etc. Being unfaithful to your spouse in any way is a violation of chastity, I do believe, and potentially very harmful to your marriage.
“Cheating emotionally” on a boyfriend/girlfriend is a different thing, though, than emotional cheating on a spouse, because the relationship is so very different. In marriage, the man and woman are sacramentally bound to each other for life and have solemnly promised to be true to each other as long as they both live. In a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, the two are presumably in the process of discerning marriage and either is free to end the relationship at any time. So while it is not good or okay to be fantasizing about other people while you are seriously dating someone, it doesn’t rise to the level of unchastity that it would in a marriage; and if one of the persons in that relationship cannot commit for some reason, then it is okay to end it. (I’m sure you know all that, and I got off on a bit of a rabbit trail there, but the bottom line is that thinking about other people when you are in a
non-marriage relationship may not so much be unchastity as immaturity or other issues and perhaps a sign that the person is not ready for a relationship and marriage–or even just a sign that the two people are not meant to be married to each other.)
