The New Infidelity
Micro-cheating includes all sorts of internet behavior that, to many people, might just seem innocent.
Last summer, a friend called bearing bad news: Her two-year relationship was finished. In between insisting that she was, in fact, totally fine, and that everything was probably for the best, she told me that her (now ex-) partner had accused her of cheating.
My friend had not, to be clear, slept with anybody else, or gone on any illicit dates. But her partner, consumed by suspicion when it came to my friend’s platonic relationships, had gone through my friend’s phone and stumbled upon old messages that were too affectionate, too “flirty.” She broke up with my friend that night.
Some people might feel sympathetic toward my friend’s ex. Others might find the entire ordeal, to use the technical term, absurd. Whatever the stance, a growing number of mental-health influencers are giving language to the debate: What my friend did, they say, was “micro-cheating.”
As with plain old infidelity, micro-cheating is tricky to define; behavior that is fair game to one person might be egregious treachery to another. Many people have attempted to catalog it anyway. According to a number of lifestyle publications, a micro-cheater could be someone who, while in a relationship, maintains an active Hinge profile or sends explicit pictures to another person. Or, they could have done something that might otherwise seem banal: “liking” someone else’s Instagram post, perhaps, or messaging a colleague about something other than work. In a Vogue article advising readers on how to properly recognize a micro-cheater, a couples therapist concluded that micro-cheating could be anything, really: “a glance, a laugh, or non-sexual touching that’s too familiar or intimate.”
